Needless to say, I was incredibly lucky with what I have received recently and I am grateful for every piece of it. At the bottom of the post, I'll make a list of all of the items mentioned and swatched throughout the post; however, here is a picture of all of them together. This post is just going to be the products that my Mum brought back from America.
Just to make things easier I'll be starting in the back row and the most left item; the lipstick. These first two products are from the American company called 'Flower', to my knowledge they are not available here in Australia. The lipstick I have is a 'Kiss Stick' in the shade 'Dahlia Dahling' and I absolutely love it. I have had a few bad run ins with red lipstick but, this one has changed my views on them - as this one has a nice finish, it doesn't feel heavy on the lips and the colour isn't harsh. With that said, the next Flower lip product I have, isn't crash hot. The 'Shine On Lip Gloss' I really could have done without, as it is really sticky and it smells really weird. I know that makeup does tend to come with a smell but, this is just unpleasant and is intoxicating; however, the coverage is really good and it's nicely pigmented. I have this lipgloss in the shade 'Zen Zinnia'.
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| The top swatch is 'Dahlia Dahling', the middle is 'Zen Zinnia' and the bottom is the gloss on top of the lipstick. |
The next products are the Sally Hansen 'Hard as Nails' polishes. I had only ever tried Sally Hansen stick on nail products, so it was really nice to get my hands on a set of polishes. My lovely Mother picked up 'Limestone' 620, which is a nice light green and 'Die- Hard Fan' and just the name of the polish is totally me - never minding the awesome sparkly orange colour. These polishes are an amazing cheap polish, as they both have really strong colours, they dry quickly and they only need two coats (if you needed to you could get away with the one coat). Although, I do prefer the orange over the green quite a lot, as the green almost has a plasticky finish to it.
I'm now going to skip back to some more Flower products but, this time they're cream eyeshadows. The Flower 'Color Play Créme Eyeshadows' are super pigmented and are really easy to apply, with or without brushes. I have two colours, one a dirty green in the shade 'Vine of the Times' which I've found is a good colour to use as a base on a smokey eye and a coraly/pink in the shade 'Mum's the Word' which I think is just the cutest name and it's a really nice colour that can be worn by itself.
The next few items are some eyeshadow pallets that are once again, by Flower. The first little pallet that I get was a shimmery purple pallet called 'Face the Grey'. (Please excuse my shotty excuse for a swatch, it's more than a tad blurry) Needless to say this little pallet wasn't too impressive, as the only colour that I somewhat liked was the darkest purple. The others are just a bit too light and shimmery.
The other pallet that I was given was a lighter, less shimmery one. The shade of this pallet is 'Blue Lagoons' and I love the name of it, for some reason I think it just sums the colours up perfectly. With these four colours, I had a tough time deciding which one was my favourite so I just decided that I would share my least favourite. My least favourite colour in this pallet was definitely the white, as it was far less pigmented, most of the shadow fell off as soon as I moved my arm and it just crumpled in my pallet. With that said, I love the other three colours that were included. The remaining colours are really pigmented and after brushing over them I discovered that the colour stuck pretty well.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with these flower eyeshadows as they were cheap and were okay quality; plus I love the packaging, the gold outline is super cute.
Last but not least, my Mum got me a 'Powder Trip' powder foundation in the shade PP6. My Mum did an amazing job in picking my shade, as I obviously wasn't there and I'm a pretty odd shade. Although that it calls it a 'foundation' I certainly wouldn't expect anything much in terms of coverage - especially with the brush that is included; however, if you needed to throw something on before you ran to the shops or you only used it as your backups backup, then it wouldn't be too bad.
With all things said and done, these products aren't too bad considering my Mum didn't pay more than USD$8.00 for any item. The packaging of everything is cute, they all work relatively okay, they all come with applicators and (my favourite part) they all come with a little paragraph on the label that tells you how to use it. It isn't like anything I've seen before, it's weird because it isn't a step by step, it's just a vague 'oh yeah, do this and maybe this and everything will be fine'. In all seriousness though, these products would be ideal for those just beginning to get into makeup or you just wanted to explore a new avenue.
Have you ventured outside your countries tried and tested and tried anything new to you lately?
xx
