Ok, try not to hate me too much, because apparently this thing is sold out all over the place, but I scored the Sephora + Pantone Universe Color of the Year Facets of Marsala palette, hereafter referred to as “Marsala Palette” because dang that is a lot of words. If you’d like to see me unboxing it and giving my initial thoughts and trying some of the colors, as well as seeing my corgis and one of my cats, you can watch this incredibly poorly filmed YouTube video I made on Monday.

Anyway, I lucked out and when the brand-new Sephora opened at the mall near me, they had two Marsala palettes in stock so I decided hey, why not give it a try. I usually don’t buy Sephora’s palettes because their eye shadow is usually disappointing, but I felt like giving this one a try because the colors in it were so unusual and really varied.

In addition to having Marsala in four finishes, there’s some warm browns, cool browns, terra cotta colors, greens, silver, gold, and even blue and burgundy. Over all it leans towards warm tones, and these aren’t colors I would normally wear, but I found myself really liking them the more I experimented with them. You already know this if you watched the above-linked video, but I challenged myself to really test this palette out by wearing only eye shadows from the Marsala Palette for 5 days in a row. It looks like I managed to try over half of the 24 colors this week, including the Marsala Glitter and Marsala Matte.

Monday’s look wore well, although after about 4 hours I noticed I had a lot of fallout from the glitter shade. I liked how the marsala, brown and gold created a kind of desert sunset look.

Tuesday’s look was built around Toasted Nut, which is really warm. I would not normally think of doing such a bronze eye unless I was maybe doing something steampunky, but I really liked this! I wore this for probably around 6 hours before removing it and it held up well, even when I got a little sweaty from sotes in ballet class. Wednesday’s look was built around the olivey green shades Dusty Olive and Kelp, but I did it right before dance class and didn’t have time to photograph it. I got REALLY sweaty for an hour in DJ Dance Cardio and then did an hour of troupe practice. I had a little color loss in the center spot of my lid where I always lose color first, but my makeup still looked surprisingly good for how much I sweated.

Thursday’s look was a really quick and simple one using Castor Gray. Despite the name, this color is a green-brownish duochrome very similar to Kat Von D’s “On the Road.” I really like it!

I knew I needed to do one more look today before I wrote this post, and it happened to be one of those boring rainy days where you know you’re not going out again so you decide to play with your makeup. In addition to doing this ridiculously over the top look based around Marsala Matte, I also played a bit with contouring, tried a new lipstick, and put on my NARS Seduction blush, which is so dark but also really good with Marsala, in case you were wondering.

Over all, I’m pretty happy with this palette. I mean, I bought it with the idea that it would probably end up being crummy and I would return it. But ever color I used had good color pay-off and staying power. They do seem to not blend quite as well as I would like, and like I said, the Marsala Glitter shed all over my lower eye area. But given my past experiences with Sephora eye shadows, this was a vast improvement. My only complaints are that I wish there was maybe one or two more colors that would make good highlights (I kept wishing for a simple matte or satin ivory, which I do have in other palettes but I was ONLY using eye shadow from this palette this week to see how versatile it is), and the packaging…

The see-through box it comes in is really cool, and the rosy gold lid is gorgeous, but this shiny metallic stuff really shows finger prints and water spots like nobody’s business. The back is plain white with a diagram of all the colors. Because there are no labels on the inside, you have to keep flipping it over to figure out what color you’re using. The colors are also listed on the sleeve, but they’re shown as swatches with the Pantone color number and then a list of the names. Neither of these options is especially quick and easy to refer to if you’re trying to do some sort of video or tutorial and tell people which color to use.

And to be perfectly honest, the inside just looks CHEAP. The mirror on the inner lid is great. Otherwise, the tiny square pans are set into a really flimsy white plastic liner, and the pans don’t line up perfectly with the edges. It looks more like a drugstore palette than a high-end palette, and since it was around $40, that seems ridiculous to me. Also, because the pans are small and close together, it’s easy to get a little cross-contamination of colors going on.

Packaging complaints aside, I don’t think there’s really anything on the market that comes close to this particular mix of colors. As I mentioned in my video, there’s a lot to work with here if you’re doing a 90s grunge revival look, plus you’ve of course got the color of the year, and some neutrals, and GREEN. Because the palette is pretty compact for the amount of colors it contains, I’m pretty sure it will be coming with me when I go to Portland in March.

This palette is currently not listed on Sephora’s website and is sold out in many stores, so you’re going to have to really hunt if you want one of your own. Good luck!