Latest Subscriptions

There are a few subscription boxes I have received that I haven’t really written about for one reason or another.

 

1. Orange Glad Sweet Box– This was “meh” for me. All of the products arrived in excellent shape, and everything was just fine. However, I really expected to be wowed. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but maybe I’m a better baker than I thought I was, because I feel like I could make all of the items I got in this box, and they might even taste better. I will say that Orange Glad’s customer service is very good. They were super nice to me. Some of the brownies that were supposed to come in my box were not in there. I e-mailed to ask about it, and they sent me two fresh ones right away. I definitely recommend Orange Glad for gift-giving. It’d be a nice thing for someone to get an unexpected box of brownies, cookies, and other sweets as a present!

2. Birchbox – Again, “meh.” I got the Cynthia Rowley silver eyeliner, and it’s so soft that it falls apart when  you use it! I also got a blue nail polish (eh…), and a packet of samples by Nyakio. They all smelled so awful to me. Two of the products smell very medicinal, an the third just smelled… bad. The only thing I liked was the shampoo by Keims. It made my hair very soft. It smells a little funky, but not too bad.

3. Popsugar – Ugh. I ordered the last Popsugar box with the half-off coupon. You would think I’d be treated like any other customer, but no. It took so long for my package to even ship, let alone arrive at my house! Seriously. Other people on the makeup/subscription forum I go on got their boxes weeks before I did. People who used the half-off coupon definitely got the last of the shipments. Luckily everything in mine was fine/not broken. It was a really good deal, and I love all of the products (especially the Too Faced Natural Eyes Palette), but I felt like Customer Service didn’t give a fig about those who used the coupon.

4. Julep – I am free of the Julep beast! (Kidding!) Seriously, though, I’ve been disappointed in Julep lately. I’ve skipped so many boxes. The formulations have gone downhill from my perspective. Every month it’s creme colors out the wazoo. I’ve seen them do a mint creme polish so many times, just with tiny variations in the shade of green. I wish they would do some innovative and interesting polish finishes, but I don’t see it happening, so I totally cancelled.

5. Rainbow Honey – In place of Julep, I’ve signed up for the Rainbow Honey mystery bag subscription! I’ve loved every one of these that I’ve received so far, so I went ahead and signed up to get one every month.

Benefit Feelin’ Dandy Kit

The Benefit Feelin’ Dandy Lip & Cheek Kit is the latest makeup thing I’ve bought. I love it!

 

The box.

 

The box everything comes in is really cute, and you can take out all of the makeup and use the box to store other little items, if you want.

 

The kit comes with some great products:

• Benefit Posetint- This is one of my favorite lip tint/stains. It’s a nice light pink color.
• Benefit Dandelion- This blush is very, very light, but I like it. It has a shimmery quality to it.
• Benefit High Beam- Highlighters can go kind of weird on me, but this one is great. It has a very, very light pink tint to it and looks sort of pearlized.
• Benefit Ultra Plush Dandelion- This one is the lip gloss. It looks a lot darker/more brown both online and in person in the tube. However, when you put it on, it’s a very sheer, light pink. Very nice!

All in all, I really liked this kit. I thought it was a good deal for the price ($28). I also think it’d make a great gift for friends who love makeup, especially since the box is reusable and looks cute.

AROAMAS Solid Perfume

I got my AROAMAS order much earlier than I anticipated, since it came all the way from Australia. It took about seven days to get to me in the U.S.

 

Aromas samples.

 

I really like how the samples arrived. Each was in their own individual resealable bag with the fragrance name clearly marked on the back. There’s enough of each sample to get a couple of uses out of them.

 

Thoughts on some of the scents:

Parisian: This is very sweet, but not sickly sweet. It’s nice.

Dream: This turned more musky on my skin than I was expecting. I still like it, but it was not what I was expecting.

My favorites: One Way Ticket and Free Spirit. Both are really light, but not so light that you can smell them. One Way Ticket is bright and clean smelling to me. Free Spirit is very fruity, but it has nice musk undertones so that the fruit scents don’t overpower the whole fragrance.

My least favorite: Bondi Beach. The website described this as smelling like the beach and sunscreen, and it certainly does. It’s really just not for me.

 

All in all, I really liked all of my samples. I think I’ll probably order full sizes of One Way Ticket, Free Spirit, and maybe one more!

Subscription Overload

Oh dear. I think I may have gone overboard with this stuff. I signed up for several new boxes recently.

• Birchbox – I’ve been burned by them before, but their point system seems worth trying them out again. I took a peek at my box onl(it just shipped) and I have seven items. Hopefully that means I get to get points for reviewing all seven items! That’d be awesome.
• SocialBliss Style Box – Last month’s box looked SO good to me (see Rambling of a Suburban Mom’s post about it right here.) Each SocialBliss box seems to contain one purse/clutch, a piece of jewelry, a makeup item, and some kind of accessory, at the very least. It’s $47.90 (that includes the shipping price), so I’m a little scared. That’s big chunk of money to spend on what is basically surprise. Their Facebook page is saying that this month’s box will have over $200 worth of items in it! Also, I had to contact their customer service after I placed my order, and they got back to me very quickly, were friendly, and answered all of my questions. One of my pet peeves with subscription boxes (and in general) is poor customer service or rude customer service representatives.
• SquareHue – Honestly, I don’t need any more nail polish at all, but I couldn’t pass this up. SquareHue had a coupon (“BOGO”) where if you purchase a subscription, they’ll also send you a previous collection for free. I had to do it! Or at least I keep telling myself that.

On the plus side, my Orange Glad Dessert Box will be here Saturday. Perfect timing for my diet “cheat day.” I figure I’ll keep the things that I love, and then give the rest of it to my parents. That way it won’t just be sitting around for me to eat, and they get to enjoy a subscription of mine for once. Although not a subscription box, just a regular order, my Fortune Cookie Soap order will also be here Saturday. I didn’t order much, just a sugar scrub and a body lotion, since it’s almost skirt wearing season and my legs look terrible. I’ve never used their sugar scrub, so I’ll see how that goes!

 

This feels like so much stuff, but I’ve had to cut back financially in a lot of ways lately, and this is the first time in a while that I’ve genuinely been able to spend some money on things like this. I hate that I feel like I need to explain myself about that, but I don’t want to seem like some kind of hoarder. LoL

 

 

Rainbow Honey Mystery Bag April 2014

I just got my Rainbow Honey mystery bag for this month. It’s amazing! Rainbow Honey is, by far, my favorite nail polish company ever. They’ve been doing mystery bags for a while now, but they just started a monthly subscription service for them. You can still buy the mystery bags outright without a subscription, or you can get one for free if you spend more than $65 at Rainbow Honey. The bags are $10 plus shipping. The subscription comes in two choices: mini, for $10, or large, for $25. The difference between the two is that the mini subscription comes with mini-sized polishes, and the large has their regular-sized polishes and ships for free.

 

What’s in the bag? I will say from here on out, there are spoilers. If you don’t want to know what’s in the bag, look away! (I pasted my own post from MakeupTalk here, if this looks familiar.)

 

April’s polishes.

 

– Cameo 18 polish- It’s a bubblegum pink cream polish. Very nice!
– Stellar Travel polish- Super glitter time! The majority of the glitter is a fine pink, but then it has pretty much every other color in there, too. And tiny little hot pink stars! It’s so cute.
– All Your Base – Base coat. LoL at the name. (“All your base [coat] are belong to us” now. I’m sure everyone will make that joke.) I love their top coat, so I hope I love their base coat just as much.
– Rose Nectar Rollerball- Perfume sample. I don’t know how I feel about the scent, but I’m not a big rose person. It’s kind of a sweet smell, and the rose scent in there is also a sweeter rose than I’m used to smelling.
– Sparkling Agave Pigment- This is loose pigment in a jar. It came with two foam eyeshadow applicators. They say these are “cosmetic pigments,” so I guess you can use them as eyeshadow? It’s a light green-blue color with a sparkling glitter element, just like their Sparkling Agave polish.
– Rose Nectar Lip Balm- This is the same scent as the rollerball perfume. It feels so nice on. The majority of the ingredients are natural oils (avocado, coconut, etc.).
– Plus ten nail art studs! Mine are little gold square studs.

Conclusion: All of this for $10 (plus shipping)?! That’s right. I think it’s completely worth the money. I love the polishes, and I can’t wait to try them out with the base coat.

New Perfume

I just found out about a solid perfume called AROMAS. I’m really excited.

They’re solid perfume that comes in stick form, like chapstick. I’ve used solid perfume before, but its always come in little pots that you have to dip your finger in. This way, you just unroll the perfume and apply it. Neat! I wasn’t sure which scent to choose, but they have sampler packs, so I got the biggest one they have. It was a little less than $13 including shipping (all the way from Australia!), and comes with seven samples. You get to choose which ones you’d like, and apparently they’re good for many uses, so you can get a feel for how the scents work for you. I’m looking forward to smelling Almaty Apple. The website says that people find that it smells like DKNY’s “Be Delicious,” which I do like. It’d be nice to have a much cheaper alternative to that!

 

Edit to add: I just ordered this a few hours ago, and they already sent me a “your order has shipped” email. Awesome!

Impatience!

Whenever I order a new something, I get so impatient about it. I check my tracking information way too many times. Does anyone else do this? It drives me crazy, but I keep doing it!

 

I have more packages coming soon(ish) than I have in a while.

• Sephora sale order
• Popsugar – I hope this one ships soon. I’ve seen that people who ordered before the sale code (now expired) already had theirs shipped.
• Orange Glad Sweet Box – I’ve never received this subscription before, but I’ve heard great things about it. Their website says it’s supposed to ship out the second week of the month, so that should be soon! There was a coupon a while back, so I ordered myself a gift subscription. (And I may have chosen the “double the treats” option…)

 

I got two of those Diamond Candle candles (link), and they arrived yesterday. These are the worst for an impatient person! They’re candles that have a ring inside. You light the candle, wait for it to melt to the point that the little ring package is showing, blow it out and wait for it to cool a bit, then grab the package with a pair of tweezers. The ring is in a plastic bag that’s wrapped in foil, so no wax gets into the cracks of the jewelry. It takes quite a long time for the candle to melt down to where the ring is. Most of it is costume jewelry, but their whole gimmick is that you could potentially find a real diamond ring in your candle. I bought them mostly for the fun of it, and because I love candles.

The ring I got from the first candle is cute, at least. I don’t love the heart on it (you can sort of see it on the right side of the photo), but the heart is hard to see when I’m wearing it. The only bad thing about this candle was the smell! I picked Watermelon Wedge and Sunwashed. Watermelon Wedge smells like watermelon bubblegum. I’m not a fan of overly sweet smells, and this one is super sweet. The Sunwashed scent smells way better to me. It has a “clean laundry” smell. I haven’t burned that one yet, but I’m excited to see what’s in it.

Watermelon candle ring.

Popsugar Sale!

*This post has referral links.

Edit: Apparently the code no longer works. That was quick. It was only up for two days total, I believe. Hope you all got a box if you wanted one!

 

Attention all subscription box lovers!

Popsugar Must Have Box has a sale code right now for April’s box. The code is: CHANNEL7. This gets you 50% off the regular price! (Also, fair warning, the Popsugar website has a sort of irritating auto-play video!) The box includes free shipping. After this month, it does auto-bill you each month at the regular price, so if you sign up and don’t want another month, make sure to cancel before next month.

 

There are spoilers for April’s box on the web, compiled by the ever-so-nice Ramblings of a Suburban Mom, in picture format. I don’t want to hotlink her image, so see her post here.

The box is supposed to contain around $130 worth of products, including (SPOILER alert) a fantastic Too Faced eyeshadow palette, among other things! That alone made me sign up as fast as I could. I’m not sure how long this box will be in stock, since it seems like a good one!

 

My referral link is http://popsu.gr/rBcT, if you’re interested. (Of course, you are certainly not obligated to go through my referral link if you don’t want!)

New (To Me) Face and Eye Makeup

The last time Sephora had a coupon, I went a little crazy with my leftover gift cards and I got some pretty great stuff!

Tarte Be MATTEnificent Amazonian Colored Clay Matte Eye & Cheek Palette: Long name! I love this palette. It has six matte eyeshadows, two eyeliners (in powder form), and a neutral pink blush, all in a really nice case. The colors are all fairly neutral, minus the dark purple shade. They’re all really blendable and each color goes well with all of the rest in the set. The brush that comes in the palette works fine for the eyeshadows, but it’s a little tricky to use with the eyeliners. Other than that, I love this set! Unfortunately, it seems sold out a lot of places. Sephora doesn’t have it. I swear I just saw it at Ulta, but now it’s not showing up on their site, either.
Would I recommend this? Absolutely!

 

Eyeko Eye Do Liquid Liner: I heard great things about this eyeliner all over the internet. I’m always looking for the perfect black liquid liner, so I got this. It’s a dark, rich black color and the liner tip is pretty thin. However, the application is horrible on me. When I put it on, if I go over the line I just drew, it sort of re-picks up the liner and leaves me with a blank, smudgy spot. Not good. I tried it both with an eye primer and without, and it did the same thing. I’m not sure if it was just that my eyelid chemistry and this liner didn’t match, or if that’s the formulation of the product.
Would I recommend this? No.

 

Tarte Amazonian Clay 12-Hour Blush: Tarte is becoming one of my favorite brands. I love, love, love this blush, and I am not a huge blush person. (I put it on, but it’s not something I must collect.) This comes in a ton of different shades. It goes on sheer, yet there is a lot of pigment in it, and it’s very buildable. It looks very natural, which I prefer most of the time.
Would I recommend this? Yes!

 

So I got two good products, and one dud (that I thankfully did not pay full price for). Not bad! At least I know that Eyeko brand doesn’t go well with my skin. From now on I’ll be keeping my eye out for new Tarte eyeshadow palettes!

 

Sephora is having a sale coupon for VIBs starting today. Well, I went to purchase what was in my cart and the $10 Tarte set I tried to buy was suddenly out of stock! I can’t help but wonder if it was really out of stock, or if Sephora is going to “out of stock” some of the smaller gift sets in hopes that people spend more. I bought the Tocca Beauty Florence Travel Duo instead, (I’ve heard nice things about it) so I’ll review that on here when it arrives.