For those that have known me all my makeup career, you’ll know how much of a fan of Smashbox products I am.  I love their shadows, their glosses, HAVE to have their fusion softlights in my kit all the time, and was bowled over when I spotted their Ultimate Palette on the Just Beauty Direct website.

It’s very rare for me to get excited about an all-in-one palette.  There’s always a chunk of it that I never use, be it the glosses are blah colours, or that the cheek colours are straight out of 1982, but I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

I have long been a fan of the Smashbox Cream Liners, and was delighted to find 8 of their best selling colours in there.  And whilst I don’t use brow products myself, there is a good selection in here.

There is also a nice selection of cheek colours, a perfect selection in fact for contouring and highlighting, although they are quite shimmery, so do watch out where you put these!

For me though, the magpie in me was drawn to the eyeshadows.  Often you can find that these ‘cheaper’ palettes are loss leaders with poor quality products inside, but this palette’s eyeshadows have lost nothing from the regular full size ones.

Yes, there are some colours that I won’t use on myself, and perhaps won’t use professionally, but of the 70 in there, I’ve used most of them repeatedly!

A couple of months ago, I did 3 FOTD (Face Of The Day) shots for the Forum regulars, exclusively using the Ultimate Palette, please feel free to have a look here!

I won’t be adding it to my professional kit, but that is purely down to the kind of case I work out of (a desktop case), but I would definitely recommend it as a kit builder product for anyone, at £38, it’s worth that alone for the lipglosses, let alone the cheek colours, eye colours, brow techs, cream liners, brushes….

Sam Donald

www.SamDonald.com