The first time I became aware of Mally Beauty was when my cousin and I visited Ulta and we happen to wander by the shelf space that the brand occupied. My cousin told me that her maternal aunt used their products via QVC and that it worked well for her.

At that point, I felt too saturated with the availability of makeup brands that I couldn’t help but wonder what would gauge my interest in Mally Beauty. I was fairly predictable with the brands I gravitate towards and I just go straight to them when I’m shopping in-store.

A quick glance at the products on the shelf revealed nothing out of the ordinary to me: Mally was selling the same staple items that every other brand offered. There wasn’t really anything that stood out enough for me to want to try Mally.

Until something caught my eye:

I’ll admit: I have a weakness for eyeshadows. It’s tempered now, but the bulk of the BBA Makeup Vault consists of eyeshadows. In its simplest form, it’s colored powder, but dammit, there’s just something so whimsically attractive about applying them to your eyelids!

Also, I’m not fond of nude eyeshadow looks. I lean more towards colorful eyelids, which this palette wasn’t about…. almost.

The eyeshadows reminded me of Naked 1. I think I wrote about it in the first entry of WWR (and realized that I mentioned that palette twice in another series, which is probably a sign of how badly burned I was by it) by the time I noticed Nude Attitude. The only difference was the single, plum Claret. Other than that, it was a cheaper version of Naked 1 (clocking in at $35 compared to $54).

And that was the selling point that convinced me to get the palette. I was curious to see what the quality was like (because my mind is convinced that not every eyeshadow is created equal) and I thought it would be a good substitute to Naked 1.

The first time I used the palette, I made sure to use Claret because it was the one shade that I felt would drive me to use the palette. Subsequent uses resulted in eyeshadows not applying well from pan to eyelid (unless you use your finger, which I discovered just yesterday with Sand) or pigmentation was not as great as before.

Now, I could have used the scotch tape method and picked up any film of oil or dirt that may have ended up on the eyeshadow, but previous attempts of this have resulted in me picking up eyeshadow instead of the film of oil.

If there is one thing I don’t like about eyeshadow palettes, it’s that they don’t really tell you that some eyeshadows are best applied with fingers (too messy for me) when they include a shitty, double-ended eyeshadow.

I was hoping to recommend Mally’s Nude Attitude as a substitute to the discontinued (if it hasn’t been already) Naked 1, but I can’t. I still have to figure out if other shades have the same mandate as Sand, but I find that if an eyeshadow requires finger application, then it was mainly created to be used for pretty swatching. Unless there really is no way around it.