Dupe alert!

UPDATE: For my comprehensive list of Urban Decay Naked Palette Dupes, please click here. I am not claiming that this e.l.f. palette is a dupe for the Naked Palette--I'm just showing you that a few colors in each palette are similar. Thanks!

Urban Decay Naked Palette

(retail: $50)

e.l.f. Essential Beauty School Eyeshadow Compact in Neutral  

(retail: $3)

So remember the e.l.f. Essential Beauty School Eyeshadow Compact in Neutral that I reviewed a few days ago? After I posted my review, reader iknowhowtolove2 said she thought that the matte brown shadow in the e.l.f. palette reminded her of Urban Decay Buck. I totally agreed with her comment, so I whipped out my Urban Decay Naked Palette to take a look. Keep reading to see what happened when I compared the two, and what else I discovered...

The matte brown shade in the e.l.f. palette vs. Urban Decay Buck:

As you can see, not a dupe. But to tell you the truth, I find the matte brown in the e.l.f. palette to be a bit creamier and easier to work with than Buck. When I use it as a crease shade, it seems a bit more pigmented and easier to blend than Buck, so if you like matte chocolate browns, you might want to pick up the e.l.f. palette for $3 even if you're only going to use that one particular shade. I think it's worth it (but then again, I love matte brown shadows!).

But when I was looking at these two palettes side by side, I discovered some other things....

The light beige shade in the e.l.f. palette vs. Urban Decay Virgin:

I LOVE using UD Virgin as a soft highlight shade, and also for when I go overboard with darker colors and want to tone them down. On its own, Virgin isn't crazy-pigmented, but I LIKE it that way because whites/creams with a lot of pigment look too harsh on me. So anyway, I noticed that the fourth shade in the e.l.f. palette looked surprisingly similar to UD Virgin in the pan, and when I swatched them on BARE skin, they were so close I could barely tell them apart:

Clearly, when swatched over primer, you can really see the differences in these two shades. The peachy-pink-champagne tone in Virgin comes out more over primer, but when applied to bare skin, these two shadows are so close I can wear one shade on one eye and the other on my other eye and I literally cannot tell them apart.

The only note of caution I have about the e.l.f. shadow is the same thing I mentioned in my original review. The texture of this shadow is very soft, powdery and crumbly, so try to "tap" or "dab" your brush on the shadow when you pick up color, as opposed to "brushing" your brush against the surface of the shadow. This can help minimize the crumbling a little bit.

The medium brown sparkly shade in the e.l.f. palette vs. Urban Decay Sidecar:

Plain and simple, BOTH of these shades are glitterbombs. You'll have loose glitter flying everywhere whether you use the e.l.f. or Urban Decay shadow. My camera doesn't do a great job of showing fine glitter, but trust me, it's there, and it was all over my arms for hours after I swatched these two colors:

This isn't a perfect dupe (especially over primer) but I think these two shadows are in the same vein. When swatched over primer though, the e.l.f. shadow is so shimmery it actually takes on a foil-like quality. Even more so than Sidecar. 

Here's a blurry photo that shows their similarities a bit more:

I still hold to my original statements about the shadows in the e.l.f. palette (some are so soft and crumbly they're unusable to me) but the pigmentation is there on all of the colors in this palette, and for $3, it doesn't hurt that it contains a  few UD dupes to boot!

To see swatches of the other shades in the e.l.f. palette, click here.

You can find the e.l.f. Essential Beauty School Eyeshadow Compact in Neutral at select Target locations, Big Lots are online here. NOTE: if you look for this palette at Target or Big Lots, it goes by the name "e.l.f. Eyeshadow Collection Neutral Eyeshadow Compact". Click here to see the packaging so that you'll know what to look for.