Despite the fact I 100% did not need these, I was in Boots and they were 2 for €14 (normally €10.49 a piece) so I thought I'd give them a try. Now, as a foreword, I haven't bought a drugstore brand eyeshadow since I began properly wearing make-up. Even back when doing my make-up was packing on black eyeshadow, it was usually an Urban Decay one from whatever palette from them I'd got at Christmas, still to this day, I have all those old palettes and every single colour is perfectly intact apart from the blacks and greys. So I didn't have super high expectations for these but they were on offer and y'know, there's no time like the present so I gave them a chance and since my recent obsession with drugstore brand skin and base products, I was hoping these would be my new favourite thing.

Starting with the V1 palette, this is the brights palette. When I first saw this it immediately reminded me of Urban Decay's Electric Palette and I was really, really hoping it was. The electric palette is something I never invested in because I never really wear bright shades but I'm sure if I had it I'd start wearing them. The palette has 12 shades, (starting from top right) Chill, Pout, Sugarlite, Dragon Fly, Pucker, Bamm!, Cricket, Bolt, Strike, Floss, Crete and Pow! I really like the combination of colours in the palette because a lot of the colours (like the blues and yellow) are colours I don't have in my collection but find myself needing when I'm putting together a look. Before I even swatched these, I thought I'd try a quick look with them and the first thing I noticed with these is that you need a primer, I can't emphasize this enough, I started off doing this look and I was absolutely hating it, so I started over with a cream eyeshadow base and things started looking up. The primer helps bring out the intensity of these colours on the eye.

I started with a cream eyeshadow base, I used the P.S Love Cream Highlighter from Penneys, All over the lid I used Chill and blended it out from the crease, on top of this I applied Bolt and blended it into Chill in the crease. On the inner corner I have Dragon Fly and lastly on the bottom lid and out towards my eyeliner flick I have Sugarlite. Eyeliner used is essence Matt finish liquid liner and mascara (no lashes!!) is the False Lashes Extreme Black by MAC (unpopular opinion - love dis). All in all, I think this actually makes a pretty good dupe for the Electric Palette and you probably could follow any Electric Palette tutorial and get similar results using this palette but you definitely, definitely need a primer for the colours to really pop!

The second palette is full of cool, dark tones and compared to the brights palette, the pigmentation of these is the first thing that really impressed me, although, after playing around with the brights palette, all the looks I put together from this seemed super boring and not special enough for me to even show off. The 12 shades in this palette are Orbit, Ink, Highness, Noir, Dune, Pillow Talk, Thunder, Maple, Flesh, Paper Bag, Villain and Fern. The black in this palette was probably the most impressive thing about this palette because for such an inexpensive black, it is so, so pigmented and super opaque. The colours are a little bit tricky to blend compared to the brights palette. In fact, using this palette made me realise how much I really loved the brights palette. But this palette has everything you need to create a cool tone smoky eye or even a warm brown smoky eye. Because I have most of these colours in some higher quality shadows, I probably won't find myself reaching for this one all that often, but it's by no means a bad palette, the small compact size of them makes them ideal for travelling. To compensate for no look with this palette, have some swatches (without any primers!). You can definitely see how pigmented the dark colours are in particular, but I didn't bother swatching Pillow Talk, Dune or Flesh because they barely showed up on my arm. Really loving the colour Orbit though, heart-eye-emojiing at it so bad.

So, to conclude this lil review, I was really impressed with these palettes. Both had their pros and cons but overall, the brights is by far my favourite of the two, probably because I'd never really used colours like that before and because it reminds me so much of the Electric palette for a fraction of the cost, mark my words, you'll be seeing a lot more of this palette here in the future!