Urban Decay Back Talk Palette – Forgive or Forget?

If you read my recent post on makeup brands everyone loves, but I don’t, I mentioned that Urban Decay was seriously slipping. A brand that I lived for and looked forward to all their releases, is now trying to compete with Colourpop’s weekly release schedule.

A good example of my theory is the Back Talk palette that came out this spring. The shades are completely up my alley with rich mauve and berry tones, which are actually quite perfect for fall. However, as much as I LOVE the colors, I hate how these shades perform, which is why it sat in my makeup cart collecting dust for about 4 months.

However, life is all about forgiving, so I decided to give this palette a second chance. We all tend to go into things with preconceived notions of how things will perform based on reviews we read or hear, so maybe now that the hype has died down, its time to come to my own final conclusion.

Yeah…no. Still not a fan.

The four cheek colors are BEAUTIFUL and actually perform great. Double Take is a creamy, soft pinky mauve that I would buy all on its own. Cheap Shot is a deep berry, really beautiful, I imagine, on darker skin tones. Low Key is a summery peach shade which I use as blush topper and Party Foul is a pink champagne highlighter that gives a lovely lit from within glow.

All the Cheek products are high quality. When you swatch them, they are creamy and smooth to the touch, which is the first thing you notice is missing with the eyeshadows.

The mattes are ok. BackTalk by far performs the best and has the most staying power. WTF completely faded away by the end of the day and 3 Sheets is so close to my skin tone, that I can’t tell what it did, but it’s a beautiful base on me.

The shimmers were the worst! Bare is similar to Party Foul in color, but no where near close in shine. Curve, Shade and 180 are more of a satin than shimmer and I’m not quite sure what is the best way to use them because I really want them to SHINE, but not even with setting spray.

Attitude is by far the most shimmery of them all and the most pigmented. It’s a shimmery strawberry shade and lovely. You need to use a bit of setting spray to get it to its full potential, but even with that it fades pretty quickly.

Overall, the shadows are pretty disappointing, however, not as disappointing as the way this palette was structured. With this slim, removable mirror separating the cheek from the eyes, it’s the stupidest design. You can’t snap the palette shut without the magnetic mirror, but I always take out the mirror when using the palette because it so slim it’s useless to me, so on more than one occasion I lost track of the mirror under other stuff and couldn’t find it right away.

Urban Decay, let’s stick to a basic palette design. Honestly, I think most of us would appreciate it.

Back Talk was on sale in Sephora for $38 last time I checked, however, it’s so similar in tone to the Naked Cherry that maybe it’s worth investing in that for the eye shadows.

Till next time, my friends.

Maritza