Expensive primer, cheap primer.. or no primer?

So every time you probably see eyeshadow or how to apply it, it always seems that you MUST use a primer to capture the true colour and this primer 99.9% of the time seems to be Urbans Decay's primer potion. So i'm gong to look at no primer, Urban Decay's and an ELF primer to see if there is any real difference apart from the major difference in price.

So here are the two primers:

 

And the results:

I chose to use two different colours to see if colour also had any impact on what was pay off of a primer had.

So i picked MAC's Mulch :

 

and Bright Aqua from the Front Cover Palette:

 

So from left to right we have..

no primer, ELFs primer and finally Urban Decay:

 

 

So using the MAC eyeshadow there is obviously an increased pay off in colour especially when using the ELF primer( £1.50) where as Urban Decay (£11) increases the colour into a darker shade, it also does this to the blue eyeshadow.

The consistency of ELF is a lot thicker and also has a concealer like colour that doesn't fade to clear, i think this is a benefit as it gives a lid with no pigmentation for an even colour.

Urban Decay's is thinner and a lot lighter so as you can see from the pictures the colour seems to be different on different areas of the swatch.

However, the Urban Decay primer has slightly better holding power that the other two swatches.

Over all, i think i will always go back to ELF as this is always my choice before a night out just because i like the coverage it gives the lid and as i said it is only slightly better holding power by Urban Decay.

xxxxx