When Urban Decay launched a collection of eight new eyeshadow shades to their lineup as part of their Summer collection, there was one shade in particular which caused quite a lot of hype; the Urban Decay Riff Eyeshadow. I have wanted to get my hands on Riff for such a long time, but it’s always sold out so I snapped it up the minute I saw it back in stock on the Feel unique website and I crossed my fingers that it was worthy of the hype.
I love Urban Decay, and when I say love.. I mean love. I have over 25 of their palettes, which I started collecting when they launched their Books of Shadows so it’s safe to say I’m a big fan of their eyeshadows, however I don’t own any of their individual shades as I just think £14 is really expensive, when you consider they do palettes for double the price with multiple shades.
I don’t tend to like single eyeshadows as I like using palettes, as they have so much variation and you can create a whole look from the one palette. However, Riff has been raved about so much and I loved the look of its warmness so it was the perfect choice for my first Urban Decay Eyeshadow single.
The packaging of the Urban Decay singles is really nice and sleek, and so much nicer than the MAC single eyeshadows. With the shadow being housed within a metallic, token-inspired compact with a clear lid and you can pop the shadow out of the container to put it into a palette which is such a clever idea, and I wish more brands did this.
Urban Decay Riff Eyeshadow is described as being a ‘brown nude matte with floating micro sparkle’, but I really don’t think that description does the shade justice at all. Riff is a gorgeous, warm milk chocolate brown with silver micro glitter.
I’d seen people mention Riff being the perfect crease shade, so I was a little taken aback when I saw how much sparkle there was in the pan but luckily the sparkle doesn’t really translate when used as a crease shade, but you can get the sparkle to be a little more prominent on the lids with the help of an eyeshadow primer so I like that you have the choice.
I’m so used to Urban Decay’s shadows as being buttery, smooth and pigmented but Riff is really quite dry, which doesn’t effect the quality of the eyeshadow but it’s something to note nonetheless. I really love using warm eyeshadows as I have green eyes, and I find they really compliment eachother and I like to use the Urban Decay Riff Eyeshadow as a crease shade for any warm eyeshadow look but it looks really pretty when worn alone all over the lid and through the crease to create a multidimensional eyeshadow look in under a minute.
Now I’ve got one eyeshadow single, it’d be rude not to buy more as I really want to fill one of their four pan palettes. Even though I think £14 is expensive for one single eyeshadow, I really do think Urban Decay eyeshadows are so much better than the likes of MAC shadows and I find them so much easier to blend. I used to have a 15 pan MAC Palette but I ended up selling it in a blog sale as I always disappointed by the shadows but Urban Decay shadows never let me down.
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