love hate – Beauty Playbox

How I wanted this quad.

I’ve been circling around BellaOggi Trendsetter in Naked Feeling for good three months before finally giving in and taking it home.

How beautiful is it?

Very beautiful.

Now let’s get to everything else.

Packaging

Something about these round black pans with a transparent cover speaks to me. I really love it on eye shadows, blushers, and powders. The size is good, it’s very nice to hold in your hand.

You get 4 g of product overall, so roughly 1 g of each shadow.

Formula

All shadows, including the matte one, are buttery soft to the touch, almost cushioned. Fallout is present, but nothing too severe, perhaps aided by the fact that three of the shades are so light. This is also perhaps what aids blending.

Pigmentation

The most pigmented out of the 4 is the bottom one. The light peachy pink right next to it gets the second place – it doesn’t show up on the swatch (really, it doesn’t – see below), but you can build it up. The very first one would work great as a really light highlighter for pasty people (read: me). It shows up against the skin, but it’s not overbearing, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, the light brown shadow (the only matte with a very light sheen) barely shows up. I’m not even sure you can see it in the swatch below. In fact, I’m not sure you can see any of them in the photo below, aside from the very first one I mentioned.

The palette is ridiculously poorly pigmented. It’s so poorly pigmented, it grinds my little stony heart to dust.

In conclusion

Another quad in the BellaOggi Trendsetter collection I’ve been eyeing is Burlesque. I went for Naked Feeling first, because a) you can never have too many neutrals; b) if it turned out to be poor quality, it would be easier to at least attempt to work with. In the end, I passed it on to a more patient person. I just couldn’t work with it. All my tries to use the matte as a base/ transition shade and to work with the lighter shades as inner corner and brow bone highlights ultimately did not work out. I would get frustrated by the poor pigmentation every time I would use it, so it went to a new home.

Needless to say I will not be buying Burlesque, although the colours are very, very lovely.

Let’s premise this by saying that it’s quite possible that my tube is just hella old. When I used it for the first time, the liquid coming out of it was clear, and during the second use it started showing some colour, which means that the product is separating. When left untouched for a couple of days, it does the same thing.

Unfortunately, one can never be too sure of the age and the quality – and in some cases origins as well – of products bought through local retailers.

The texture and the feel of the skin with this primer are bloody amazing. It doesn’t alter the skin’s appearance on its own, but I can’t remember the last time my skin felt as smooth as it feels after applying this primer.

I’d also go as far as to say that Pure Minerals improves skin quality with continuous use. It really is hydrating.

It applies evenly and doesn’t require a lot of product for one application. Both the downside and the plus are, it’s transparent. So I can never be too sure if I covered all parts of the face with it.

The packaging is a squeeze tube with a thin nozzle. It’s more or less convenient when there’s a lot of product left to go through, but it will be a bit of a pain further down the road. I’ve already started to store it vertically.

While not scentless, ARTDECO Pure Minerals Pore Refining Primer has a very light scent that reminds me a bit of L’Eau par Kenzo.

Seeing as it smooths out the skin, the foundation application with it is a breeze, including my nose, where I really struggle to apply foundation evenly due to pores.

So with all the good points of this primer, why doth thou hateth it, Alex?

Well.

It doesn’t prolong the life of my make-up one single bit. My foundation starts to wear off about three hours after I apply it – much like it would without a primer.

I have oily skin, but if yours is on the dry side, I think you will love this product.