*This is a scheduled post*
SWATCH: Rimmel "Smokey Brun 002"
As I described in my last post, this is definitely my "go to" palette. The texture isn't all that great.. I feel like I sort of have to dig in my brush to get enough color for some of the lighter shades (but hey, I'm NC37). The dark brown goes on easily enough, as does the lightest shade. I would describe the colors as (lightest to darkest): A light yellow/gold-ed out white (what I imagine MAC's Ricepaper to look like--though I don't have it for comparison), a beige-champagne, copper and a brownie (food) cool-toned brown. The darkest brown doesn't show up very well in this swatch.. scroll down a little bit to see a better color representation.
Here, I swatched them with my other brow-highlight shades:
Top L-->R: Wet and Wild "Fine Wink", MAC Shroom (go-to brow h-light color), MAC Phloof
Bottom L-->R: Rimmel eyeshadows
You can see that they're all really quite different.. though "Fine Wink" and "Phloof" are sort of similar, except for "Phloof" has more silver shimmer to it and is lighter.. and "Fine Wink" has more traces of pink. These colors really aren't that dark.. I didn't brighten the photo in Photoshop because I wanted to really see the color tone difference that you couldn't normally see if the colors were brighter and more washed-out.
L-->R: Rimmel vs MAC "Handwritten"
As evidenced, "Handwritten" is a much warmer (reddish?) shade of brown than Rimmel (which also contains some silver glitter). Texture-wise, I prefer MAC over Rimmel though if you're on a budget (like me), this palette will be a great addition and it's perfect for every day wear, though you could totally use more of the dark brown to smoke out your look for night time!
The darkest blue shade on both are pretty good dupes for each other. The Kate (K1) blue glitter is much more noticeable than the one in the MM (M).. Plus I think the Kate glitter is slightly larger. The Kate blue looks slightly more blackish while the MM looks slightly more grey-toned. I'm not sure why I swatched (K2) which is the second darkest shade in the palette.. but there you go, hahaha. I would loooooove a nail polish that looked like K1! 
KATE: There's definitely your blue spectrum in this one palette, and it makes it very easy to grab ONE palette and go, especially with you lucky gals who can use 5 colors in one look and have it ALL show (grumbles a bit about having monolids--not that there's ANYthing wrong with that!). The texture of these shadows is smooth but a little more powdery.. I keep feeling like I would have a bunch of fall out, but I don't. The fact that there's a cream shadow on the rightmost side kind of annoys me, since I don't tend to use cream shadows, but it's not enough to turn me away from using the palette. All of the shadows have some glitter in them.
MM: This has a nice variety of colors that I wouldn't normally think to put together. Fuzkittie made a great "vintage" look using just this palette--definitely one of the main reasons why I bough it in the first place. All of the shadows are shimmery and have this amazing buttery-soft texture to them. The issue I have is whenever I use MM palettes, they seem to fade like crazy on me! Maybe I just need to use a better base or I have super oily lids, who knows; I haven't heard many complaints about that from other people.
OVERALL: Even though I think the Kate palette is slightly more pigmented than the MM one, I find myself reaching for the MM palette more often.. mostly because of the color variety, and the fact that I don't tend to do all-blue EOTD's. I find myself hard-pressed whenever I think about putting EITHER of them up on blogsale though..
