Ooh look, someone’s paid a visit to Knock-Off Nigel! Love them or hate them, dupes always get a lot of attention in both the beauty and fashion industries. Let’s be honest, apart from those of us with money falling out of our booties, there’s always a slight appeal to rip-0ffs – even if it’s just out of curiosity to see how well the dupe matches up to the real deal.

I recently spied this 14-piece Real Technique lookalike set of brushes on another blog  and aftering finding out it was in the sale on AliExpress for around £8 I couldn’t really resist ordering it. I already own a few Real Techniques ‘inspired'(ahem)  brushes that I bought last September (that you can see in this post if you so wish) and with my buffing brush finally starting to shed a little, I realised I could do with a replacement. My brush collection is pretty poor in general too, so I figured adding to my toolkit wasn’t a bad idea. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally start being bothered to wear eyeshadow if I have more ways to poke myself in the eye…

Firstly I’ll point out there’s not even a buffing  brush in this set, but obviously that’s my own fault for being a tit and not even bothering to check. However, what the set does include is pretty impressive. There’s a variety of eyeshadow and eyeliner brushes, a couple of flat brushes for liquid foundations or concealers, and a range of powder brushes with different varieties of angles for all your pressing and contouring needs.

As a collection, they obviously look great (though yes, the different coloured bases do annoy me), but to be honest the quality varies a LOT amongst the set. Some of the bristles, particularly on the eyeshadow brushes, are really stiff. This means they aren’t the best if you want to blend, or actually, y’know, keep your eyes not-stabbed. However, a few of the other brushes are really good. My two faves are the large face brush, which I use for powder, and the slightly conical powder brush, which I use for angling bronzer underneath my cheekbones. To show how good the face brush is, here it is next to the genuine Real Techniques face brush:

The fakey is slightly smaller than the real thing, and the bristles are a bit less dense. But other than that, these brushes are practically identical, feeling equally soft and luxurious. Of course only time will really tell how the dupe matches up in terms of shedding and keeping its softness, but for now I’m really impressed with this one and a few others from the collection.

It’s quite unusual for us to give such a lukewarm review of products as we tend to either love things or want to throw them into the fiery pits of hell, but my feelings towards this set are genuinely a bit meeeeeh. Overall I’d say it’s still decent value for money, even if only for the face brushes (I mean, £8, c’mon). However, with half of the brushes being pretty useless for me personally, I’d probably still rather just pick up a few brushes of choice separately via eBay.

Have any of you tried RT dupes? What do you think?