NYX Ultimate Palettes Review and Swatches

Hello out there! I’ve been super swamped with my last week of school that I haven’t had a chance to get all my recent reviews up, so here’s the first of a handful for summer! This is the NYX Ultimate Palettes. You can hit the play button above to listen to me ramble on, or click through to see swatches and read my thoughts. So, NYX released these Ultimate Palettes in 4 different combinations. There are brights, smokey/highlight, cool neutrals, and warm neutrals palettes to choose from. I was able to get all but the warm neutrals palette. With how they’re marketed and laid out, it looks like NYX attempted to mimic the Viseart palettes, which I can say they failed to do. I’ll have all the swatches at the end of the post because my thoughts on all the palettes are the same because they all had the same problems.

To start off, these have great initial pigmentation with both finger and brush swatches. The formula is very soft, dare I say too soft for the mattes, yet very bendable and the color selection you get in each palette is enough to create multiple looks. When you first get an eye look completed, they look absolutely gorgeous on the eye and it’s almost too good to be true, especially for a drugstore eyeshadow palette.

And it is too good to be true.

For each of the three palettes, I had issues with longevity. I’m not talking that these faded after 4-5 hours of wear, I’m talking the color was almost gone in about 30 minutes. I tried them over different primers (TF Shadow Insurance, UDPP, WnW). I tried them over cream bases (NYX Milk, Color Tattoos, Marc Jacobs Highliners). I tried them on their own and I tried combos of the primers and bases and nothing would get these to last longer than an hour before things would start to go south quickly.

Now, normally I’d give a drugstore eyeshadow palette some leeway, especially one with brights because the price is cheaper and it could be a nice way for people to experiment with color. These palettes are $18 each. That’s not “experiment with color” money. That’s when you start to expect colors to last most of a work day money. It’s a damn shame that these didn’t want to stay on my lids because the color selection in them are gorgeous, but it’s not worth it and it prompted me to actually do something I’ve never done before with a makeup purchase.

I returned them to Ulta and got a refund.

If you want to purchase these, you can get them anywhere NYX is sold. They retail for $18.

Swatches:

All the swatches are finger swatches on bare skin. The first picture is the top two rows and the second will be the bottom two rows. I’ve included a pan shot for reference.

Cool Neutrals