hudabeautyreview – Ms. Mimsy Reviews

For the last week and a half I have been trying out the Huda Beauty Mercury Retrograde palette. This palette retails on the Huda Beauty Site for $67. Currently it is on sale for $33.50. In general I like Huda Beauty’s eyeshadow formula. I have several of the brand’s palettes and really enjoy using them. Typically I find them highly pigmented and easy to blend. This however was an interesting palette to test.

Before we get into it, I will say that the packaging is really nice. The palette feels nice and heavy. It feels like an expensive palette. When you open it you realize that the mirror it the heavy part and the rest of the palette is kind of light. I don’t mind this because it means that when you open it the palette lays flat and is pretty stable. You can set it on the table and dip a brush into the shadows without the palette moving.

The mirror kind of holds it into place. It is a 20 pan palette. Of these pans nine are matte, one is a glitter and the rest are shimmers. It is not a bad mix as far as matte to shimmer ratios go. There are three rows of seven shadows each and we’ll start with the top row and work our way down. The shadows do have names so I will list them under the photos in case you can’t read them on the palette. (even in person they are hard to read on the palette). A word about the swatches. These shadows swatch far better than they actually apply on the lid.

L to R: Cosmic, Utopia, Ultraviolet, Nebula, Mercury and Haze

In this first row, Cosmic, Ultra Violet and Mercury are the shimmers, Nebula is the palette’s one glitter shade and Utopia and Haze are the mattes. Nebula is very much a glitter shade. It is blue and silver glitter and you will need something to help stick it down if you want it to stay in place more than an hour. An eyeshadow primer will give you more time, but I think it is a shade that needs some glitter glue. I am not a huge fan of glitters and this one isn’t my favorite so after tying it out, I tended to skip it.

With The mattes in this row Utopia tended to blend out into nothing without a lid primer and when it had a lid primer it was a bright peachy shade that didn’t want to blend into anything. Even though I don’t care for blues as a rule Haze worked well for me as a pop of color. Without a lid primer it was a soft blue that gave me Easter egg feels. It blended better than any of the other mattes in the palette actually and I found myself enjoying it.

For the Glitters in this row, Cosmic and ultraviolet worked really well. They were able to highlight the mattes and work well with them. Mercury on the other hand kept trying to take over. With Cosmic and Ultraviolet a brush will give you very little color or shimmer. If you damp down the brush you get more, however I found they work better if you just use your finger to blend them in.

L to R: Off Balance: Galaxy, Libra, Crash Momentum and Supermoon

In the second row, Off Balance, Libra Crash and Momentum are the mattes while Galaxy and Super moon are the shimmers. With the Shimmers, these two blend better with your fingers and worked pretty well. Supermoon has a bit of a dual chrome nature to it. it shifts between white and pink.

And then there are the mattes. Crash was close enough to the color of my skin that it disappeared. Momentum was good for the inner corner of the eye but tended to fade to nothing when blended. Libra looks lavender in the pan and applies more pink toned on the lids. Off balance looks like a soft pink in the pan but applies as more of a mauve. The mattes blended well but it generally gave a muted look until you use a lid primer. The primer brightened the tones as more pigment stuck to the lid, but then they didn’t blend.

L to R: Vortex, Hot Mess, Supernova, Karma, gold Glitch and Frazzled

And then there is the third row. The mattes are Vortex, Hot Mess and Karma. While they are the darkest mattes in the palette, they were also the most disappointing. Hot mess was the best of these three, but it still blended out to a lighter pink and to be honest had less pigment than off balance. Vortex just blended into nothing. It slightly darkened things a bit but otherwise was not much of a shadow.

The two shimmers, Supernova and Gold Glitch are the type of bronze shades I usually am over the moon about. They performed like the other shimmers in the palette. While I have palettes I have kepd simply because I adored the bronze shades, this isn’t one of them. The bronze shimmers were okay, but not the best.

Over all, this palette was a bit disappointing. It is the kind of palette I might reach for in creating a pastel look since i don’t have many shadows in that range. The shimmers were far better than the mattes and the mattes were a bit of a trial. All of the mattes have a pink undertone to them, and while they blended well they were a soft pastel that easily faded by the end of the day. With a lid primer they brightened in their pigmentation but they lost their blendability. In all honesty I am keeping this for the shimmers. I don’t keep a lot of shimmers so these are nice to have. However I will be pairing them with more strongly pigmented mattes from another palette. For me the palette is worth keeping for the shimmers since I don’t have a lot of them, but I don’t think I would pay full price. The discounted price for the sale they have going on now might tempt me to buy it, but I certainly wouldn’t pay the full price for this palette. It is worth $33.50. It is not worth $67.

The Rose Gold Remastered Palette Untouched

This week i used the Huda Beauty Rose Gold Remastered Palette as my eyeshadow palette. I have used the smaller Huda Beauty Obsessions Palettes in the past (I have two in my collection) and I really liked the formula. I don’t reach for them a lot, or haven’t recently, mostly because they are small and they ended up getting buried. This is my first full sized Huda Beauty Eyeshadow Palette.I don’t know what the original was like, so I can’t compare it to the newer version, I can only tell you my thoughts on this one.

Personally, I loved using the remastered rose this week. Recently I have been doing very simple one and done looks or adding one shade and then topping it with a bit of shimmer and calling the look done. With this palette I wanted to spend time playing with it and layering the shadows. But let’s look at the shadows.

The top row is all shimmers.They are butter soft and perform really well. I have no idea why they have divots carved into them as that seems really strange to me. Perhaps it is a factor of the machine pressing the formula or the product was so soft it pressed better that way, or maybe they were even trying to put less product in the pan. I don’t know. I do know that even with a dry brush, these shimmers applied well and performed magnificently. There was only minor fall out and usually that occurred when I didn’t tap my brush off enough before applying them. I did not end up with glitter cheeks because of these shadows. Towards the end of the day I did have a slight crease across my eye, but it is where I have small hoods in my lids and quite frankly the only formulas that don’t give me a line by the end of the day are liquids and even then there are only a few that can perform like that. The line was very slight and I think I am the onl one who noticed it.

The second row is composed of half matte and half shimmer shades. What I found interesting about the matte shades in this row is that Risque (far left) felt more solid to the touch than the other formulas. The other two mattes were soft and butter, almost as soft as the above shimmers. The shade Risque did not feel this way, however it performed just as well as the others. The eye image is of just Risque on the lid. I did one tap into the pan and one swipe across the eyes.

As you can see, the shade is highly pigmented and despite the swiping motion there is little color fall out. While I did try playing around with this palette without adding my face products first, I have to be honest, my eyeshadow is one of the last things I do. I end with Eyeshadow, Mascara and then lip products.

I generally use setting spray after the shadow but before the mascara. It is the way I have alwyas done my make up. I know most people do the eyes first and then work their way out, but the habit of the lifetime makes me always feel like I am missing a step if I do it that way. I will say that because I received cleansing wipes from my Refreshments subscription and actually have them on hand, I am playing with my eyeshadow more and when I play with it more, I do apply shadow first and then face products. It I know what look I am going to do, I do the face first. The wipes make it easy to play and clean up fall out and tidy edges, I just don’t like the waste of them. But there you have it. I also have to sya it has been a while since I’ve had a palette that made me want to play. this one makes me want to play around with shadow.

But moving on we have one more row to go.

This third row is composed of all mattes. In case you are wondering about the difference with the photo, the flash kept going off when I took it. For some reason it wouldn’t go off with the other two sets of swatches but no matter what I did it always went off with this set. so the image is different.

The formula however is the same, and as you can see from the swatches, they look almost creamy. The shades were butter and soft and applied fantastically well. I had no trouble with streaking or patchiness, even from the black. Generally, I find that the darker the shade the more patchiness can be a problem. I simply didn’t have that issue with this palette. Black truffle applied well, blended into the other shadows and layered beautifully.

I know usually i have at least one criticism of the palate, one thing that didn’t work for me or slightly annoyed me. Honestly, i can’t really think of one. These shades of the Huda Beauty Rose Gold Remastered Palette are completely in my wheelhouse, they are nicely and thoughtfully arranged, and user friendly. They blend well, stay put and provide great color pay off. Quite frankly those are usually my priorities when looking at an eyeshadow palette. I very much enjoyed using this palette this week and will continue using it for a long time to come. It may sound overly enthusiastic, but really, I can’t complain.