Coloured Raine Queen of Hearts Palette Review

I’ve been eagerly watching the Coloured Raine Queen of Hearts palette on Beauty Bay, waiting for that £45 price tag to drop. I finally got my wish a few weeks ago, when I found it on offer for £31.50.

You get 12 shades for that, which isn’t bad. I mean, it’s still way more than I’d usually spend on eyeshadow but I like the look of every single colour.

Packaging:

On first impressions, it’s bigger than I thought and kind of an awkward rectangular shape that doesn’t fit in my eyeshadow storage well. The palette comes housed in this beautiful print cardboard sleeve, which honestly gave me high expectations for its performance.

Once you remove the sleeve though, it’s just a standard matte black card, which is kind of disappointing. The inside is a shiny gold with a small mirror and the names are written on the box, which is the only thing I like about it really. The rest of the packaging just doesn’t feel as luxurious as I was expecting for a £45 palette.

The shades:

So you get 12 shades- 5 shimmers and the rest matte. They’re all different to each other despite being within the same warm-toned colour spectrum. Sometimes when you get palettes with more shades, the transition colours can look a little samey but these are all unique and go well together. I feel like the shimmers are what set the tone for the colour look i.e. you can have a gold eye or a red eye or a purple eye etc. and the mattes fit in with all of that.

Swatches:

Top row

Bottom row

The colours all perform beautifully with some really pigmented mattes too. The only exception is the purple shade ‘Ladyship’ you can see from the swatch it applied patchy and I found it difficult to even get that much out of it! Compared to the softness of the other shades, this one was just dry and scratchy and hard to work with and it doesn’t perform any better on the eye!

I had a quick Google to see if anyone else had this problem or if I got a dodgy palette but the other reviews I found all mention that Ladyship isn’t quite up to standard. All the other swatches I found online showed it looking a lot nicer than mine though!

It applies fine when wet though, so I’ve mostly been using it smudged out on my lower lash line so far.

Application & wear:

The colours blend beautifully together and I think you could create a gorgeous look with any combination of these shades. They do require a fair amount of blending, though. When I try a palette like this, I always think about how my inexperienced self would have handled it and I honestly don’t think I would have known what to do with it! So not great for beginners in that respect.

They last on the eyes about as well as any other eyeshadow, to be honest. Nothing remarkable but they saw me through a long day at work just fine. The shimmer does stay put, which I like as this tends to fade with a lot of my shadows (I tried them out with NYX glitter glue and got even better results!)

Overall, when I pay a lot of money for something, the usual test of ‘is it worth it?’ is would I pay the same amount of money to repurchase it? The answer is probably not. I’m glad I got it for £31.50 and I think that price is about right for the quality of the eyeshadows but I think, if you already have similar colours in your collection, you probably don’t need to rush out and buy this one! (unless you have a palette problem like me!)

Have you tried this palette before? I’d love to know your thoughts!

Amber x