Beauty Pie

Hello strangers! I've been gone for a good while but hopefully at least some people will see this!

I've been trying out Beauty Pie, which I've seen described as "Costco for beauty" - I think it does give you the general idea. It's a UK company, but they do ship to the US and they ship fast, so I'm guessing they're not actually shipping from overseas. The idea is that they sell quality beauty products for really insanely low prices - like, drugstore-type prices. But you do have to join - it starts at $10 $15 a month or $99 $60 a year. (Added: The prices have changed since I first wrote this. They are definitely really pushing the annual memberships, but on the other hand if you don't mind being a member for a year, it's far cheaper than it originally was.) 

So far I feel like they're delivering - I really love everything I've tried so far, at least! There is a "spending limit" that's kind of confusing, but so far I've ordered twice without running up against it.

The first time I ordered, I got a small bottle of cologne and a "sample set" with four other scents. I got Petals, Heliotrope & Ambrette, which is really nice. It's flowery without being overwhelmingly flowery, if you know what I mean. That was a 15ml bottle for about $17, and while it's still available, it's apparently a limited edition thing so if you're interested you might want to grab it soon. I'm about halfway through that smallish bottle already, so I decided to order something bigger, and this time I got Mandarin Leaf, White Cedar & Freesia, which I really think smells awesome. I was afraid to order the big bottle without knowing what these smelled like, so I do recommend trying the sample set or a travel size first, but the big sizes are really a good deal at about $22 for 100ml. They say these are made by the finest French perfumers and put the normal retail price at $125, and honestly, I believe that. They seem to be very high-quality.

(Note: I am not being compensated for all this gushing. I'm doing it entirely on my own dime, because I like it.)

Their packaging is adorable, too:

Here's my recent order inside their respective boxes:

The smaller white box is top-coat, and I'll try to report back on that after I've tried it out. They do have nail polish, but it's only a small selection at this point, and I'm still on my polish no-buy so I only bought the top-coat, which I actually did need. (For some reason I have tons of different base-coats but I'm running out of top-coat.)

Later: Verdict on the top-coat after a couple of uses is that I really like it. But I don't know that it's that stunningly better than anybody else's.

Here they are out of the boxes:

L-R, fragrance, shadow stick, top-coat (The brush in the top-coat bottle looks bizarrely huge but it's actually not, it's just your standard wide brush, I think. I opened it up to check!)

The shadow stick is a coppery color, which I like. The only other thing I've tried that I haven't already mentioned above is a glossy "Futurelipstick" which I also liked. (It doesn't have as much of a color payload as I'd like, but I bought it when we were wearing masks all the time, so it didn't seem to matter then!)

And oh! I almost forgot to say that I did indeed get a new phone, so yay, better pictures! (I traded my old 5-year old iPhone SE for a newer iPhone SE. It made an amazing amount of difference.)

Happy Lipstick Day! (very belatedly)

(This is another one of those things I hadn't gotten around to posting.)

I didn't know there was such a thing as National Lipstick Day, but apparently there is (it was July 29), and Ulta had a sale when it rolled around, which is how I came to buy a whole bunch of lip products. Ulta also had a little bonus package if you spent some certain number of dollars ($25? I'm not sure), which was this:

This is, as you can probably see, an assortment of lip treatments. I've tried most of this and I like it fine, also though trying to get the lip masks to stay on my lips was pretty comedic. (Yes, there is a selfie, but no, you're not going to ever see it. It's really not a pretty sight.)

I only bought one thing that was higher-end, because it was about half-price and that put it more into my price range. This is Urban Decay Lo-Fi lip mousse.

This looks like it would be the kind of color I like, but on the lip it's awfully neutral-looking. I've been wearing it some, though, and I do like the texture of it - I don't think it feels very much like a mousse, though. Note that the thing sticking out on the right side is an applicator, which retracts back into the package when you close it - kind of cool.

All of the lower-end stuff was marked down as well, so I just tried a bunch of different things. Here we have a Nyx Lip Lingerie, and three Maybelline Super Stay products, two of the Matte Ink line and the other one an Ink Crayon.

I'm not worried about showing swatches for these four, because you can see the colors quite clearly from the packaging and it's pretty accurate. Mostly I think the top two are too neutral for my taste. (I was determined to try the Lip Lingerie because I kept seeing people talk about it, but this was the least neutral color they had, and, guess what, it's just not me! I should know better than this by now, since it's what I always end up thinking.) The matte ink in the pinker shade is okay but I inevitably like the red-violet one much better. I actually like the ink crayon most of all - I need to go back and see what other colors they have but I still like the less-purple fuchsia very well. The colors here are Treat Yourself, for the Ink Crayon; on the Matte Ink the more purple one is Creator and the pinker one is Inspirer. (I don't seem to have the Lip Lingerie color name anywhere handy.)

While I'm on the subject of lips, here's the Tarte lipstick that I bought on sale at Sephora.

You can see that I've been using this a good bit - enough to wear down the shape of it, anyway. The color on this one is Sea Goddess.

Pac-Man!

Wet n Wild released a whole set of Pac-Man stuff, which is so adorable I couldn't resist it even though it's not really anything I need at all. I did refrain from buying absolutely everything - in fact, I didn't even buy the nail polish! - because it was not very interesting colors, I thought. But I bought a couple of items from Ulta, and then more from WnW directly later on.

This is the Game Over eye palette:

I'm linking Kathleen's video below, partly because she compares this to a recent Anastasia rainbow palette, and she says it totally compares favorably, and this one is $9.99 as opposed to $45. (This whole collection is limited edition, so if you want something from it, better go grab it fast!)

Here's the lip scrub - Bonus Fruit!

I feel like they even got the font right. (Can you tell I have feelings about Pac-Man?) I bought the two items above first, and then later I kinda went on a lip scrub binge from WnW - they were having a sale - so here's my new lip-scrub collection:

I am not big on green apple scent or taste, really - the  rest of these definitely are more my kind of thing (although the green apple is okay, not obnoxiously scented at all). The pink and black one at the bottom is from the Rebel Rose collection, I think, and so far that one is my favorite.

So from WnW I also got a gift set which included many of the Pac-Man items I didn't buy the first time around:

This is the Powder Kit, and it has the blush palette, the powder brush, and the little pellets of bronzer. Kathleen also loved this brush, and I have to say I don't disagree. Plus, it has a handle full of floating glitter, so coool. (Imagine what we would have made of all this in the 80s...)

Many of the kits still seem to be on WnW's website at the moment. Don't know how long that will last, though.

I also bought another little box of pellets which is "blushlighter" but for some reason I don't seem to have a picture of that. It works much better than I expected, though, I like it. I may end up giving the bronzer away, though, because I doubt that I will use it.

And then I bought this to experiment around with. It's the kind of thing I probably will use some of the time, at least.


Here's Kathleen, with a nice take on rainbow eyes from the palette:

(I can't really visualize myself wearing it, but it's still pretty!)

Colourpop: Kathleen's favorites

This started because of a Kathleen Lights video, so I'll link that first rather than putting it down at the bottom like I usually do with videos. (That doesn't mean I expect you to watch it right now before you read any further. That part's up to you!)

Kathleen does collabs with Colourpop, and they were coming out with new products, so Colourpop had a "Kathleen's favorites" sale (which has now ended). I had been wanting to try out Colourpop concealer for a while now, so I used Kathleen's sale as an excuse to buy that and more.

I think Colourpop is 5 years old? that's what I decided this card was referring to.

I tried out several of the products that Kathleen talked about. I started out looking at the separate Zodiac shadows, which have just been released - I put two of them in my cart and then I went, "Y'know, it wouldn't cost much more to buy the whole palette," and so that's what I did.

Here's the items out of the boxes:

Top to bottom: Jelly Much shadow in Whistlin' Pixie (also see below), Colourpop No Filter concealer, Ultra Blotted Lip in Double Double, and the Zodiac palette. (I apparently didn't take a picture of the inside of the palette, for some reason, but you can see it here, not to mention that each individual eyeshadow color has a page, and the zodiac pigments -which I did not buy - also have pages, and so do the new blushes that were just released - and all that stuff is listed here.) Whistlin' Pixie was actually a color that Kathleen mentioned - and I jumped at it because I love coppery anything - but I don't think the blotted lip was one that she mentioned. I probably wouldn't have bought the Ultra Blotted Lip at all if she hadn't been talking about it, though, because it just wasn't on my radar. Kathleen's lip picks, especially, tend to be more neutral than I like, a lot of the time. Neutrals just aren't all that flattering on me.

Tarte "make your own kit" deal

I don't remember if Tarte officially calls this "make your own kit" or not, but I've seen somebody call it that, at least. If you get e-mails from Tarte or anything you probably know about this already, but I first heard about this thing a couple of years ago, I think - it's a deal that pops up on Tarte's website once in a while - like two or three times a year, maybe, and only for a couple of days at a time. And I've been meaning to try it when I saw it again. I kept missing it for a long time, but this time I did finally see it in time, so I have this little haul of goodies:

It's seven items for $63, but you can't just pick out any seven items from their website. Instead, there are seven categories and you pick one item from each - the foundation is $39 by itself, so they're not about to sell you seven bottles of that for $63, right? You only get one foundation, one lip, one eyeshadow, etc. I wanted to try their foundation and I've had sample sizes of their blush, but I've never had it in a color I like - so those two things are what I really wanted to try, and the blush is $29 so those two things are worth the price of this alone (and shipping was free, too). All this other stuff was just a bonus, for me. But I like the bag and I like the lipliner and the eyeshadow is a pretty silver, and I also like this little "Blot Party" thing which is a translucent powder and a brush and also has a pack of blotting tissues in it that fit underneath the brush. (I've been keeping that in the tote bag that I keep in the car and haul with me into work every day.) Oh, and the white thing in the picture above is a mascara primer, which I wanted to try, even though I don't normally wear mascara.

The foundation is the Shape Tape Hydrating formula one. There were other choices - that was just the one I was most interested in. Now that I've tried it, the only thing I don't like about it is that it has one of those doe-foot applicators and I don't like those, for foundation. I tried one Physician's Formula foundation that had that and I didn't like it then either. But I guess I can work around that, right? (I'm fine with doe-foots - doe-feet? - for lips and eyeshadows and concealer, but for foundation it makes it tedious to apply, to me. It doesn't give you enough of it, I guess!)

Blot Party:

I don't have the color information in front of me for the lip and cheek products - looking at the website I think the blush color was Blushing Bride and the lip liner (they call it "lip crayon") is On Fleek. I was going to get a lipstick instead of a lip liner, but they ran out of the color I wanted. But then Sephora had some of the Tarte lipsticks on their "Weekly Wow" sale for half price so I bought the lipstick there, and I ended up with both.

Anyway, I do think this Tarte special is a good buy if you like Tarte products - which most people seem to! They are not cheap, even marked down, but the quality seems to be very good.

May Boxycharm Box

I decided to resubscribe to Boxycharm for a few months, mostly because they were doing a special skincare box that I wanted to try out, and also I figured while I was at it I would get a Luxe box. So far I've got two months of regular boxes and the skincare box. If you're not familiar with Boxycharm, they are boxes that give you full-size makeup items every month. You pay around $20 but you get products worth many times that.

The theme for this month is Make Waves, and here's what was in the box:

top to bottom:

• Glamglow Gentlebubble Cleanser - daily conditioning gel cleanser. Vegan formula with oat amino acids, applie extract, vitamin E, and green tea extract. Retail price $28
• Alamar - Colorete Blush Trio - highly pigmented vegan formula. Retail price 22
• Dose of Colors - Liquid Matte Lipstick - velvety, high-fashion matte finish. Retail price $18
• Ciaté London - Eye Lustre Creme Eyeshadow. Retail price $22
• Mellow - Brow Definer - non-greasy, easy glide formula with a triangular tip makes for easy hairlike strokes & the long-lasting formula ensures your brows won't budge. Retail price $18

That's over $100 total retail. Here's the things out of their boxes:

These cheek colors look awfully warm for me, but I'm intending to try them out before I go and give them away.

The Dose of Colors liquid lipstick, on the other hand, is totally my color.

Added: Alexandria's unboxing video; mostly she has the same stuff except one item is different and some colors are different. (I'm really really glad I got "Berry Me" lipstick rather than the neon-ish one she got! However, I think I like her blush colors more!)

Oh, and Kathleen's too, because I found it while I was doing this:

I had not taken in that the blush trio had stuff printed on the back - apparently Kathleen got "Fair-light" which is the same one I have. I'm guessing Alexandria got a darker version, maybe.

More KL Polish - Ofra collab set

I think I said that my last KL Polish order would probably be my last, but... no. This might or might not actually be my last order, I don't know - but after this I'd either have to be buying backups or buying things that I never thought I'd want, because I've bought everything that I care about having that isn't already sold out again. They did one restock and that's supposed to be the last one. They don't seem to be in any hurry to get things shut down completely. (Meanwhile, Kathleen is already selling some assorted merchandise, as in t-shirts and stuff, and planning a new polish line - "Lights Lacquer" - which she will have total control over.)

I don't have all the swatches right now for these four polishes. The two I don't have are the first two, To The Stars and Celia. But here is the KLPxOfra set, which came with an Ofra liquid lip as a bonus.

This one is Miami Fever:

I'm not sure this will be flattering on me, but it's a pretty color - sort of a light brick color. (KLP's website calls it "terracotta.")

And then the other one is Havana Nights:

which is a deep brick red. (As of now, this set and the two individual polishes are still available.)

The lip color works on me, which I assume means the nail color will as well. I had one spot left on the wheel, so I smeared some liquid lip stuff on it:

This may just be the color being wacky in this photo, but notice how on the wheel it looks much more berry-toned. I think that part is more or less color-correct and the part where the color is funky is the tube. Anyway, it works on me if I don't put it on too heavily.

Ulta drugstore-brand purchases

I went into Ulta a week or so ago - I don't really do into the physical store very often at all - and they had a promo on L'Oreal/Nyx/Maybelline. (It was the little box below, with any $20 purchase of those three brands.)

So, question: I know that L'Oreal and Maybelline have had the same ownership for a while, but the promo got me wondering if Nyx is part of that group as well ...aaaand I just went and poked around on Nyx's website, and I didn't see anything that directly 'fessed up to corporate ties. However, I finally found that if you click on Careers down at the footer of the page, it takes you to the L'Oreal Talent webpage. So I'm guessing the answer to that is actually yes.

Here's what I bought - mostly Nyx, and L'Oreal foundation:

On the True Match Lumi, I bought C3 - I've always thought I was C2.5 on regular True Match - but so far the C3 is working fine. and then the Dewy Finish setting spray, a liquid lip, and a lip pencil.

So the promo was five assorted items (in the box above).

L'Oreal clay cleanser (I have another sample of this from somewhere else, but I'm not sure I've ever actually tried it), lash primer, yet another mascara, a micellar water sample, and a Nyx lippie that looks like it's full-size. Unfortunately that brown looks awful on me, I tried it.

Here's another picture where you can see some of the items better:

The pink lippie is "candy slick" - it works pretty good for me. The brown one is Liquid Suede, and so is the pencil. (Added: I forgot to look at the actual color names at the time I posted this - the Candy Slick one is Birthday Sprinkles, I believe, and the brown Liquid Suede is Brooklyn Thorn. I tried mixing the brown here with a Colourpop dark-pink that I haven't been wearing, and I got a color I actually like. So I may give that one a real-life trial later on.)

KL Polish part 1 (Black Friday)

I did two orders from KL Polish, one right after Thanksgiving and one a week or so later when they had a flash BOGO sale that included the Zodiac polishes (which had previously been excluded from sales). Anyway, this is the polishes from the first order - I got three polishes from the 40% off sale. I'm heroically resisting the bundle sale that's going on now, because I've got way too much new polish already.

I got two polishes from the Lips & Tips collection (aka KL Polish x Colourpop) - these are polishes that match the lip products that Kathleen had previously done with Colourpop. This is November:

Their website calls this "rosy pink" but I think it reads more coral than I would have thought. It's on the pink side of coral, for sure, but as far as I can tell from the swatch, it's pretty coral-leaning. (This is not likely to get worn until after the holidays. I'm wearing Cookie now - I put a pic on Instagram but hopefully I'll get around to doing a NOTD post here - and I'm intending to wear those NailsInc reds for Christmas proper. I might do some layers with Cookie in a day or two, but I don't expect to do anything else before I go red.)

The second Lips & Tips polish is Point Zero:

I was interested in this because it's a cool brown, and those can be hard to find. I think I may really like this. (On the other hand, this is a bad time of year for browns - by which I mean that this would have been really great a few weeks ago when I was still in #chocolatenovember mode. It's possible I won't wear this until next fall, but I'm going to try to work it in while it's still winter.) Incidentally - since we're talking about Lips & Tips - it's possible I will eat my words about this someday, but I don't wear brown lipstick at all. To the extent that I even experiment with this, the results have never been anything that interested me. Mostly I don't think fall colors are flattering on me, as far as clothes, either, although I've been known to wear chocolate brown from time to time.

Anyway, moving on... the third polish is Medusa, from the fall collection:

Since I've just finally worn Zoya Aggie, I'm noticing the similarities between those two. This is like a greener version of Aggie, really - and that's a good thing, because I really liked Aggie, and I always love a good green. This is green with a gold flip; Aggie is gold with bronze flip.

(You're getting a preview of the Zodiac polishes on this wheel. I'll come back to those later.)

Nyx sale haul

I am addicted to Nyx lip butter, so when I saw last week that they were still having a 40% off sale, I decided to stock up on lip butter and try out a couple more things.

The lip butter is my usual color, Thunderstorm (it doesn't go on as dark as it looks by the packaging). I also decided to try out a Butter Gloss in a similar berry-ish color. And then I got a color-correcting primer - the blue is supposed to reduce sallowness, which is an issue for me - and an ink-liner in brown.

I also got a little freebie:

...a makeup sponge. I don't use sponges that much - I've gotten very much into brushes lately, you may have noticed - but all the makeup sponges I had are rather old and I'm sure I will use this some.

More makeup than I'd wear in a month

I know it's awfully late, since Halloween was over a month ago, but I thought it might amuse somebody to see my witch makeup that I wore for Halloween. I didn't have any green paint or anything so I just did very heavy eye makeup and dark lips and left it at that.

I have the veil down in this picture but I took another one where you can see the makeup more. (See below.)

I used this Pur palette which had extremely bright colors. And I had a dark lip pencil (Colourpop Mamacita) and this Star Wars lipstick - which I'd practically forgotten about - turned out to be the darkest lipstick I had.

This is the eyeliner I used, the Pretty Vulgar gel liner (isn't that the most fabulous packaging?) I had to put it on with a brush, which is not something I've done much... or ever, I think.

But I think it came out okay..

(I think this was taken after I'd had it on for some time, so it's not exactly pristine.)

More November purchases

(Oops, this was supposed to go up this morning, and I screwed that up somehow. Oh well.)

Sometimes I'm embarrassed to show all the stuff I bought, when I feel like I got totally carried away. But I'm trying to get myself to wear a little more makeup - for a long time I was like, foundation and blush and out the door - so a lot of this was things I just didn't own a lot of.

This is one last item from the Ulta sale, which wasn't in the picture with the rest of it, so I forgot about it. Ulta had Body Shop products for 40% off, so this was, what, $11 and change?

I wanted to try out Body Shop Body Butter, but I doubt that I'll keep all of these - probably I'll break up the set, keep one and give the other two as gifts. They're all different and I don't have any particular opinion on which one I'm keeping. I did crack them open and sniff, but they don't have really overwhelming scents so that may not be the deciding factor. I may decide which formula I like the most for me instead.

And then I have some things I bought earlier in the month and haven't shown. Colourpop was having a sale back before Thanksgiving, and well, this all started because I wanted a pencil sharpener. Colourpop's lip pencils are kind of weird and don't seem to fit the sharpeners I already had. And then I decided to buy another lip pencil while I was at it. I bought Lumiere, which is a Kathleen Lights color that I already have a nail polish to match. It's very neutral, on me, which is a good thing in a lip pencil, I think.

And then I decided that out of the few Colourpop shadows I have, I like the pressed powder shadows more than the Super Shock shadows. I poked around and decided the Yin to my Yang set had a lot of stuff I liked, so I got that. The first two colors (on the left above, that is) are ones I already had.

And then see the black and "white" ones on the row above, here? The black is really just soot-black - always useful - but the one that looks white is actually very pale gold. It's really beautiful.

One more - I think I had mentioned this at some point but I got this set of brushes - I wanted it because it had some shapes I don't have already, but also the packaging is lovely.

It comes in this nice silver clutch with a magnetic closure. (As you can see, this was from Sephora.)

Here's what all the brushes are. I especially liked that flat one, the second one down, and the very small flat one, the second from the bottom. The quality on these seems very nice.

October Boxycharm box

It seems to be my pattern that I get two Boxycharm boxes and then I cancel - at least, I've done it twice now. All these full-size items, all these palettes - it's just too much! I've kept a couple of palettes because I want to start wearing eyeshadow more, but I don't need more. (Although I have to confess that I did buy a Naked Palette on clearance, the other day.)

Anyway, back to Boxycharm - here's what I got:

I don't have a card to go by - either it wasn't in there or I just mislaid it - so I'm not sure of the sizes and values and stuff like I was last month. But here's what I've put together about these items:

1. I found the PÜR palette on their website - it's $38 (more on that below)
2. It looks like the "Superhero" mascara is $24 - that's some pretty pricey mascara. (Mascara just makes me cry, though, so I haven't bought any in years. I get them in these boxes and just give them away.)
3. The lippie is Kat Von D, as you can probably see. I'm just not a fan of matte lipstick, but I also heard that she's been throwing around anti-vaxxing ideas, which makes me very uncomfortable. I've never actually bought any of her products, in any case, although I've had samples before from Sephora. You may can see the color in the picture below, depending on your monitor! (it doesn't show up much on the one I'm looking at now.) I haven't tried it because I intend to give it away anyway, but it doesn't look like a color I'd be remotely interested in, even if it was another formula. It's Bow n Arrow, and the value is $20.
4. The last two items look more like really premium samples/travel sizes than full-sized items. The Briogeo is only two ounces - it seems to be this leave-in mask  but that's 4 ounces, for $28 - so I guess we can consider this to be worth $14. (I'm not really complaining about the value, but doesn't Boxycharm say that their items are full-size?)
5. And then the final one is Ahava Mineral Hand Creme, and it's even less of a full size. This item, per the website, is 3.4 oz for $24, but what I got was only 1.3 oz, so well under half. (I've tried it and I do really like it, though, and I never go through hand creme very fast, in any case.)

So as far as the retail value, even if you only value the hand creme at $9 (which is what I got, approximately, when I did the math), that's still over $100 total value.

The palette is called Midnight Masquerade:

As you might guess, the colors in it are fairly bright:

They seem to have a nice consistency. Most of the shadows look glittery in the pan but don't seem to go on looking that way.

Elastic Stretch Mascara? I have no idea.

Added: here's Kathleen's video, for comparison. She got three of the same items - palette, mascara, and the lip stuff in a different color (that I like better than what I got). Both of the items I didn't get are way better than the ones I got - or at least more expensive. Yeah, I know I'm being whiny but I cancelled Ipsy a few years ago over crap like this, and I don't think I'm the only one that thinks it's important that all the boxes be equivalent. I actually like my last two items, both of them, but like I said, I just don't really feel like they're full-size. Plus I would like to have tried out that Farmacy stuff!

(Going by Kathleen's reaction, I might be happy to give the mask a pass, now that I think about it!)