What brand's releases have become stale or redundant to you?
Charlotte Tilbury and Tom Ford for sure; they seem to just redo the same thing over and over again with little variation in-between.
— Christine
Explore Temptalia
We're here to help you make better beauty purchases that you'll enjoy and love! We recommend signing up to take advantage of personalized features like tracking products you own, viewing dupes that you already have, and more!
Here are some useful resources for you:
Compare Any Two
Curious how two shades compare to each other? Type in the shades below to get instant side-by-side swatches!
38 Comments
Comments that do not adhere to our comment policy may be removed. Discussion and debate are highly encouraged but we expect community members to participate respectfully. Please keep discussion on-topic, and if you have general feedback, a product review request, an off-topic question, or need technical support, please contact us!
Please help us streamline the comments' section and be more efficient: double-check the post above for more basic information like pricing, availability, and so on to make sure your question wasn't answered already. Comments alerting us to typos or small errors in the post are appreciated (!) but will typically be removed after errors are fixed (unless a response is needed).
We appreciate enthusiasm for new releases but ask readers to please hold questions regarding if/when a review will be posted as we can't commit to or guarantee product reviews. We don't want to set expectations and then disappoint readers as even products that are swatched don't always end up being reviewed due to time constraints and changes in priorities! Thank you for understanding!
Comments on this post are closed.
We try to approve comments within 24 hours (and reply to them within 72 hours) but can sometimes get behind and appreciate your patience! 🙂 If you have general feedback, product review requests, off-topic questions, or need technical support, please contact us directly. Thank you for your patience!
Too Faced!
Almost all of them, really.
Charlotte Tilbury, Tarte, ColourPop come to mind first.
Right, Charlotte Tilbury, a pricey luxury line with cheap ole packaging.. never any embossing on anything.. just the basics and the same shades rinse repeat ad nauseum.
I’m just glad when someone else mentions Charlotte Tilbury packaging is cheap. 😅 I hear so many people praise how luxury it looks, but I always got the tacky cheap auntie vibes from the brand.
To each their own and I truly believe some people actually like it, but it’s good sometimes to feel it’s not just me.
Agree with both above! Luxury price and packaging that looks like a drugstore line back in the day. Also, same shades or repeat, repeat. No surprise in similarity between Tom Ford and Charlotte Tilbury as she was the Creative Director behind his line.
I thought I was alone with my opinion. Charlotte Tilbury is so overrated.
It’s too funny, Wednesday. The word that came to my mind first was ad nauseum. I tend to post my comment and then read others comments. But I believe we both chose the best word, lol.
Yep, Miss Charlotte is another one who comes to mind for excessive repetition, Wednesday. Although, thankfully not at the speed of light like ColourPop. And once in awhile, she actually throws us a bone! Like last holiday’s Bejeweled palette, which is more chocolate, purple, plum, red instead of all warm pinks. I can get something closely approximating what I was hoping for with TF’s Honeymoon quad using Bejeweled.
Urban Decay. A few years ago they were so exciting.
I look at the many wonderful Urban Decay products I have (almost all of them discontinued now) and wonder why a brand would almost deliberately crash and burn itself like UD has.
Urban Decay – the slow, painful, tragic death of one of my favorite brands. Not mine only, but so many of us on here. RIP UD.
Pat McGrath. Her eyeshadow palettes lean pretty heavily on some version of pink or gold eyeshadows.
I’d agree that Charlotte Tilbury can be repetitive when it comes to the shades she releases but I’ve found she has tweaked the eyeshadow formulas over the last few years and they perform so much better.
Same. But with the addition of Pat McGrath. She’s definitely fallen in to the CT and Tom Ford trap of “pink sells. we do pink now. all the time. all the pink. eyeshadow palette? pink. lipstick? pink. Pink. Pink. Pink.”
So…yeah, I’m out on pink.
Also, Colourpop honestly all of their releases (which I don’t buy anyway) all look exactly the same to me now.
COLOURPOP!! They continuously regurgitate the SAME exact shades, or damn near close, with different names. Every single time that you review their eyeshadow palettes, there is nearly always several dupes, if not many, by them themselves! It’s actually become laughable.
ColourPop has released a new collection every week for the past 2+ yrs so at this point, they’re just duping themselves!
It’s actually funny when some reviewers show 2-3 old Colorpop palettes as dupes when a new one launches, at least one being nearly identical. At this point they’re better off selling refillable pans and just put different eyeshadow combination; at least they don’t have to rename the same shade 5 times…
I’ve never actually had a single product from ColourPop (it’s that “no physical stores” thing) and in the past years, I’ve seen a few palettes I would have liked (mostly taupe-y ones) but even I agree about this constant regurgitation of the same products with new names. It seems like at least every 5 days, they come out with new stuff that looks alarmingly like all the old stuff and it really is laughable – that’s the best word for it!
Pat McGrath. She’s been releasing pink shades for years at this point, with slight variations among them.
The whole industry is obsessed with pinks, reds and warm tones, not just Path McGrath. I’m waiting for this phase to die since ABH Modern Renaissance.
I’ll join you in that waiting room, Ana Maria, and we should save a chair for Genevieve too as I know she’s so over the pink/red/orange eyeshadow overload. Sadly, I fear it won’t die, just like the matte lipstick overload won’t die either.
Tom Ford is definitely up there with all of his repromotes and when he does release a new quad, the colors are generic and boring, with many containing 2-3 shades (out of 4!) that look almost identical. Mac needs to completely overhaul their eyeshadow formula to join us in the 21st century. I get that they’re a Pro MUA brand and I think their base products should stay as they are but the shade selection and formulas of their eyeshadow collections are stuck in the 90s and just not worth the price anymore.
Colorpop launches so many new collections, it’s almost impossible for them to not be stale and redundant.
Charlotte Tilbury and NARS are definitely on the list, especially milking whatever they can from their best known products (Pillow Talk and Orgasm respectively). Although sincerely I would give a pass to Charlotte Tilbury. I don’t feel that the brand tries to target a large audience; they seem to focus on a specific demographic, so it’s quite normal to have a redundant aesthetic.
Well… and anything luxury, like Tom Ford, Channel, Givenchy… but like Charlotte Tilbury they have a specific audience who likes the same things… no reason to make something too new and unexpected.
MAC is quite redundant, and I’m not necessarily mad at it (especially when they bring back discontinued favorites of mine). Sometimes I wish they were more stale and redundant rather than experimenting too much (usually that’s a fail).
Urban Decay was very redundant when they kept launching brow product after brow product (they have like 8 or 9 different SKUs by now???). Their Naked line is redundant and stale just because they use the name again and again… even if clearly 4-5 of the last ones weren’t ‘naked’ at all.
And for the Too Faced and Tarte are also stale and redundant, even if they launch a gazillion products (especially around Christmas) more or less their just small variations of the same themes. One could easily predict their next holiday collection.
I would give credit still to Tarte… at least they have like 20 different lines of product, they have deodorant, body care, hair care and everything in between…
Ana Maria, I couldn’t agree more. I can overlook redundancy when we’re talking about an eyeshadow palette that is neutral beige-browns that is targeted towards someone working in a conservative environment or someone who has reached a point in their life that they chose those types of palettes. There will always be a market for that, but your analysis of the Pillow Talk and Orgasm lines is spot on….I would just need to add Divine Rose to your list.
Too Faced, Charlotte Tilbury, Tom Ford – all minor variations on a theme. Like one thing is New & Amazing & Lovely and then they make endless replicates with minor variations and it just all looks the same in the end.
Colourpop does also dupe itself to a certain extent but they’re at a lower price point and they do an excellent selection of palettes so I don’t mind if the odd colour is recycled here or there occasionally.
Colourpop. They released Feeling Bubbly and it looks like the last one they released. So redundant and stale!
Same as Christine (and several others, it seems) – Tom Ford and Charlotte Tilbury as well as Pat McGrath (I know some consider that sacrilege but even though I’ve only one of her palettes, I find so much in a lot of them to be repetitive and loaded with shades I don’t use).
Hmmm – quite a few brands for sure – I would also say CT, Tom Ford, UD and most definitely ColourPop!
UD, PMG – who has done the pink/red theme to the ground.
Pretty much all of them. Haven’t bought anything Mac in years. Never cared fir CT.
Tom Ford the same. I refuse to pay Pat McGrath prices. I just shop Indie brands.
I think we all need a reset, how many pinks, reds, golds can we have? I can agree with all the replies it’s just one after another, which makes it easy for me to stay on a no/low buy. We need a shake up. I’m liking the Indie brands they seem to be going in a different direction.
Not sacrilege to me, Mariella! I did get the Divine Rose II because it really didn’t resemble anything else I had already. However, PML has since milked that “everything’s roses” (or gold!) cow to death! And I’m one of the lucky ones who’s eyes are very nicely complemented by that shade family and I’m sick of it by her and CT!
Yet, I did just get ND Retro….so perhaps I ought to take a seat in the corner?
Okay, so that comment went under the wrong name somehow..I was answering Mariella.
Lol! That’s ok Nancy it’s nice to see where the comments go anyway.
Colourpop! It seems like every other day they are releasing a new palette and they’re all starting to look the same!
Pat McGrath and her Divine Rose ad nauseum and now her Spring collection has more pink. She also seems to repeat (or closely duplicate) her quads. Charlotte Tilbury and Tom Ford for the multiple renditions, repeats, of their quads.
In general, I’d say all of the companies that keep releasing the same pinkish-orange palettes and can’t put together a color story that is fresh. I know I’m being kind of harsh and we all realize that there are only so many colors that can be generated so I think it comes down to the color story. Christine puts together multiple 4-5 fresh color stories weekly, thank you Christine, so we know its possible. Why can’t brands do the same?
Urban Decay’s eyeshadow releases haven’t been the greatest, as of lately. I bought the Naked Heat and Naked Cherry palette back in 2016, and I still have them. At the time, I liked the quality and the color story was right up my alley. I was thinking about buying the Naked Reloaded Palette but I wasn’t amazed when I read your review about the palette. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with your product reviews! I just wasn’t feeling the vibe that I was expecting to get from an UD product.
I don’t like Too Faced.
I live in Belgium so I don’t think I can get ColourPop. It seems like they got into this rut or something. It’s like they release the same shades over and over again. Their packagings may be beautiful but it’s what’s on the inside that matters. This might sound harsh but to me, it feels like they’re sort of using the design as a distraction for what’s to come.
Fun question.
I don’t follow all releases, most of the time just what’s reviewed here. But at this time I think most brands feel stale. Some probably are meaning to be as their audience want’s what they’ve always bought. Who hasn’t seen people in makeup stores wanting the exact lipstick they bought five years ago, having the salesperson run like crazy trying to find a dupe as the lipstick in question is DCed years ago.
I can agree on CT, but I still like her original eyeshadow quads and I love her matte lipsticks.
I find the indie brands a lot more fun these days, but I still like some of the old, old brands, like Dior and Chanel, they seem to me less stuck than Too Faced, Tom Ford Pat McGrath, UD (sad to say) and a lot of other brands.
CP should ease up on their releases, I think, it’s just too much and there are so many dupes from themselves.
I also agree with all other comments.
Literally agree with EVERYTHING that you said, Helene! Because it’s all so very true.
I don’t really stay loyal to one brand enough to consider any of them stale or redundant. Instead, what I tend to find redundant is certain types of makeup seen throughout the industry. I’ve spent years in the waiting room with Ana Maria, Mariella, and Genevieve-being tired of warm neutrals. Lately I’m getting tired of all the dewy/sheer stuff that’s been so popular the last couple years.
If we do go down to the individual brand level, NARS really needs to stop beating Orgasm into the ground. Part of me looks at that statement and goes “Really? Says the girl who has 3 UD Naked palettes?”, but at least UD seems to be branching Naked out into different color stories.