Beauty Review: Kat Von D 10-Year Anniversary Eyeshadow Palette

The Kat Von D 10-Year Anniversary Eyeshadow Palette is a limited edition palette that Kat created as part of a capsule collection to celebrate the 10-Year Anniversary of Kat Von D Beauty. I’ve only tried a couple of lip items from the brand before, and am not a very big fan of the creator herself because of some controversial issues surrounding her, but I still ended up picking up a couple of items from the collection, and first up is this palette.

I bought this from Sephora at SGD76 for 16 x 1.7g of product; there are 16 shades from wearable neutrals to bright pops of colour – 11 of which are matte shades and 5 of which are metallic or shimmer shades. Apparently all the shades are named after Kat’s muses, but I don’t really know for sure and I don’t really care enough to check.

The packaging is really pretty – it’s encased in a gold plastic palette with a clasp closure, and a really pretty black and white art drawing on the top. There’s a very good size mirror in the palette, and the whole palette is of a reasonable thickness – quite thin and sleek.

There’s a lot of eyeshadows so I won’t be describing the quality and application of each eyeshadow one by one. But I have tried as much as I can to describe the colour – I’m really crap at this so please bear with me if they are not how you would describe them.

1st Row from Left to Right:
Adele: warm dark brown, matte
Malice: rusty reddish orange, matte
Ashley: coral peach, matte
Gina: warm dark yellow, matte
Egypt: gold with yellow undertone, metallic and glitter
Sylvia: beige yellow, matte
Lala: warm olive green, matte
Leafar: bright leafy emerald green, metallic

2nd Row from Left to Right:
Melanie: beige, matte
Alexandra: light iridescent pink, frosted with pink glitter
Nancy: light warm brown with orange undertones, matte
Catherine: purple, metallic
Kelly: plum brown, metallic with blue glitter
Sarah: cool gray concrete taupe, matte
Carolyn: dark teal, matte
Chad: dark cobalt blue, matte

On the whole, I think the quality of the palette is great. I always use a primer, so I don’t know if they don’t perform as well without. The matte shades felt quite dry to the touch but surprisingly didn’t have a lot of powder kick-up and did not look powdery when applied. The pigmentation is really good and nearly opaque on first swatch for some, such as Chad.

Most of the shadows applies very smoothly with little to no fall out, with the exception of Adele and Melanie. I found Adele to be the driest of them all and applies really patchy, while Melanie was nice and smooth in texture but the pigmentation was significantly lower than the rest (but it is also meant to be a very light shade).

The shimmer/metallic shades are, for me, the best performers. They are extremely pigmented and so stunning. When I first swatched them, I expected some fall out due to the sparkly bits in the metallic shades; surprisingly, I had very little fallout and fantastic staying power across the 5 non-matte shades. Leafar is so gorgeous and I also adore Catherine, which looks like a plain plummy brown but it has this surprising blue shimmers in it.

I actually bought this sight unseen so I only had a vague idea of what the colours really are like; I did not realise that there were so many matte eyeshadows. I like matte eyeshadows, but I would prefer to have a more equal split between satin/shimmer and matte eyeshadows as I am not very good at doing all-matte looks. Also given how gorgeous the shimmer/metallic shades are in this palette, I really wished that there were more of them.

This is a beautiful palette – from the shades to the whole packaging. At first sight, it appears to be a very bright and colourful palette but as I play around with it I have also realised that it is actually rather wearable even for work. There are enough neutral shades to put together a few work looks, and more than enough unusual shades to play around with.

Overall, I love this palette and I have no regrets at all getting it. I don’t know how long this palette will be available for sale, but if you like how it looks, don’t wait!