Our November GlossyBox focuses an awful lot this time on the make up side of things, with four of the five items in the box being… yep, make up items. It’s a great little set to make yourself look pretty over winter whether you’re going somewhere, or just want to doll yourself up anyway! While I personally like the even mix of items in each of these monthly boxes, this is still a really nice, affordable box.

This is also the first month GlossyBox tried out letting us Glossies pick one of the products (or at least the shade of one of the products) before the boxes were sent out. It worked for me and I got my chosen shade, and I think this could be a great way to add more variety to the products, as I sensibly suspect we don’t get things like foundations because of colour picking. But maybe that’ll change?

The first item I’m going talk about is the ‘pick your shade product’ in question, and it’s Revlon’s Super Lustrous Lipstick. There were four shades to choose from, if I remember rightly the choices were; a nude, a pink, a red, or a dark red. Since I actually have quite a few red, pink, and coral shades of lip wear I thought I’d go bold and pick ‘477 – Cherry Red.’ This is a full size lipstick weighing in at 4.2 g, in a traditional twist up tube with a clear plastic top, and it costs £7.99. It has a really nice, creamy formula – thanks to being enriched with vitamin e and avocado oil – so you’re not only getting pretty colour, but these are going to moisturise the lips too. Great for winter! The lippy itself can actually be worn really shear, or as a more full on application, and another thing that’s made me really glad I picked it, is that I can blend this with other lip products to make more colours, or to do some real fancy lip contouring. Oh yeah.

Next up is the MUA (Make Up Academy) ‘Undressed’ Palette. Most people consider this a passable dupe for the Urban Decay Naked Palette (the first) – though I don’t actually own one of those to tell you outright. I do, however, have a few MUA palettes already, and they’re very nice, very affordable palettes – they’re really good for the money you’re paying specifically. In this full size palette you get 12 shades, with a total combined weight of 9.6 g, so assume 0.8 g per pan of colour there. This palette is valued at £4. So, you get some really light nudes and browns, different metallic tones, and some darker shades. Most of the colours are shimmery, with a few mattes – which is fine by me, as I love those shimmery ones. It’s a very user friendly palette, you can use most of these shades on their own for simple looks, and they all work together really well for some more dramatic ones. The only real downside I think you could say with these palettes is there aren’t that many different looks you can do – a lot of the shades are a bit samey, baring maybe the last two – but then if you love these tones on your eyes, who cares, right?

I also did some quick swatches here so you can see what you get, and it shows which are matte (fawn and Hazel) and which aren’t. ‘Fuel’ on the almost furthest right is a matte black powder with little bits of glitter in it, rather than a straight matte shade or a shimmery shade.

Next up is our first travel or deluxe sample size item, and it’s the Emite Diamond Heart Primer, which is a brand we’ve had before. This is a cute little 15 ml tube of quite warm toned primer, the full size is valued at £29.90, however, I couldn’t reliably find out what the ml measurement is for the full size item to break down that price. Diamond Heart does refer to the shade – this primer comes in two shades, and this is actually the darker of the two annoyingly, as I would have prefered the lighter one. However, it is a very nice, light formula, and I can use just a little on my face along side moisturising and it blends right in. As such it does only really give a light priming feel – my skin does feel nice, soft, smooth, and matte after using this, but I don’t think it really offers any sort of coverage, beyond perhaps a tiny bit of colour correcting. It is nice enough, but like the blush/bronzer fiasco last time from Emite it’s just not the right shade – because one shade does not suit all, obviously.

The second travel size/deluxe sample is from Royal Apothic, another repeat brand for me, and it’s their Cutting Garden Cream Creme Body Lotion. This is a little metal tube of rich body lotion that is made with milk proteins and lactic acid to smooth, soften and hydrate without a greasy feel. And it does do all of those things – it’s a nice rich cream that smooths onto the skin well and leaves it feeling lovely, and has a nice ‘beauty product’ type smell. I would say that compared to the lip butter we received previously this is less exciting (it had cuter packaging and smelled amazing), but it is really lovely. This little travel size is 35 g, and is valued at $14 on their own websites (not the £14.50 the GB card states) which translates as around £9.37. I personally don’t buy moisturisers at this price point however – I prefer to spend around £10 and get a decent 200-400 ml, so I don’t think it’s for me.

And last up in the box is a full size set of Eylure false eyelashes in the variety ‘Naturalites’ – these are a very pretty, natural looking pair – though not too natural looking to be not worth wearing. They come with the usual latex based lash adhesive, and some instructions. I haven’t used these yet, but I have used Eylure before, and they’re very nice, straight forward lashes that are readily available to buy. Like with most things putting on lashes takes practice to get right, and I usually find the important thing for me is to trim them down a little, as they’re usually too long, and they’ll either not stick on at the end or come off after a little while without a little trim. One of the neat things you can do is re-use that little trimming either stacked over the lashes or on their own at the outer end of the natural lashes. These are worth £5, and while you can get cheaper, they’re really nice quality, affordable enough anyway, and can be reused if cleaned.

So, that’s it for this month’s box – a really nice, affordable collection of make up items and some high end travel sized items. I like that they’ve put in a whole palette, though obviously if MUA isn’t a brand you like, you won’t feel this way. The total box value is £26.36 without counting the primer, as I don’t have a good price for it. And while this is a pretty low value box compared to others, I still actually really like this box and will use up all the items, as the content matters just as much as the pound value.

I’m really looking forward to the December box, it’s going to be a Limited Edition Rose Gold box, with six items instead of five. Yay!

Until Next Time.