Hi all! Today’s review is gonna be a little different from the usual. For a while now, I’ve been lusting after the Huda Beauty Desert Dusk palette, but I couldn’t justify that price tag. So when I saw that there was a full palette dupe by Bad Habit Beauty, I got really excited. I was a bit skeptical, however, due to the price tag, but I figured that since it was so cheap, it couldn’t hurt to check it out. Bad Habit Beauty is an LA based, cruelty free company that dupes several other popular eyeshadow palettes, such as ABH Subculture and UD Naked Heat. Their palettes can be found on Shop Hush, but I got mine on r/Makeup Exchange.
The Athena Palette by Bad Habit Beauty comes with 18 shades: 8 mattes, 7 shimmers, 2 duochrome toppers, and 1 pressed glitter shade. The ingredients are on their website. The packaging is really nice and quite sturdy; it definitely doesn’t feel super cheap. All of the swatches in my post are done with fingers and no primer. My skintone is about N10.
Now, I don’t have the Desert Dusk palette to compare it to, but I can talk about the quality of the Athena palette by itself. Honestly, I’m really impressed. The mattes have a bit of kickback and they can be a tad chalky, but they’re surprisingly pigmented! The shimmers are gorgeous; very metallic and vibrant. The toppers are sheer, but that’s to be expected. They look a bit similar to me as well, but I don’t mind that too much. The glitter shade is hard to apply without glitter adhesive, and I’m not 100% sure if it’s eyesafe. But I didn’t buy the palette for the glitter, so I’m not upset about that. If I had to compare this formula to another brand, I’d probably say that it’s closest to KVD. My biggest gripe about the palette is that there isn’t a dupe for the Huda shade Twilight in it, but I think I have another shadow in my collection that’s similar to Twilight (UD Tonic).
From top: Fierce. Triumph, Valour, Purity, Truth, Heroic, Gleam, Epic, Medusa, Justice, Lore, Power
From top: Divine, Cunning, Wisdom, Prize, Daring, Clever
Now, onto the dupes! As you can see, some of the shades are reminiscent of the ABH Modern Renaissance palette, but none of them are dead-on dupes. The closest dupes I could find in my collection are Divine and ColourPop White Rabbit, and Medusa and ColourPop Come and Get It.
From top: Truth, ABH Warm Taupe. Heroic, ABH Realgar. ABH Red Ochre, Power, ABH Venetian Red. Clever, ABH Cyprus Umber.
From top: ColourPop Static, Wisdom, Stila Pigalle. Epic, ColourPop Skydancer, UD Tonic. Divine, ColourPop White Rabbit.
From top: Valour, ColourPop Flutterbye. Medusa, ColourPop Come and Get It. Cunning, ABH Primavera, Fierce.
Overall, I’m really impressed with this palette, especially for the price point. It satisfies my desire for Desert Dusk without breaking the bank and some of the shades are really stunning. I particularly like Medusa, Divine, Wisdom, and Prize.
The Scenturion 