Weekend Smoky Sparkle: Urban Decay Naked Smoky Look

There's a single glitter-infused shade in the Naked Smoky palette by Urban Decay, and the shade is gorgeous (Armor) but weekend is pretty much the only time I would wear it!

You have to be prepared for some fallout when you wear glitter smoky shades, so if you can, try to do your eye makeup first, and the rest after you clean up or you'll have tiny specks of glitter and black on your cheeks, your nose, etc.

The four shades I picked out today were:

• Main lid shade: Armor - metallic taupe with platinum glitter
• Socket and wings at outer corners: Smolder - deep prune
• Lash line: Black Mail - satin charcoal
• Inner Corners: High - pale champagne beige

I did also use a little of the 2 palest matte shades (Combust and Thirteen) on my browbone just to clean up and serve as contrast against the metallics on the lids.

Tip:

This is a smoky look, but I didn't smoke the color up too high above the socket. In fact I stopped right at the socket line. I wanted a more elongated catty effect, rather than a full-on rounded smoky eye, so when I was blending I concentrated on sweeping and diffusing the colors outwards from the outer corners instead of upwards.

I did try using the dual-ended blender/smudger brush included with the palette. I love the smudger tip for applying shadows along the upper and lower lash lines.  It's very precise but shaped just right for getting a soft smoky liner look.

The blender tip though, I'm not a huge fan of. Partly because UD's bristles are packed too stiff and not fluffy enough to really diffuse shadows. You CAN still use this to pack and buff on color but you will get tons of fall-out using this shape for that purpose. It's better used clean to blend out edges or to buff two colors together. Which means you might need a separate packer brush to apply shadows onto the lids, before going in with this to blend.

Other products used in this look:

• Urban Decay 24/7 Pencil in Perversion - applied along the waterline and lash line, but smudged out a little so there is no hard defined line.
• Eyeko Black Magic mascara
• Afterglow Blush in Score - peachy-pink blush
• Urban Decay Sheer Revolution Lipstick in Sheer Liar - rosy beige-brown my-lips-but-better color with a creamy semi-sheer texture

Urban Decay Naked Smoky Swatches and Demo

It almost seems there will be no end to the Naked series!
The latest item to join the family is Naked Smoky, which for the first time sees the 12 colors grouped by theme, so you can easily create looks using the 3 "quads" in the palette, or by picking balanced trios just by choosing 1 warm, 1 cool, and 1 matte from the palette.

Warm Neutrals:

Cool Neutrals:

Matte Neutrals:

There are plenty of soft colors but definitely more deep shades in here, considering it's a "Smoky" palette. The mattes are slightly more chalky, which is quite common for mattes. They're pretty smooth and blendable though, so you don't need to worry that they'll go on patchy and uneven.

But as usual for Urban Decay, it's really the metallics that stand out. They are smooth, pigmented, and just gorgeous as heck. I'm more of a warm neutral girl, but the grey/plum shades in this palette are just too nice. The warm shimmer shades are beautiful as well of course. (I'm a huge fan of Dirtysweet.) The good news is I didn't experience quite as much fallout with this palette as some of the earlier Naked palettes. In fact, I didn't even need to clean the skin under my eyes after doing the eye look below.

This palette has only 1 glitter shade, Armor, which is good because they have a tendency to fall off the lid and all over the cheeks after a few hours. Still, this wasn't as bad as I remember some shades being in Naked 1.

One of the fun things to do with this palette - since the cool and warm tones are quite balanced - is to do part warm, part cool looks, like the one I did above.

I do feel several of the shades, and the balance of light and dark in this palette are somewhat similar to the Naked original palette, so technically speaking, you don't need both unless you're a collector and fan of all Naked palettes. This has more deep/smoky shades than Naked 2, so you can consider it if you want deeper options. And of course, it is very different from the rosy-hued Naked 3, so it's actually quite a good complement to that palette if you want a good range of different neutrals.

The Naked Smoky palette launches 20 Aug in all Sephora Singapore stores at SG$83.