The Naked Palette: Twelve Shades of Neutral

An eyeshadow palette is an old idea: several colours in one case, chosen to be worn together. Urban Decay’s Naked, which went on sale in 2010, made the idea a bestseller. It held twelve shades on a nude theme, and when the company withdrew it eight years later it said that more than thirty million had been sold around the world.^[1]

The figures are the company’s. What they describe — one product carrying a brand, its sale and, finally, its own retirement as an event — is the decade’s commerce in miniature.

The palette did not begin in 2010. In 1967 Gala of London sold Eye Shaping Kits, four cake colours and a brush packaged like a paint box, and Pick-and-Paint palettes for contouring the eyes, which came with two brushes and a space for mixing colour.^[2] Gala’s instructions describe a method any later tutorial would recognise: colour the lid from the lashes to the brow, use a darker tone of the same shade for the contour line, and a darker one again for the eye line.^[2]

Neutrals in a case were not new either. Gala’s Down-to-Earth Basic Kit held white, grey and brown shadows with a black cake liner, beside a Sophisticated Kit with silver and gold; the Pick-and-Paint palettes came in blue and mauve, or in green and aqua.^[2] What Naked offered was the neutral range alone, graded across twelve shades in a single case.^[3]

The sales the company later claimed for it were very large: more than thirty million palettes across the world in eight years, one bought every six seconds at its height, and more than a billion dollars for the brand.^[4] The trade press called it a catalyst for the eyeshadow market that followed.^[4]

The wider market bore out the direction, if not the figures. In 2017, the market-research firm NPD reported, the growth of American prestige makeup was driven by foundation and eye shadow, together with face products such as bronzers, highlighters and glow products.^[5] Naked itself became a line rather than a single product: sister palettes such as Naked Heat and Naked Ultimate Basics stayed on sale after the original had gone.^[4]

Urban Decay was created in 1996 and based in Newport Beach, California. By 2012 it was sold not at department-store counters but in what L’Oréal called the assisted self-service channel — Ulta and Sephora among others — and it was strong online, through its own website and Sephora’s. In the year to June 2012 its net sales were $130 million.^[6]

That November L’Oréal agreed to buy it from the private equity firm Castanea Partners. The price was not disclosed; the Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, put it between $300 million and $400 million.^[6] The report of the deal named the Naked Palette among the brand’s star products in the eye category.^[6] A company built on the eye had become worth buying for it.

The sale came months after a reversal. Earlier in 2012 Urban Decay had announced that it would pull out of the Chinese market because of the country’s animal-testing policies.^[7] Animal testing was then mandatory for cosmetics registered in China. When the rule was relaxed, from 30 June 2014, the change covered only ordinary cosmetics made in China; imported cosmetics still had to be tested.^[8]

For a company that a news agency described as cruelty-free,^[9] that left the Chinese market closed on the only terms it was offered. Europe, meanwhile, was about to close its own market to cosmetics tested on animals, from the other side.

In August 2018 Urban Decay withdrew the original palette and marked the occasion with a mock funeral in Newport Beach, filmed for YouTube and attended by the brand’s ambassador Nicole Richie and by beauty influencers. The company gave no reason for the withdrawal, and offered shoppers a last chance to buy the palette at a reduced $27.^[11]

The cast of the funeral video said as much about the decade as the palette did. Beside a fashion designer stood beauty bloggers and brand founders,^[12] and fans said their goodbyes on social media. The people who sold makeup now included the people who demonstrated it.

Every large number in this story comes from Urban Decay, relayed by the trade press: the thirty million palettes, the one every six seconds and the billion dollars.^[13] None has been independently audited in any source used here, and those sources do not give the palette’s launch month, its original price or the names of its twelve shades.

Nor do they say why it sold. It is tempting to credit the tutorials of the same years, in which a palette of graded neutrals is easy to demonstrate; no source here measures that, and this account does not claim it. The price L’Oréal paid for the company was never disclosed, and the figure usually given is a newspaper’s report of an unnamed source.^[14]