Happy New Year! And welcome back to Northern Soul Beauty. To start off this year I'll be reviewing one of my favourite things - an eyeshadow palette. This is one of the Pro 12 Eyeshadow palettes from Freedom Make Up (the sister company of Make Up Revolution); my hopes were high and this is what I found out...

I picked up the Secret Rose palette which retails at £4 - so the same price point as MUR and MUA 12 shadow palettes. Despite the name, these shadows are actually more of a purple colour family with some greys, taupes and a fairly random bright peach shade in the mix.



On the positive side, the shadow pans are a really good size and the packaging is sleek and simple, as you would expect for such an affordable product.

That, I'm afraid, is where the positives end for me. These shadows kick up so much powder and are very crumbly and patchy - I think part of this is due to the beveled surface of each shadow pan and part down to the quality of these shadows. They are incredibly messy and difficult to work with.


The pigmentation I found to be pretty poor with most of the shades - the darker matte shades are okay but the texture just isn't desirable. The lightest shades barely show up and the shimmer shades are uneven and choppy.

I also found that when these shades are blended, they pretty much disappear and as there aren't any super dark or super light/shimmer shades with enough colour pay off, you end up with no discernible difference between any of the shades once they are applied and blended out.


Now, obviously, for the price, you might not expect great things and you certainly wouldn't expect the quality you get with Urban Decay or other high end shadows. However, brands such as Sleek and MUA have proved that creating a decent affordable eye shadow palette is possible - no they're not perfect, but they are workable and can actually be pretty impressive (you can check out my MUA palette review here - same price but what a difference!).

This is the first and only product I have tried from Freedom so I am by no means writing off the brand as a whole - they have a lot of other products which I am excited to try such as their brow pomades and contour kits. Unfortunately, this palette really didn't work out for me and I wouldn't recommend it.

Let me know in the comments if you've tried anything from Freedom and what you thought of it!