Hard Candy recently released five new ten pan eyeshadow palettes (The Top Ten Trendsetters Eyeshadow Palettes) and the super cute packaging caught me in it’s web of cuteness, thus, I have four of the five palettes to swatch for you today! Yay!

A note about my swatches: I felt that the majority of these shades swatched with relatively good color payoff (with a few obvious exceptions) without primer.  The shades that were most lacking were the matte shades and primer did not seem to improve the color payoff as much as one would expect.  It did however make those swatches stick like glue! Some of the deeper or more blue shades actually required serious scrubbing and multiple washes before the swatch completely disappeared.

I’ve only used a couple of the shades in these palettes so far in an actual look, so I can’t give a comprehensive review, just my first impressions. Some of the matte shades are fairly chalky and some of the super glittery shades are…well…glittery. But chunks of glitter. What I’m trying to say is they weren’t all that smooth BUT…GLITTER and who doesn’t need a little more glitter in their lives? The metallic and shimmer shades were by far the nicest in the swatches.

I did wear a few of the shades from the matte neutral palette and they were ok to work with.  They weren’t anything to write home about but they were definitely useable, so kind of middle of the road? The biggest problem I found in that palette is that most of the shades are fairly similar to one another which made it harder to get a defined look.  I lined my lower lash line with one of the bright blue shades in the Aphrodisiac palette and it took a little building up but was really pretty.  It did fade significantly throughout the day. Lastly, I used one of the super glitter shades just as a top coat and was actually pleasantly surprised, I didn’t end up with glitter everywhere and the glitter basically stayed where I initially placed it all day. So that’s nice!

Hard Candy is sold exclusively at Walmart and each palette was $6.00 which is an exceptionally good price even for drugstore eyeshadows. While these were not the best eyeshadows I’ve ever swatched or applied, they absolutely weren’t the worst, not even close.  And for such a fantastic price and a really good selection of shades and finishes, I’m actually really impressed!

I may come back and do a full review on these later after playing around with them, a bit more, but so far, my first impression of these is pretty darn good!