Kat Von D’s Shade + Light Eyeshadow Palette was designed with a range of colours that would ‘contour’ the eye. But this choice of branding doesn’t really offer anything different to what most of us have always done with our shadows (light on the lid and dark in the crease). Part of its appeal comes from the fact that the entire palette is matte with neutral colours. I picked mine up at Sephora and it retails for $54CAD.

The palette is set up such that there are 3 smaller quads, each of which have a base. highlight, contour and define. The left most quad is considered neutral, the middle is cool toned and the right is warmed toned.

Here are swatches. They’re extremely pigmented and show up on the eye just as well as they do here. I also appreciate that the names of the colours are interesting yet nonsexual.

One of my gripes with the palette is how much powder it kicks up. No matter the brush I use it feels like 50% of the product ends up on my brush while the other half is dispersed into the air, in my eyeball or worse, all over the matte packaging making it kind of messy.

Here are a couple eye looks I did with the palette. This first one was from the instructions provided, using just the shades from the the centre quad (cool). And you can see that the base was way too light for me. WOC will definitely get better results using the ‘contour’ shades as all over lid colours.

Here’s another quick look I did using a colour combination I thought would work better for darker skin.

You can really tell in this photo that the shades go from brown to gray on darker cool toned skin which is a major negative. Although there is supposed to be one quad that’s ‘warm’ and one that’s ‘neutral’ I still find they both lean pretty cool. Additionally I think there’s about two too many ‘highlight’ shades in the palette, colours which will hardly be used by woc.

All in all, the palette is a good value and I’ll get my money’s worth out of it but I wouldn’t suggest it as a go-to for darker woc. It definitely needs to be paired with another palette that’s warm enough for warm skin tones (like the Too Faced Chocolate Bar – ultimate fav) or select MAC shadows.

I imagine it would look good on cool toned black women but too gray on Asian women who also have yellow undertones. But I’d love to hear your personal experiences with it.

Hope this was helpful!

xx

Alyssa