Wired

Urban Decay Wired Pressed Pigment Palette ($39.00 for 0.40 oz.) is a new, limited edition palette that includes six eyeshadows and four pressed pigments (which are "not for use around the eye"). The pigments are easily identified and split up within the palette, which was a welcome update and something I wish more brands would do. That was the best part of the palette --it only went downhill from there.

The performance of the palette is drastic departure from the original Electric palette, which wasn't perfect but was significantly more workable. If this palette was the full spectrum of colorful eyeshadows available, I'd give up wearing colorful eyeshadows entirely, but thankfully, that's not the case. What year is it??

Part of me couldn't quite believe it, so I dug out my original Electric palette (from 2014!) and recreated the same look, and it really was that different in performance. I spent 10 minutes to create the look using the Electric palette, whereas I had worked over 30 minutes (on one eye) trying to get the similar/same shades in Wired to work.

It is beyond disappointing to see a brand that used to be famous for their brighter colors "revamp" their Electric palette and release such a disaster.  Over half of the shades performed dismally without primer from the get-go: patchy, uneven color application, poor coverage, unable to build up pigmentation, and five to six hour wear.

When a formula is extremely poor without primer, I try hard to test it over an eyeshadow primer--in this case Urban Decay's Anti-Aging Primer Potion!--just in case that's the magic trick. By and large, most eyeshadows (in my experience) apply well enough without primer and it tends to be longevity that gets the most improvement by adding a primer (not application, pigmentation, blendability, etc.).

I had nearly as much eyeshadow below my lid as on it when I attempted to use any of these shades without primer: Glitch, Chaos, Shock, Fluorescent, and Switch, and to a lesser degree, Jolt, Switch, and Savage. The mattes lost a lot of color trueness applied, with and without primer.  Savage is a brighter pink but darkens and loses definition when applied, so it ended up running into Slowburn rather than being two, distinctive shades.

The matte shades were also moderately to very powdery with moderate to heavy fallout, uneven application, weaker coverage (that tended to sheer out), and were inconsistent in whether they blended out decently or not.  Shades like Slowburn, Savage, and Switch blended out decently, while Jolt darkened and blended out with some extra effort.  Shades like Chaos, Shock, and to a lesser extent, Slowburn caused lifting and patchiness when applied more heavily and blended out.  Chaos was, in fact, total chaos to use.

Perhaps you had hope for the shimmers (I did), but it would be misplaced--in fact, the phrase "abandon hope all ye who enter here" was where I landed after using the palette five times.  The two shimmers have a firmer, denser, and physically thicker formulation, which played poorly with the thinner, drier, more powdery mattes; they created an uneven surface, which resulted in patchiness, poor color application, and weak pigmentation that looked muted after application.  They pushed away the flimsy matte shades and help erase the look I already spent far too long fussing over.

Savage and Slowburn were the only workable shades in the palette; they were blendable and fairly buildable with only some fallout, and Switch blended out with complementary tones but would be difficult to finesse with more contrasting tones as it definitely wasn't that blendable.

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