How useful are swatches from a brand?
These days… hardly useful at all! They are so over-edited to the point where I can’t tell if they were even starting from something real.
— Christine
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26 Comments
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They have never been very useful, especially with products where it would be really nice to be able to actually compare the swatches. The most I get is a rough idea but the idea of gleaning eg undertones from a brand’s website is laughable. 0/5
I would say they are more like a guide and if i like what i see im waiting for swatches from customers. They are useful but not trustworthy, they give me an idea.
The worse has to be Pat McGrath’s own site. The colours never look like that in real life.
Fergettaboutit.. Another reason why swatch gallery is an invaluable tool. I have a dream such a database will exist someday for foundation swatches.
Agreed!
From the brand itself? Meh. Usually digitally manipulated or altered in some other way. I don’t trust them.
Instead, I really on this site plus some trusted YT’ers.
Lol. Not at all. They basically give the idea of the color story the brand wanted to go for, without actually showing the real formula, color, consistency, or anything resembling reality at all. Color swatches are now the same as mascara ad photos (in america. I believe it’s against the law in other countries to advertise mascara on models wearing copious amounts of false lashes).
You are an absolute treasure for your swatches, consistency, and dedication to putting so many out every single day. My bookmarks are littered with the corpses of blogs that crashed and burned while you have gotten even stronger with things like the dupe lists and now the “this vs that” posts.
Brand swatches are very rarely helpful. I think the only ones that are helpful are from some indie brands. Otherwise, they’re edited to hell and back and some brands look like they just photoshopped swatches onto people’s arms.
I think they are only useful for telling you how the brand envisions the product. I consider them no more accurate than the highly stylized food photos used by restaurants in their marketing.
What? You mean a Big Mac doesn’t actually look like that.
At most, they tell me if there’s enough contrasting shades of light, medium, dark but pretty useless otherwise. I find most marketing pretty obnoxious.
Theoretically swatches, on any media, are always good. Being able to see a product swatches on the brands website, along with other retailers and reviewers can give you a diverse optic of how a product looks on various circumstances.
Practically, not so much. Many brand show few pictures, showing just the product in pan. Or they show the colors digitally pasted on an arm. To this day I am still amazed how big companies, with huge resources, can’t even match the quality of temptalia swatches (Christine is just one person, they have entire teams).
I do rely on swatches especially since Covid safety protocols prohibit swatching .
I usually look at a few swatches to get an idea of the shade .
I really appreciate all the work Temptalia has done with the website to create the dupes and comparison swatches gallery.
Brand swatches always have to be opaque and intense. I don’t necessary want super dramatic makeup, so they are just unselling to me. As an example, Viseart’s petit pro palettes are photographed so differently that the Solstice brand swatches look closer to the swatches Temptalia took from the Apricotine palette. The petite pros are beautiful and decent quality, so why use the filters? If they think we prefer the brand swatches, why not make the palettes match? Brand photography is fun to look at, but it’s useless for purchase decisions.
Like you have said Christine, the swatches from the brand are so heavily photoshopped that it really doesn’t give you much indication of the quality and sometimes, even the true colour of the shades. The only swatches I trust are the ones that you do Christine.
So many eyeshadows I buy look nothing like the swatches. Very disappointing.
i’m here pulling my hair at ig comments fawning on obvious MS Paint rectangles on a stock image of three women’s arms (one of them kinda tan). love how these brands don’t even bother adding shadows + distorting the edges to match the curvatures of the arm + adjusting the opacity a little–nope, here’s some box, colour fill set to Chartreuse, floating on an arm, come get your swatches
They’re about as useful as the scent descriptions at Bath and Body Works.
The best brand swatches I’ve seen are on-lip lipstick photos from Urban Decay and Charlotte Tilbury. UD shows their lipsticks on 3 women with different skin tones-light, medium, and deep-and most CT lipsticks have a photo carousel of about 20 models with different skin tones and undertones.
They aren’t helpful to me at all. They never look like actual real swatches and they are definitely ridiculously over edited. I always come here for real genuine swatches and if I can’t find what im looking for here (which is rare) I search Google for real peoples real swatches I really wish brands would stand behind their products and believe in them enough to use real swatches in their marketing.
So True Christine!
I was totally amazed at how different eye shadow palettes actually looked when I seen them in person at Ulta last week! Most looked so much nicer and brighter online than when I observed them at Ulta. Palettes I thought I’d buy online were a no go when I seen in person.
Minimally. Most of them are photoshopped graphics or heavily manipulated photos. They just give me a general idea of whether I want to keep an eye out for real swatches.
If they’re Pat McGrath swatches then NO!!! One of the new Liquilust shades had 4/5 different appearances across her own IG, Facebook and website. They all looked like totally different shades. It’s infuriating and I can’t understand why the brand doesn’t improve this.
I rely on coming here or search out other swatches before I buy.
No, not at all. They’re advertising, so I sort them into the part of my brain where fast food healthy options live.
Since everyone’s monitor shows colors differently plus the fact that they are manipulated by the company our only hope is that the reviewer will inform us as to the true color but especially the undertones. Is it cool or warm. That’s the main info needed.