This month’s (or last month’s at this point) GlossyBox was the lovely limited edition packaged Valentine’s Day edition. It’s a lovely pink and white minimalist box with pretty text – I actually think this is one of my favourite box designs. It’s very cute. This month’s box contains five lovely full size products, and a sweet Valentine’s Day appropriate freebie in the form of a mini roll of Love Hearts – I saved mine ’til the day itself (I may have been looking forward to a free sweet from GlossyBox for a while). I did the unboxing video over on YouTube on the 11th of February.
First , we have a Wilkinson Sword Hydro Silk Razor. It feels a bit silly calling this a full sized product – it’s not like you can get a sample size razor – but go with it. The Hydro Silk is a fancy women’s razor with a big, smooth, ergonomic, slightly squishy handle, and a big, rotating head with five thin blades surrounded on either side by moisturising strips. The strips are supposed to provide hydration for up to two hours after shaving, and this is probably true, but I honestly don’t notice my legs being dry within two hours of bathing. I usually notice the next night. The important bits are that it’s easy to use and it does shave hair. If anything, I would say the moisturising strips are more of a hindrance while shaving, as the strip moistens the actual act of shaving feels smoother and smoother until it’s hard to feel if you’re actually getting all the hair – but a good swishy rinse gets rid of the smooth residue build up. The whole thing costs £9.99, which gets you one handle and one head. I won’t be buying a new one mostly because I don’t see the economy in buying these fancier razors that need to have their heads regularly replaced – it’s a nice shave, but it’s not worth it that much to me.
Next up, is the Marsk Mineral Eyeshadow in the shade ‘Fifty Shades’ – and to start off, yes it’s inspired by ‘that film’, and no I don’t care – I care if the eyeshadow is any good. It’s a small pot of loose mineral powder eyeshadow with a loose foundation style open top. It’s a graphite/pencil grey in colour with flecks of tiny glitter in lots of shades – grey, white, blue – the overall effect is actually quite pretty. Wearability wise it’s a very buildable eyeshadow, just a light wash and you get barely any of the grey solid colour and a little glitter, built up in layers and you get the deep shine grey pencil colour with the full range of glitter colours. As it’s a mineral based eyeshadow it’s packaging also adds that it’s talc, paraben, fragrance and GM free. Oh, and they don’t do animal testing, which is still a good thing to mention, even though I’m pretty sure the EU ban on animal tested cosmetics probably covers that. While I do think this eyeshadow is very pretty – the downside is that it’s proportionately the most expensive item in the whole box. The nondescript pot is just over a gram (1.2g specifically) and even if it is very cute in it’s smallness, it costs £14.49, which is an off putting price.
Our third item is another cutely small full-sized pot – the Royal Apothic Tinties – which is a tinted lip butter. Mine is in the shade ‘Coral’. This little pot feels premium just in the packaging – the box is cute and the little pot is glass with a metallic fancy lid. It’s an oily rather than a waxy formula, with shea butter and oils – and it does feel very good for your skin, and smells lovely too – like sweet almond or coconut. The colour is very subtle – definitely just a tint, but’s a very pretty colour, and the oils make it shiny and pretty on the lips. Like the mineral eyeshadow this item is more expensive for what it is – ten pound (or £9.16 to be specific) for 3.4g of tinted Lip butter is pretty steep – you can definitely get an equivalent item (without the fancy name and look) for just a few pounds. Again, it’s a case of it’s nice…but it’s not that nice.
We’ve got a So Susan item up next (our third item from this brand in a GlossyBox) and it’s the Rose Quartet Lip and Cheek Stain in the shade selection ‘Warm Rose’. This is a little black mini palette with four on the firm side cream tints – with a total weight of 4g, you get just 1g per shade, so it is a small amount – but these little squares are pigmented enough that a little goes a long way. In the Warm Rose palette you get a very “red” red, a bright pink, a coral, and a light baby pink – they’re all on the warm side. There’s enough of a range to suit most people in terms of lip colour and blush, and using the same colour for both gives you a very well put together look. In terms of practical wear for me, I’d say the firmness of the cream makes these a little impractical as a blush – they don’t blend as well as I’d like. Also, for all that it’s a small palette (suggesting it’s been designed as a hand bag item) and it’s not dirt cheap – it doesn’t have a mirror, which it needs, and it has a little brush, which it really doesn’t need. Like all So Susan items, one of the big selling points is that it’s free from lots of things (mineral oil, phthalates,triclosan, sulfates, fragrance), and it’s good for your skin (hypoallergenic and non-comedogenic). It’s £8 for this little palette, and honestly while it’s nice – I’m not as wowed as I think I could be by it – maybe if it had a mirror and lost the brush.
Our last item is from the SuperDrug brand B.Cosmetics – their Defined Eyebrow Kit in the shade ‘Dark’. This is a big compact style container with a wax for shaping the brows and catching/holding the colour, two different shades of brown to choose from, and a highlighting gel to finish the look. This pretty well thought out product has a double sided brush – an brow/shadow style end and a spoolie/mascara end – that is pretty usable, though I would say the brow/shadow brush is a touch too on the firm and plastic-y side. The other point in this kit’s favour is they’ve put in a great big mirror – so you can actually see to put this stuff on your face. Practicality wise, you could actually get away with using this little kit for a lot of things. I found the darker of the two brow shades is too dark for my brows but you can use it gently with the brush as a shadow eye liner to make your eyes more defined. The highlighting gel is a nice bonus, which you could use for both brows and general highlighting, though since there’s only one pan of this it would get used up quickly. Ingredients wise it has a much more standard ‘drug store’/’high street’ list of a fair few things. The brow kit is £9.99 for 3.32g of product, and I would probably consider buying it again.
The Love Hearts – as I said in my unboxing video – are worth about 12p for a small roll with about 6/8 sweets in it, if you want to add it’s value to the box. Mostly, it’s a cute and thoughtful treat.
The final box total, with five full sized items, comes to £51.63. This sits comfortably high on the value side – while it’s not the most expensive box I’ve ever gotten, it is up there – and there’s no question that the contents of my box are worth more than the £10 plus shipping I paid. My overall feeling of this box is actually very happy – all of the items could be used quite well together in a single Valentine’s Day look, and while not a lot of them are things I will re-buy personally (it’s fine to be honest about that), they’re all lovely things to try, and I will use all of them up. My favourite item/s are probably either the brow kit, because it’s so well thought out, or the Tinties lip butter, because it’s so lovely.
In March GlossyBox are selling both the regular box (which I think is just a regular regular box) and a limited edition Mother’s Day box, which I won’t be getting – I’m not really interested in. We’ve also already had a sneak peak for next month, one of the full sized items we will be getting is Naobay’s gently skin peeling facial milk – which sounds interesting. Until next time.