Fake Urban Decay Palettes: How I Ended Up With An Ebay Fake

It was mid-December and the buzz surrounding the release of the Urban Decay Naked 3 palette was gripping the beauty community. I had done my research and had already chosen my favourite shades.

And with my birthday and Christmas falling on the same week, I thought I may have just dropped enough hints to get my paws on this beauty. And for a makeup obsessive like me, more eye shadows were EXACTLY what I needed.

So I  was pretty excited when Boyfriend produced a palette-shaped gift on my birthday. I took it out of its box to admire the shades and that beautiful rose-gold packaging.

But something was irking me - there was a blue-grey shade in the palette that I was certain I had not seen in any swatch photos or videos. 

I had a good look at it and realised that the swatch photographs on the back of the box were a range of different colours (green, purple, blue) but with the same names of the shades in the REAL Naked 3 palette. It was most definitely a fake and I was gutted.

Now, let me state for the record that Boyfriend is an internet-savvy kind of guy. This is not your grandma assuming that the bags on the market stalls in Gran Canaria are genuine Chanel for €20. So I was really surprised when he told me that he had paid €75 for it on eBay, convinced it was the real deal.

And to add insult to makeup injury, my mother had done something similar. She had picked me up a fake Naked palette when shopping around Meath Street before Christmas. It was the one palette I didn’t have and though she knew it was a fake when she picked it up for €25, she thought it would make a good stocking filler nonetheless.

She had bought me quite a few genuine Urban Decay products for Christmas and so I never imagined any of them were fakes. I sat down to swatch the palette, applying an eyeshadow and photographing it, before removing it and applying another. I was only four or five eyeshadows in when I realised that ‘Half-Baked’, an eyeshadow I have had in several other palettes before, was the completely wrong colour. Then I noticed how some of the pans looked like they were about to fall right out of the palette.

• My mother instantly confessed to the bogus stocking bonus. Little did she know that the eye I was swatching on would hurt for the rest of the day. Often from applying and removing eyeshadow continuously, my eyelids can get a little chapped or dry but this was genuine pain in the inner corner of my eye and it remained red for the entire day.
• You see, that’s the thing about fakes – they are not approved by anybody, they don’t have to pass any regulations, they don’t even have to be made with skin-safe ingredients! So I urge you to please be careful where you are purchasing your cosmetics and never knowingly buy a fake.
• You may think it will make a great cheap gift for your little cousin and “she’ll never know the difference” but the truth is that it may be seriously damaging. A sore eye for a day doesn’t seem like much but I have heard so many horror stories about fake products leading to skin reactions that it was enough to terrify me to the core and I was glad to have an eyeball left at the end of the day.

Do you have any experiences with fake products? Would you knowingly buy one? And how do you check you are buying a legitimate product?