Birchbox is a $10 a month subscription that sends out a box with 5 beauty samples. Samples range from beauty to skincare, hair care, fragrances and the occasional snack or lifestyle item of which I have yet to receive. It's August 31st and I'm just now getting around to reviewing my Birchbox because according to the company's site they partnered with a new shipping company and shit met fan. Full disclosure: It's not my favorite subscription box but if you're into poorly matched lip shades and tiny samples of high end brands I'll just drop my referral link right
here.
I loved the box design itself this month. It reminded me so much of home and my heart did swell just a little bit seeing the sunset and palm trees. Up to this point I didn't really realize I was homesick.
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| Homesick |
I'm perfectly fine with my broken, bushy brows but I found myself falling into the Benefit Brow craze. Fortunately I scored the
Benefit Cosmetics Gimme Brow this month and I must say I do like it. I got the shade 5 deep and it's a really nice, cool toned match for my brows. I was a bit concerned that it would pull more red than ashy and look strangely warm and brown against my face but my fears were all for naught. I really
really need to go get my brows threaded but at least now I feel confident enough to get them done a bit thinner to fit my face shape and my ginormous glasses. Last time I got them done I was not assertive enough and ended up with a straight brow. While I do like the straight brow style on Cara D, mine looked nowhere near as glamorous in part due to my huge Maurice Moss sized glasses.
The
Dr. Jart+ Ceramidin Cream is the second Dr. Jart+ product I've received and so far they're not really scoring many points with me. This moisturizer is a fairly thick cream that is full of
ceramides, waxy fatty acids that help the skin maintain moisture and is also a component of vernix caeseosa (or baby cheese) on newborn babies. Cool beans, I can respect that. Except I have combination leaning toward oily skin so... no dice. Unfortunately this cream is just a bit too thick and tacky for my taste but I imagine it would work wonders on somebody with normal or dry skin. My biggest hangup is that it has that thicker tacky consistency after
application which drives me insane (yeah, I know it's probably more
mental than anything) so it's definitely an evening cream for me.
I received another perfume this month called Like This. It is a collaboration between the brand by Etat Libre d'Orange and Tilda Swinton, whom I've had a total girl crush on since
Constantine. This fragrance has a very deep, woodsy, musky, almost gourmand scent to it. I'm not sure if what I'm smelling is gourmand or floral though because the scent tends to evolve on me rapidly for the first 10 minutes then gradually over the next few hours. It definitely has a deep autumn scent to it (love!). The info card describes it as having notes of ginger, rose and pumpkin. Omg I just want to roll in a pile of leaves with every sniff.
I received
Glamglow Thirsty Mud H this month! Please excuse my excitement but teeny samples by this brand were part of the reason I had subscribed to Play! by Sephora so I was too excited to receive this tiny sample in my Birchbox instead of say, another dry shampoo. This is a wash-off mud mask that you apply to a damp face and leave on for roughly 20 minutes. It contains hylauronic acid, raw honey and ginger and smells
amazing. I applied this before bed and my skin felt calm and refreshed and moisturized without that tacky post-moisturizer feeling I get. It did take quite a while to wash off though so if that's a point of annoyance this mask might not be for you.
For the love of fuck I wish Birchbox would either take my skin tone into consideration or just stop sending me colored lip products entirely. I had been eyeballing Stila Stay All Day Liquid Lipsticks for a while on Hautelook while never biting the bullet and buying one. I got the shade Perla, a rosey "nude" shade. My husband worded it best: "I imagine a manatee floating dead, absorbing all that water. Turning sort of sickly purple/gray with hints of what used to be pink. That's what your lips look like in that color." Mind you, this is after I attempted to fix the color with a nude toned NYX lip liner in the shade Coffee. It smells the way fondant tastes. It applies a bit patchy on my lips and requires at least two coats. The downside to this is that after the second coat the lipstick begins to pearl (no pun intended) a bit on itself. It has a very offputting fragrance that smells almost exactly what cake fondant tastes like and has a bit of a sweet flavor to it as well. The formula is not transfer proof and it dries to leave a powdery finish on my lips. Overall this product was a resounding no with me but I wonder if I would have given it a higher rating if I were able to at least wear it for an extended period of time.
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| Stila Perla swatched in very shitty lighting |
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| Left: Stila Stay All Day in Perla alone, Right: Stila Stay All day on top of NYX lip pencil in coffee |
Too cool that I got two bonus foil packets this month. It feels like that has been happening more frequently, actually. This month's foil bonuses were Oribe
Shampoo and
Conditioner for Brilliance And Shine. I'll be honest, I didn't get a chance to use these yet because my box came in after weekly wash day. Please somebody explain to me though why the full size of the shampoo and conditioner are $49 and $52 respectively? Is it the brand we're supposed to be paying for or are these comprised of some form of infant tears and unicorn farts? I would also love to meet the people who are willing to shell out that kind of money for a shampoo and conditioner because I will take that opportunity to ask him or her to buy me a latte.
Am I happy? Yes and no. I could absolutely do without shipping delays
and poorly matching shades. I hate the liquid lipstick shade (as I often
do
because I highly doubt they take my profile's skin tone into
consideration) but I did get Glam Glow, Oribe foil packets, a questionably nice smelling perfume and Benefit Gimme Brow (score!). I accidentally ended up with two boxes this month. I
had sent an email around August 21st saying I never received my box and
my shipping hadn't updated since the original notice on August 9th so
they apologized to me and sent a replacement box. My original "lost" box
arrived 4 days ago while my replacement box just showed up in the mail
today. Oops. My one comfort is that I'm not the only person who has had
shipping issues and concerns. I've also been toeing the line about
whether or not I wanted to cancel but I believe this shipping issue is
the last straw. My subscription is up for renewal in December but I
think I feel more comfortable moving to a monthly plan from my current
annual subscription. Shipping delays and vendor changes make me pretty
nervous.
