What I'm Not Buying: Natasha Denona Sunset Palette

Natasha Denona has come out with another palette that is warm-toned with lots of reds and oranges and one yellow and therefore totally unique and not at all like all the other warm-toned red-orange palettes that have come out recently.

And I won't be buying. 

This palette retails for $129 and contains 15 shadows. And lots of people will tell you that this palette is not a complete ripoff because the shadows are such amazing quality! and if you bought each shadow individually, it would be triple the price! blah blah blah. This palette is a total ripoff. 

I have two Natasha Denona five-pan palettes, and I have kept the majority of the shadows in those palettes. I like them and think they are very pretty, metallic, and foiled. And I absolutely, 100% regret buying both of those palettes. I just don't feel they are worth the cost, and I completely bought (literally) into the Natasha Denona hype. 

The matte shadows in the five-pan palettes are a complete joke and as bad of quality as Morphe mattes. I have heard that the brand has since reformulated their mattes, and I guess good for them, but they had no business changing what they did for mattes of such subpar quality. And because of that, this isn't really a brand I would want to further support. Natasha Denona products recently appeared inside Sephora stores around Manhattan, and I swatched a few colors in person, and again stand by my opinion that these shadows are just not at all worth the hype or the price. 

Before we even look at the (completely not unique) colors in this palette, I want to dispel the rumor that Natasha Denona palettes are a value. They are not. And that's because it is incredibly unlikely that you would personally go out and buy each one of these shadows from Natasha Denona if they were not available in this palette. You don't get the pick the shadows you buy. They are just there and you have to live with them. So instead you are just looking at the overall color scheme, thinking it looks pretty, and bargaining with yourself that you will get use out of most of the shadows. But just because you will get use out of them doesn't mean you would have purchased them yourself. And if you weren't going to do that, this is just a (freaking $130!) collection of trendy colors. 

This is also Natasha Denona's least expensive large palette, but that is only because it is the palette with the least amount of shadows. This brand seems to refuse to acknowledge that they came out of the gate claiming to be a luxury brand, charging incredible prices for their (frankly underperforming) shadows, and have cheaper than cheap packaging that could not be farther from "luxury." If they charged $45 for this palette, I still would say that the packaging is way too cheap for that price tag, let alone $130. I find their prices unreasonable, and this is coming from someone who likes the brand's shimmer shadows. 

Let's look at Sunset:

Photo credit: Trendmood1

So, let's just get this out of the way. Natasha Denona is clearly copying ABH Modern Renaissance:

But, in an attempt to make it not look like Modern Renaissance, they have added a yellow and some shimmery oranges. 

This also looks like the (also overpriced) Violet Voss Holy Grail palette:

The (also overpriced) Huda Beauty Rose Gold palette:

Coloured Raine Queen of Hearts:

And the original red-orange palette, Lime Crime Venus:

I'm just going to be frank. If you already have one of the above palettes, you don't need the Sunset palette. It's not different. You won't use it more. It isn't different enough that it makes sense to have both. 

If you actually break the colors down, you have a red, bronze, orange, white, yellow, and pink. If you already have those colors, you have the entire palette. And I assume that the majority of people contemplating throwing out $130 on this palette very likely have at least one of all of those colors. They just might not have all of them in one palette or with the name Natasha Denona slapped over it. 

I have owned Modern Renaissance and returned it because I already had the Lime Crime Venus palette and plenty of natural shadows and found Modern Renaissance to be redundant. And since then I have depotted Venus and decluttered some of the shadows and (funny enough) have the remaining shadows in a custom palette with my Natasha Denona shadows, among others. 

Fact is, once you stop looking at palettes as complete packages that will "complete" something in your collection or in your life, and you start looking at them as a prepackaged collection of single shadows, you are able to see how much of something you already have. And I get that some people don't like single shadows. And I really get that some people don't like to depot shadows out of palettes and create their own non-perfectly shaped custom palette. I used to be both of those people. I also used to be a person who felt if a palette had enough colors that I liked and would use, even if it meant that palette was made up of mostly colors I already owned, I would still buy it. 

But now I look at makeup a lot differently—and I see marketing tactics much easier—and I really see how much I just don't need something. And I think for the majority of people, the Natasha Denona palette falls squarely in the "don't need this" category. 

The palette is overpriced, the color scheme has been done, and the color scheme is quite repetitive within the palette itself. I think most of the colors in this palette will just have little variation between the others, and for $130 and 15 shadows, again, I just think this palette is very not worth the money, even if the shadow quality is really nice. 

With the incredibly cheap packaging, tired color scheme, and overpriced nature, this palette is an easy pass for me.