In 2020, I reviewed my first Nomad Cosmetics product: the Tokyo Harajuku Palette. It is one of the worst palettes I ever owned, which is a shame because the palette art was so cute and I tried so hard to make it work on me. It was bad enough to scare me away from purchasing anything else from the brand. However, in the last 2-3 years I’ve heard nothing but good things about the brand’s eyeshadows. Beauty Influencers and other makeup enthusiasts that I trust all seemed to like their palettes. Granted, not a single one of them ever reviewed the Tokyo palette and even the people who owned nearly all of them coincidentally were only missing that one. I always found that to be strange considering the Tokyo palette was extremely hyped up when it first came out and it was the reason I even discovered that Nomad Cosmetics existed.

Pastels are notoriously tricky to make look good on dark skin, so I was willing to accept that factor could account for the particularly bad experience. I had also heard their formula “got even better” over time. So, at some point I made up my mind to give them another try, especially since I felt bad that their only review on my blog was a negative one. The problem was that none of the color stories were of interest to me until the launches of the Haunted Europe and Royal Europe palettes. I also didn’t want to spend so much money on a palette when the potential was high that I might not like it. So, I finally caught Haunted Europe in stock during Black Friday/Cyber Week!

Before we get into the review, I just wanted to mention that this palette was delivered to me in Germany via GLS. This was my first and hopefully last time having to deal with that service. I was literally looking out the window as the delivery van passed my building and stopped somewhere else to deliver a package, then continue driving away. At the end of the work day, they updated tracking with a note that my package couldn’t be delivered because I was on vacation, instead of them just admitting they forgot to stop at my place.

I sent an email to GLS customer service. My package was delivered the next day, but they never responded to that email. I found plenty of complaints about GLS online, so this wasn’t an isolated incident. If you’re ordering something that uses them as delivery partners, just be forewarned!

Haunted Europe Palette

I was so relieved to discover that this palette is leaps and bounds better than the Tokyo palette!I’ve been able to create quite a few pretty eye looks. This has a nice mix of neutral and colorful shades, but the matte colors are a bit muted. The mattes are soft to the touch and powdery. They are all opaque and apply smoothly without being patchy, but they create a soft and hazy kind of look. The brand describes all their palettes as “intense,” including this one, which surprised me because these aren’t vibrant colors. I can’t think of a single indie brand whose eyeshadows are less saturated than these. For example, Spandau Citadel looks reddish brown in the pan, but it’s a medium pinky-orange on my eyes! Bloody Mary looks so promising in swatches, but it’s so much less impactful on my lids.

I’d like to clarify that I don’t think this is inherently a bad thing. It’s about preference and I think a palette like this is perfect for the neutral lover who wants to dive into color, but gets easily intimidated. This could also work for someone who likes to combine neutrals with colorful shades and without the overall look being too bold. Someone that likes smokier type of colors might enjoy this as well. It could also be the case that these look more intense on people with lighter skin or someone who uses different primers or bases. The ones I use with this palette are MAC Paint Pot and Lisa Eldridge’s Liquid Silk.

These mattes have a hazy effect that make them look well blended. It is easy to get a gradient look from a single shadow, but they aren’t easy to build up, nor to they layer well on top of each other. If I want real depth, I have to start with the darker shades first and work backwards from my usual order of eyeshadow application. Black Forest is the most pigmented shade in this palette and is the one that layers the best. Using that shade or the dark shimmers is the quickest way for me to deepen my looks with the least amount of effort. Grendel has the second strongest amount of pigment, but it’s not as easy to blend as Black Forest.

Houska Castle is a yellow-gold and Boogeyman is orange-gold. To keep them from feeling redundant, I think Nomad could have benefited from giving them different finishes instead of making them both smooth metallic shimmers.

The golds are fairly smooth, opaque, and vibrant. Highgate Cemetery and Merry Cemetery have bigger sparkle particles, but I can see my skin through them. I can fix that by wetting them so that they apply more compact on my lids. The Catacombs and Bloody Mary have more opacity and more obvious shimmer, but they’re not able to complete with brands like Pat Mcgrath or Natasha Denona with intensity, let alone other indie brands. Big Bad Wolf and Krampus stand out because of the multi-colored shimmer, but they aren’t duochromes and they look smoother than the previous four I mentioned. Hoia-Baciu Forest is the smoothest of the shimmers and what I prefer to use as the highlighting shade, especially in the inner corner. It pairs well with nearly all the eyeshadows in this palette. To me, the shimmers are just fine. They don’t crease on me though, so that’s a plus. I also get an acceptable amount of fallout throughout the day, as it adheres to my lids pretty well, but after that it’s impossible to remove all the shimmer particles with micellar water and a microfiber cloth alone.

Since the theme of Haunted Europe is supposed to be spooky and smokey, I assume this is why the colors are muted and that Nomad’s other palettes are more saturated. That could mean that I still have gaps in my knowledge regarding the brand’s eyeshadows, and therefore shouldn’t assume the others perform like this one.

Haunted Europe is good enough to have redeemed Nomad Cosmetics in my eyes, and I can see how people would like the quality, but this is still in the middle of the road among the palettes in my collection. There are too many aspects that aren’t a perfect fit for my makeup preferences, so this is probably where the journey ends between Nomad and myself. My curiosity has been sated.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!

-Lili ❤