Ulta Contour Kit Review

I’ve been wanting to branch out into another contour palette for a while (I started with this one). While I thought about jumping right in and purchasing the Anastasia Contour Kit, I thought twice about dropping $40 and decided to evaluate some of the cheaper options first.  I instead grabbed the Ulta Contour Kit ($18.99) and the NYX Highlight & Contour Pro Palette ($24.99).  You can usually score these palettes on sale every so often at Ulta–I actually got the NYX for 40% off and used an Ulta coupon on it to boot!  Today, though, I’m just reviewing my experiences with the Ulta Contour Palette.

The palette has 6 shades–2 highlighters and 4 bronzers.  It is in a relatively thin cardboard compact that’s about the size of a paperback book. It comes with a little card that slides out of the back cover that shows you what shades to use and where to use them for both light and medium skin tones.

Things that initially attracted me to the Ulta Contour Palette included the price point, the size of the pans, and that banana-y color of highlighter.  Immediate drawbacks were that I thought the bronzers to the left would be entirely way too dark for my skintone (light/fair) and that the pans were not removeable.

After trying the palette, however, I was completely unimpressed.  The formula lacks the pigmentation to truly show up on your skin (or at least on mine).  You can see in my picture below that I have a more natural look going on.  This is because the shades just do not show up on my skin!  The only two shades I was truly able to get any traction out of were the two darkest bronzer shades, and even then, they quickly melted off of my face:(  I even tried to swatch these colors on my arm for you, but they just wouldn’t show up.  I couldn’t tell where I had already swatched colors at.