ABH Subculture Swatches + First Impressions

I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited in my life than when this arrived on my doorstep this morning – literally felt like a child on Christmas. I proper fell in love with this like the day before it was gonna come out and after frantic refreshing and stressed sweating on a packed train waiting for my order confirmation for 40 minutes, I got it straight away. I’d never jumped on a release so fast and so far I’m glad I did! Keep reading to see my first look with the palette, my first impressions and of course (the thing everyone wants to see)… swatches!

I just wanna talk about the packaging real quick because it’s gotta be done. It’s suede just like the Modern Renaissance palette (which I love), but it’s like its midnight blue counterpart, and I love the pop of yellow in the lettering as it really adds something to the minimalistic packaging.

I’ve popped in a closer photo of the palette so you can really get a sense of the colours and the variety, which let me tell you: variety is this palette’s strongest suit. It has three shimmers, which is a decent amount, and then the rest are mattes. While I do love a good shimmer shade I did need more mattes in my life so am happy about that. What I love about this palette is that you’ve got your sort of grungy earthy tones and then BAM, pops of pastel.

Soooo here are the swatches! And I’ve gotta say that the pigmentation had me dying. They all swatched beautifully for the majority (a couple of them were a bit eh but we’ll get to them in a minute when I do a row by row round up). One thing about them is that there’s quite a lot of fallout, but they feel beautiful and you can fix it easily by tapping off/blowing your brush to get rid of excess.

So here are my swatches for row one (the first shade of 2 made it on there as well but hey ho) top to bottom: Cube, Dawn, Destiny, Adorn, All Star, Mercury and Axis. Now let’s get the disappointing shade out of the way – Cube just didn’t do it for me. In the pan it’s this really exciting looking white with a holographic pink shift, but when you swatch it it’s not really pigmented at all which sucks. Will have to try and wet it and things but it’s not the best. Dawn is a gorgeous butterscotch crease shade – I tried it out in my look and it worked like a charm. Destiny is like a khaki green colour that I’m really excited to test out.

Then we have Adorn, which is the most impressively pigmented shimmer I’ve ever seen/ tried. You don’t need to wet this shade but I bet if you did you might have to wear sunglasses because it’s blinding enough already! All Star is one of my favourite shades from the palette (even if the name makes me think of Shrek), as it’s a grungy red-toned purple and it’s pretty unique. Mercury is a nice ashy brown that’s perfect for darkening your outer corners in a smoky eye. Axis is a teal blue colour that sort of matches the outside of the palette – am super excited to play with it. It’s quite a powdery shade but it swatches nicely so we’ll have to see.  Then we have Roxy creeping in from the second row which I absolutely love. It’s a gorgeous pastel salmony colour and I can’t wait to do more looks with it.

In the second row we have (top to bottom): Roxy, Electric, Fudge, New Wave, Untamed, Edge and Rowdy. I’ve already talked about Roxy so we’ll just move straight onto Electric, which swatched kind of disappointingly. I tried it on my inner corners and it wasn’t really as intense as I’d like it with a brush at first, but it’s actually pretty buildable, and if you wet it it’s stunning. It’s a shimmery green shade and it’s really unique and interesting. Fudge is a nice chocolatey brown shade that’s a bit warm toned but still on the grungy side.

Then we have New Wave, which is a super pigmented bright orange – cannot wait to see how that looks with Roxy. Untamed looks quite similar to Axis in the picture but it’s actually more of a really dark green. Then there’s Edge, which is the beautiful mustard yellow I never knew I wanted. Then finally there’s Rowdy, which is a brown so dark it’s basically black (it swatches really well it just looks a bit textured here bc I had to go into the bit under my elbow).

So here’s the look I created the first time I used the palette! (Sorry for my weird af brow). I’m so shook by it like I can’t believe it worked so well. From what I can remember I started with Dawn in the crease, then darkened the outer corners with Mercury and added a bit of New Wave to the crease. I then put All Star all over the lid and put Roxy in the crease and blended slightly above so it diffused nicely. I then went in with Adorn in the centre of the lid (and took a minute to be blown away with how pigmented it was without even wetting it), and then I blended some of Roxy either side of it, before running the colours along my lower lash line and putting Electric in the waterline and in my inner corners (love it).

Overall, my first impressions of this palette are that I absolutely love it and I’ve had no real problems with it so far. With the exception of Cube, all of the shades are super pigmented. When I did my first look I tried to use as many of the colours as possible and the ones I did use blended out super well. I’m really in awe of this palette and I love the names and the overall concept. I also think that’s gonna be amazing to mix and match between Modern Renaissance and this to create looks as there are a lot of great potential colour combinations, and I think this palette is just so well thought out in that respect. I’ll be back with a full review when I’ve had more time to test it out and get a bit creative, but for now I can say that Modern Renaissance’s grungy sister sure packs a punch! (You can also check out my review of Modern Renaissance here if you’d like).