Urban Decay Glinda Palette Review

I'm writing this like there aren't already hundreds upon thousands of reviews on this product already. Don't care. This is my opinion and mine alone; it never hurts to have one more review.

Besides, I have been playing with this palette almost exclusively for the last month so I think I can do a proper review of it now.

I debated so much whether I wanted to buy the Glinda Palette or the Naked2 Palette. I don’t have a lot of money to spend. And when I do spend, I am pretty frugal with the way that I do it. When Urban Decay sprung on their semi-annual Friends and Family sale, I went into “Should I or shouldn’t I” mode. After 2 days of debating between the two palettes, I finally settled on the Glinda Palette (2 hours before the F&F sale ended) since I decided that NAKED2 wasn’t that much different from NAKED. Now on to the actual review:

The Glinda palette. There was no doubt that I wanted the Glinda Palette even though the packaging on the Theodora one was more to my taste. I’m not a girly girl and I don’t really care for pink colors all that much. However, I have browns and neutrals thanks to the NAKED palette so it was kind of a no brainer that I wanted something different from what I already owned.

I’m not going to talk about the packaging because that’s been reviewed to death. I’m just going to skip straight to the products included.

Products: Eyeshadow, Eyeliner, Super Saturated Lip Gloss thingy

Eyeshadow: The formula is pretty decent for what it is. Urban Decay generally has a very good formula for their shadows. I really like Storm which surprised me because I generally don’t like eyeshadows that look very obviously glittery. Tornado is a beautiful dark purple. It’s super smooth, blends well and looks very pretty. I also was very impressed by Aura which is a white with both a blue shift and red shift. Both are lovely colors. It’s a cool white though, so keep that in mind when using it.  

And now to the ones that didn’t really impress me... Oz sucks big time. The glitter of Oz just gets all over the place. I haven’t had such bad glitter fall out in a shadow before and I’m including Creep in the NAKED palette which also had glitter fall out whenever I used it. The gold and silver (which looks Green and blue) are very pretty and it works very well depending on the look you’re trying to achieve. I’m still scared to use it because the fall out is so bad that it gets all over my cheeks like I put glitter on my face purposefully. Illusion is such a pretty color but there are several things I don’t like about it. First of all, the color doesn’t show up very well on my skin tone. Even with a primer, I can’t seem to get any color from it. It kind of just blends into my eyelid. Magic is better than Illusion in that I can see it on my eyelid. It takes a bit of work before I can see it, but it’s buildable so you can get some color payoff on my not white skintone.

24/7 Pencil eyeliner in Rockstar: the color is beautiful. It’s a deep purple. The pencil itself is very creamy and soft. I would use this all the time if pencil liners didn’t smudge all over the place on my oily lids and inevitably give me raccoon eyes.

The lipstick-gloss thingy: When they say the color is Naked, I think they meant it literally because it only made my lips glossy. My lips are pretty dark/pigmented so when I put this one on, it only looks like my lips. Maybe it nudes it out a tiny bit. The gloss stick is a no-go for me because not only is there no color payoff on my very pigmented lips, but there’s no way for me to sharpen this thing. I don’t have one of those chubby pencil sharpeners.

Value wise: the set is pretty good. The colors are good if you just want to do normal smokey eyes. In fact, I kind of think it clashes a little bit with my coloring because it’s such a cool-toned palette. It’s a fun palette to have, but it’s a compliment palette not a everyday palette. If I had $50 to drop and I’m just getting into makeup, I would not go for this palette unless you’re cool toned. Honestly, I’d rather have a neutral palette like NAKED, NAKED2, Lorac Pro, Too Faced Natural Eyes, or the Balm’s Nude-tude if I were just starting my foray into “high-end” makeup. Granted, of the neutral palettes I listed, I only have NAKED so maybe I’m not one to talk.