It seems like I was just saying last week that I was getting bored with drugstore makeup and had moved on to smaller indie brands, when Covergirl came along with their Spring 2016 collection and completely turned my head around!
When I first saw the Covergirl TruNaked palettes ($9.49) at Bed, Bath & Beyond, I thought to myself, "oh man, seriously...another UD Naked dupe?". It seems like just about every brand has been there and done that already, and with the exception of the Makeup Revolution Iconic Palettes, no one has come close in terms of eyeshadow quality or pigmentation.
But something caught my attention about these... a sticker on the front of the palette has the claim, "shades like a leading $50 eyeshadow palette". Ok, now none of the other drugstore Naked palette dupes has made that claim, so I bought one out of sheer curiosity. I figured that if the claims were true, I would go back and get the others. But I wasn't really prepared for what I was about to find out...
The Covergirl TruNaked palettes have 8 shades, while the Urban Decay Naked palettes have 12. TruNaked Roses has rose-toned neutrals with a mix of shimmer and matte shades. It comes with a sponge-tipped applicator and no mirror, similar to the Maybelline Nudes ($9.99) and Revlon Not Just Nudes ($14.99) palettes.
I really like the mix of shades in this one! It has both shimmer and matte at the lighter end of the palette, plus some great matte transition and crease shades.
I wasn't expecting too much when I went to swatch these shades for the first time, but oh. my. gosh. Nothing could have prepared me for the soft, buttery-ness that is this palette. One swipe in the pan is all you need for smooth, saturated color. At first, I went back and forth in the pan with my finger a few times, thinking that I would have to do that to pick up more color. But all that did was create some fallout...these are so soft, you only need to glide your finger or a brush across them once and you'll pick up all you need.
These swatches below are done without any primer...they're just gorgeous. Even the matte shades swatch exceptionally well. To say that I'm impressed is an understatement! These can also be used wet for an even more intense color payoff!
So how does this compare to the Naked 3 palette? I figured I had to do a comparison since the claims say that the TruNaked palette stacks up to a $50 eyeshadow palette.
The shades are similar, but not exactly the same, which I'm actually happy about since I have the Naked 3 palette already. An exact dupe would be redundant in my collection, so I'm happy to have some slightly different shades to work with.
Here, I swatched each of the Covergirl shades next to a Naked 3 shade that looked to be similar. Most of them aren't exact dupes, but the important thing to notice here is that there's no real discernable difference in pigmentation!
If you follow me on Instagram, you've probably seen my swatch videos, but if not, I wanted to link them here so you can see the kind of color payoff you can get with one swipe!
Here's a video I did where I show swatches of Urban Decay Blackheart vs. Cover Girl Mousse (the two darkest shades) and then Urban Decay Nooner vs. Cover Girl Copper Rose (both matte shades).