Allure Beauty Box for February ^-^ Swatches and Rants

 Hii again! Time to talk about the February Allure Beauty Box that I got! I’ve already started receiving my March things, so it’s time to get this written and posted before I start diving into all that.

This month’s box only had six items, not seven - I thought they always had seven, but I even found the product list and it clearly shows six products not seven. I’ll have to do more research. I swear I even took an Allure Beauty Quiz and it was like, what’s your favorite thing about the beauty box? And one of the answers was seven curated items or something like that. So I thought the seven was a given.

    [Edit - it was a me misunderstanding thing I guess. The adverts online say 6+ items, so it's six or more. Good to know! Six is still a lot 😋 ]

Anyway, this box was pretty good and I’ve had a lot of time to try the stuff out. I’ll start off with the item I was able to choose - this month it was the brand Beauty Bakerie, which I am actually super familiar with. Jeffree Star was recommending their makeup a few years back and I bought their Breakfast in Bed palette which had some of the best matte shadows I had tried up until that point.

So I was happy to see them featured in Allure, their founder has a great story. The choice was between their milk and honey highlighting palette, which is super pretty but has shades I can’t use and also starts to crumble a little after a while, and this eyeshadow called The Chosen Bun. I had previously owned the highlighting palette and the matching blush palette, and they were good started palettes but I quickly realized they weren’t ideal. And the blush palette had all sparkly blushes 🤮 we don’t do that here. But their eyeshadow formula is amazing and unique, so I was excited to try another one of those instead.

So this palette is predominantly warm toned, with browns and hazels and nudes. But there are a couple of cooler tones, like there’s a purple and a silver. So that makes sense, chosen bun, it looks like a cinnamon roll, mostly brown with some silver. I love cinnamon rolls. Mmm Cinnabon.

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The matte shades are super blendable and have good mid-range pigment, which means that even a beginner would be able to handle them easily without too much issue. There are several good midtone shades in this palette, there’s a shade close to my skin tone and then one a few shades deeper, and then some darker browns. They all blend together very well like I said, they’re pigmented but you can work with them.

But this brand is so known for their incredible shimmers. Unfortunately I can’t read the names from the picture I took, and I’m not writing this from home, so - there is a really pretty purpley shade that goes on the lid like a dream and stays there the entire day, and then there is this blinding white shimmer, the silver I talked about, that is perfect on the inner corner and as a highlighter and the tip of the nose. Seriously, this might be my very favorite blinding shade in an eyeshadow palette. People have commented on it on my inner corner at work, which always makes me feel so happy.

I have been wearing this palette pretty exclusively since I received it, it’s just a really perfect palette for the more subtle, dark outer corner look. But even while using other palettes, I’ve been reaching for that one silver shade that’s just amazing.

So this is a win.

Next up is the YSL Beauty Lash Clash Mascara. I think this is a mini, when I looked it up online it’s a much longer component. I love this mascara, it’s very volumizing, gives me length, didn’t get clumpy, just a really good formula. I hardly need a second coat because it’s just really good the first time.

The actual applicator is way bigger than the one I'm accustomed to, so it is a little more awkward to work with - like, the Beauty for Real mascara has this tiny, super precise applicator so I can really be detailed with my application, whereas this one is an entire caterpillar, but I still do like it, I just have to be more careful.

I can wear it throughout the day and there’s no smudging. It does just as good as you might expect against crying, it only gets everywhere if I use on my lower lashes, which I tend to do. Use it on my lower lashes that is, not cry.

The packaging also makes me feel good. It’s a matte finish instead of that shiny plasticky drugstore mascara vibe, it's heavy, it feels like a more luxury item.

Next I got a sheet mask, with Beet and Retinol - it’s from a new brand, like new to me, called Sweet Chef, which I thought was so cute, and made me wonder if their masks are all food themed. The mask itself was nice, had plenty of product, and made my skin feel refreshed and cool. It also stayed on and was not a super thick material, and y’all know I like to leave my masks on for as long as I can.

So I just went and perused their site and it is definitely confusing. You can search by food, but most of the foods (like celery, oat milk, ginger, carrot, etc.) only have the one item in them? So you can search by oat milk, but there’s only one oat milk item, instead of a whole line of products. But the products do look really cute and I’d try more from them if I saw them on selections in the future ^-^

Next is another new brand to me, called Tula Skincare. Honestly never heard of them before. The item is called the Cult Classic Purifying Facial Cleanser. It comes in a big blue squeeze tube - like way bigger of a package than my other facial cleansers have been in - and the product is a milky clear gel. It smells like, not very nice, like very soapy. But it does do a good job as a secondary cleanser.

I feel like it’s probably good for more oily skin types, because it does foam up and leave me feeling very cleansed. I did try it for my makeup, but still needed a little of my Juno to get the rest off. So not a bad face wash, nothing that made me say wow like the Fenty one. I’ll definitely finish the bottle though, because I do wash my face often and don’t have anything else I currently use. I will say though, that this face wash retails for $34 which is a little on the high end, and I’m def not on board with it, so I probably won’t repurchase. If I were spending that much, I’d buy the Fenty Beauty one that smells great and makes me feel sexy and matches my fat water.

Next is a product I did not like. It’s from a brand called D’Alba, called the Aromatic Spray Serum. I tried this twice and did not enjoy it, asked my boyfriend to try it and he didn’t hate it, but neither of us liked it.  It’s a spray bottle, tall one, with a cap that comes off. So it’s like a perfume spray, but it’s a serum.

I do not like this, it smells like straight up perfume, heavy and floral and ancient, that you spray directly into your own face. I did not even think I was using it right? Because it literally says aromatic, so it knows it smells like grandma, and you spray it directly into your own face. 

Like - no. I don’t think I will. Also it separates into this watery and then this yellow liquid, which just looks weird, like I don’t want to spray this on my face. 

Maybe this would be good for someone who is very dry and needs to consistently touch up their moisturizer or always needs to spray a little something? Like if you don’t wear makeup and you want something on-the-go? But it’s this huge bottle, like no one’s going to want to carry it in their bag. It’s a no from me.

Last up is a sample size - okay, maybe not sample size, deluxe size? - of the Nourishing Moisturizer with Prebiotics from the Sephora Collection. It was only a deluxe sample, so there wasn’t a lot of time for me to try it out unfortunately, but it was certainly a moisturizing formula and did leave me feeling smooth and nourished. Wasn’t super heavy and didn’t leave me greasy - I feel like it’d be a good everyday day cream, maybe not as good for the nighttime.

It retails for $18 which is not bad for a face cream, I’ve seen good ones from E.L.F for the $12 range, so $18 is competitive. Come to think about it, it does have a similar feel to the Holy Hydration from E.L.F. The texture and everything is similar. The only difference is this Sephora one doesn’t have that fragrance, which is probably good because of the recent movement away from fragranced skincare.

So this box didn’t thrill me, besides the palette and the mascara - the skincare really didn’t wow me, these brands are nice to know about but these products didn’t amaze. And one of the ones I did like was from a brand I already knew about - maybe I wasn’t buying from them, but I knew about it. So I just didn’t feel like this box brought me a lot of value in terms of discovery, which is what they’re designed for. I’ll probably discard the spray serum honestly, it irritates me just looking at it.

Wow these other box posts are so short without all the add-ons. I should probably be rethinking my spending with the boxes. 

Thanks for reading! I’m so excited to start getting March’s boxes in and get the swatches happening ^-^

Talk soon!

Dani