Why You Don't Need the Urban Decay Naked Vault

For the past few years, during the holiday season Urban Decay has released some absurd collection of their Naked palettes in a "vault" value set. This year, the Volume III was released, and it contains Naked, Naked 2, Naked 3, Naked Smoky, Naked Flushed in Naked and Streak, Naked Basics, Naked 2 Basics, lip pencils in Naked and Rose, lip glosses in Naked and Conspiracy, and Vice lipsticks in Naked and Backtalk. 

(So much Naked.)

This set is $300, and you absolutely, unequivocally don't need it. 

I'll get the obvious out of the way and say that in terms of numbers only, this is a value set. If you were to buy each of these items individually, it would cost $452. And $300 is obviously less than $453. 

BUT. You would likely never, never buy all of these products individually. 

What happens in these sets is that people think, "I want the Naked 2 for sure. And I've been curious about the Naked Basics. And everyone really likes the Naked 1. If I bought the Naked 2 and Naked 1, it would already be over $100. If I also got the Naked Basics it would be $130. And if I just spend a little more that than, I can get everything. Okay, I'll do it!"

And that is really flawed thinking. Because really, you only wanted the Naked 2, and you should just buy the Naked 2 and only spend $54. 

Sets like this convince you that you are getting an unbeatable deal, but really, would never buy all of these products, so the value inherently goes down. You see, if you were never planning on spending all this money, then you aren't actually saving anything. You are spending more than you ever would have in the first place, which is exactly what the company wants. Sales and value sets are designed to benefit the retailer, not the customer. 

The Vault III comes with an absurd amount of product.

And getting all of this in one shot would be incredibly overwhelming and absolutely overkill. 

I'm going to share a personal story. I've loved makeup for around seven years now, and I've always had a much larger collection than most. I once saw my friend's small makeup bag and was floored to learn it housed her entire makeup collection. I don't have drawers upon drawers of makeup like I see in collection videos on YouTube, but compared to that friend, I have a huge collection. After decluttering many items I wasn't using, I had gotten my collection down to a reasonable size that I was happy with. And then I started a demanding, rigorous graduate program. And I was (and continue to be) living in a city that I hate. And my best friend moved across the country to the city I wanted to live in. In addition to all this, I had quite a few personal struggles as well, and I turned to makeup shopping to comfort me. My collection and my problem ballooned out of control. Every day was a fight, and on the days I lost (and there were many of them), I bought makeup. I turned to my dad for advice because I knew I was spiraling out of control, but he was also across the country and felt helpless. He told me that I needed to do whatever I could to get through the day. If that was buy makeup, he said, then buy makeup. I needed to get through my program and graduate. And I did. I graduated in May, which is when I first started this blog. 

When I was in the thick of it, I was buying an eyeshadow palette weekly. And that's not an exaggeration. I went from seven eyeshadow palettes to twenty-five very quickly, and I was even decluttering/selling as I went. It was bad. But worse than that, the high I got off of buying new makeup dissipated so quickly. And because I was buying a new palette weekly, I certainly wasn't getting to know the palette I had just bought or the one before that or the one before that. I was just amassing all this stuff, and it was all going unused. 

And that's what I imagine would happen for people who purchase the Naked Vault. There would be this ridiculous influx of makeup, eyeshadow specifically, and there would be no way to get familiar with all the palettes because you would be moving on to the next thing. Those of us who are makeup obsessed forget this easily, but palettes were originally designed to be ALL the eyeshadow one could want. So immediately getting six new palettes would be just so much. 

I'm also not sure who the audience is for the Naked Vault. If it is the die-hard makeup addict, they would probably already have one of more of these items or at least a substantial collection of eyeshadows already. If it's someone brand new to makeup who doesn't have their basics, wow, would this be overkill. Going from zero to six eyeshadow palettes in one shot would be so overwhelming. And I really don't see it being for someone in between because most women don't even have three eyeshadow palettes, let alone six. 

As a final point about the sheer number of eyeshadows included here, I would just like to show all the colors as pigments, away from the packaging and presentation:

The colors all look the same! So much brown! When you look at the palettes like this, you see that there really isn't all that much variation between palette to palette, so in buying the vault, you are really just buying the same colors over and over. 

The only real value I can see in this palette is if you plan to break it up and give it away as gifts to many people in your life who love makeup. Getting all of this makeup in one shot and keeping it all to oneself feels—and this is coming from a person with way too much makeup—quite gluttonous. 

Urban Decay also offers the "Perfect 3some Vault" with Naked, Naked 2, and Naked 3:

I'm no prude, but can I just say: Urban Decay, you are not edgy or cool for using a sexually-charged name to market your product. 

This Vault is $115, and if you were to buy these products separately, it would cost $162. But again, unless you were planning on buying all three of these palettes at the same time, there are no savings in buying this. 

I have previously owned and decluttered the Naked, Naked 2, Naked 3, and Naked Basics palettes. I personally would not recommend any of these palettes to anyone, but I know there are many people (my good friend included) who love their Naked palettes. Nonetheless, I'm going to run down why I don't like them and why I got rid of them. 

Naked:

I bought this palette when it first launched and included the dual-ended eyeliner. I had no idea that it was going to blow up like it did or that it would be incredibly hard to get in the weeks after I purchased it. I was in Sephora on vacation in California, and a sales associate showed it to me. See, I had been really wanting to get Woodwinked from MAC for a while, but at the time I two quads and didn't want to have just a random single shadow as well. I swatched Half Baked and Smog and decided that between the two, they were close enough to Woodwinked. I liked some of the other colors as well, so I thought I would just buy it. It was my first palette. 

I liked Sin, Half Baked, Smog, and Toasted. That was it. I pretended to like Naked and Buck but didn't really; I hated Virgin; Darkhorse and Hustle were too dark with too much fallout; and Creep and Gunmetal were never touched. 

Naked 2:

I still remember the release of this palette well. I was at work when I read Temptalia's positive review, and looking at the swatches, I didn't think it looked that much different than my Naked palette. But having lived through the hype of the first palette, I was going to buy this no matter what. I even convinced my co-worker to buy it at the same time, and we ordered our palettes just as they went live. 

I liked even less shadows in this palette. There was Half Baked (again) and YDK (which looks a lot like Toasted), and I kind of liked Suspect and Snakebite. There was no transition color for me, and the chunky glitter fallout was even worse than the first. 

Naked 3:

I very recently talked about my thoughts on this in my post about the MAC Nutcracker Sweet Cool Eye Compact, so I'll be brief. I liked Nooner. That was about it. 

Naked Basics:

This was a really bad purchase on my end. I hated Venus; Foxy, W.O.S., and Naked 2 looked like nothing on me; Faint was too cool-toned and looked like mud on me; and Crave is the worst eyeshadow that has ever been in my collection. Crave just started breaking one day for no reason whatsoever, and did not stop breaking no matter what and got into all the other shadows. I finally had to break up the entire eyeshadow and throw it all away just to keep the palette clean. 

Having tried so many different formulas now, Urban Decay is really lacking, in my opinion. The shadows feel dry and stiff and have an absurd amount of fallout. The mattes are awful. They aren't as bad as the likes of Morphe and other cheap formulas, but Urban Decay is mid-range! The quality should be on par with Kat Von D, MAC, Makeup Geek, Tarte, and Make Up For Ever. But they're not. 

I got rid of all of these palettes because I felt the quality was not very good when compared to my other shadows. I also didn't like or use enough of the colors in any of them to justify keeping the entire palette. I haven't missed having any of these palettes and now feel, especially after so much time has passed and I've tried and loved other things, that these palettes are severely overrated. 

I think Urban Decay could do better, and I'm frankly a little tired of the Naked theme. Charging the prices they do, I expect the quality to be much better. The Vault collections, in my opinion, are really unnecessary. They are a scheme to try and get people to spend more money than they would otherwise, and then you are stuck with a ton of product that you either can't use fully or won't like. Even when it seems like a good deal, I think it's still important to crucially evaluate why you want to buy it. If you wouldn't buy it when it's not on sale, then you probably don't want it all that much to begin with.