NYX Professional Makeup Ultimate Shadow Palette (Smokey) – A Review

A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to pick one of these palettes up. It’s not often that I get to look at NYX make-up since I live in a tiny little town with no NYX counter within about 40 miles, so I’ll always do a nice haul whenever I come across one! As a matter of fact, I actually went with the intention of buying the warm neutral palette and instead walked away with the smokey one, my reason being that when November comes, Autumn is over, and then i’ll need some more wintery colours anyway and the warm neutrals palette would’ve been shoved into a draw for the next 8 months. So I’ve had a couple of weeks now to play around with this palette, and oh my has it been fun!

To start off, each palette contains a 16 matte and shimmery shades. The packaging is farily simple – just a simple square black compact. It’s fairly lightweight and can easily fit into any make-up bag, so basically it does the job but could be better. The price of this palette stands at £16, it’s a little more expensive than some UK high-street brands, but you are getting 16 high-quality shades and it’s significantly cheaper than some of your premium brands.

My favourite thing about this palette is certainly the selection of shades. The colours range from matte and shimmer nudes, to a range of greys and blues and even includes burgunday, green and purple. The vast choice of colours in this palette is fantastic, and there are so many looks you can produce. I also think the ratio of mattes to shimmer shades is perefect too, and I like that there is a matte black included within this so you can style more of an evening look!

I’ve always loved NYX eyeshadows and picked up some at every given opportunity, and this one did not fail to impress. Like always, the colours here are nicely pigmented. I’ve always struggled with finding pigmented lighter colours, but the ones in this palette show up nicely on my skin tone. I found the shimmer shades in this palette to be particularly impressive as the quality was great, the texture smooth and they blended extremely well.

There were a couple of shades that I noticed were a bit dry, particularly the blue in the bottom left and the burgundy on the right. As I blended these out they became slightly sheer and I really had to work to layer, but nevertheless, once you’d layered enought they still look great. If there is a disadvantage of this palette, I’d say that if you didn’t wet your brush beforehand you may become suscpetible to a bit of fallout. In terms of longetivity, these colours last all night long! I love using this on a nightitme because I know that my eyes will be in-tact for hours, and I’ve often worn some of the lighter shades for the 9-5 grind, only to get home and see it all still looks the same!

Overall, I would recommend this palette to anyone. You get a great selection of shades, and the quality of shades is well worth the price. At £16 (£1 per shade) you can’t really go wrong! Due to how pigmented these shades are, you can quite easily have a nice casual day look, or an intense evening look, there’s so many different looks you can style purely due to the choice of colours! I’m definitely considering purchasing the warm and cool neutrals when I next encounter NYX in a shop, so hopefully I will be just as praiseworthy over these!