Review: Urban Decay Naked 3 palette

I got it! I honestly didn’t think I would, but I received the Urban Decay naked 3 palette for Christmas! This is going to be a more first impressions/personal opinion post. I will not be posting swatches because my lighting right now wouldn’t do it justice; for good swatches and technical details head over to Temptalia.

This is my first Urban Decay product and my first “high end” eyeshadows.

The palette comes with 12 eyeshadows, a dual ended brush, and a set of four primer potion samples each of which should last a week.

The brush is “meh”; while it looks nice and well-made and the bristles are dense and stiff, the bristles also feel very slippery and plastic which isn’t the best in my opinion for applying eyeshadow. My elf essential brushes are better for application (or my fingers).

I will be reviewing and comparing the primer potion in a different article.

The texture of these shadows is definitely velvety soft, but I’m unsure about how to describe the pigmentation.  Some of the glitters need a bit of help to be seen; I pat shades like dust and buzz on my lids with my finger. Other shades seem to be true to pan but don’t show up that well on my lids; I think the may be just how close some of the shades are to my skin color.

While this palette is “rose toned”, it is possible to make non rosy looks which makes this palette more versatile. For example on Christmas I was wearing red, so I wanted a more brown/gold eye look. To create this I used strange (white) in my inner corner, trick (gold glitter) on my first half of my lid, factory (golden medium brown) on my outer half, mugshot (taupe) blended up from my crease an a little bit of blackheart (black with red glitter) on my “outer v” area.

To get a more rosy look I like to pat on a bit of dust (pink sparkle) in the inner third of my lid, nooner (dusty rose mauve) over the rest of my lid, liar ( a shimmery version of nooner) blended out from my crease, and a bit of darkside (dark grey) in the end on my crease/”outer v” area.

My favorite colors of this palette are probably nooner and darkside. Just these two together would make a good basic eye look.

The packaging on this palette is good and solid and very classy looking.

Overall, I think this is a really nice palette with a variety of really nice, wearable shades. This palette is not super dramatic, but does have some darker shades if you favor smokey eyes. I do feel this palette is a bit expensive at $52, but I see myself using this for a great deal of time to come.