Urban Decay Gwen Stefani Eyeshadow Palette Review and Swatches

The Eyeshadow Palette was the first piece of the Urban Decay Gwen Stefani collection to be released. It's currently out of stock on the Urban Decay site, but is available on Feel Unique for £40 with the option to use a student discount or other voucher codes that can be found online to reduce the price ( I love Feel Unique). 

I've had this palette for a few months and whilst I was counting down the days for it to be released, I'm a little disappointed by it. 

The Palette contains fifteen 1.4g shadows, three of which are permanent shades (Skimp, Stark and Blackout) with the remaining twelve being limited to this palette. The palette contains a mixture of matte and shimmer shadows in both neutral and bright colours. 

The shadows themselves are a fantastic formula, as with pretty much all Urban Decay shadows. All are creamy and pretty pigmented, though 1987 is a little creamier than the rest. 

Swatches over Urban Decay's Primer Potion in Original on the left, no primer on the right.

What bothers me about this palette is the range of colours you get. I felt like a palette with fifteen shades was great value, but it doesn't feel like you get as many as that as a lot of them are incredibly similar. Most of the shades are neutrals and a large chunk of those are very light. Once on the eye, I find it pretty difficult to distinguish between Skimp, Bathwater, Blonde and Pop.

The only colour in this palette that I actually use regularly is Punk. Punk is a gorgeous, warm, dark brown shade and is great in a warm toned smokey eye look. I use this pretty much every day and am pretty disappointed that this isn't one of the permanent shades as I'd love to be able to buy it separately. I'd love to hear about any good dupes for this shade in the comments!

I'm not usually one for pink eyeshadow, but Harajuku mixes very nicely with 1987 for a rose gold eye look, these are the only other two shades I use fairly frequently. 

When I ordered this, it came with samples of four of the Gwen Stefani lipsticks which was a nice surprise. I'm not sure if it still comes with these but they are a pretty great bonus as the lipsticks are fantastic and I've since bought a few. 

All in all, I'd say this palette probably isn't worth purchasing in my opinion. There are better neutral palettes out there for less money that I feel you would get more use out of. It's a shame as there are a few great shades but they alone don't feel worth the hefty £40 price tag!

Let me know what you thought of the palette in the comments!