Birchbox November 2013

Belated beauty box time!



Before I start the product reviews, I have to show you my terribly professional new small product photography setup:



As a photographer, I'm normally all about the natural light, and my bathroom has this beautiful frosted window that faces southwestish that provides almost exactly what I wanted. (See photo at the top of this post.) But I bought a new camera and am trying to get myself out of a photographic rut... so, after recommending this setup to my sister I thought I was overdue to try it myself. My room is not nearly as dark as that photo implies, I just didn't bother to balance it because I liked the spotlit effect.

Incidentally, you can see my sister's use of a similar setup here on her latest makeup box review. She's going with a much more neutral white backdrop which probably is better for this sort of thing, but Birchbox so kindly sent me pink tissue paper with this month's box (that's January's, not November's... I'm terribly behind) and I thought it was more fun. I expect I'm going to start developing a coloured paper collection now...

So! Photographic digressions aside, let's talk products.

( Snark, science, and makeup! The abrasive/meat tenderizer/healing balm is the most amusing. )

Overall? Nailpolish I don't love but will use, hand cream that's at least nice at home if no good for work/travel, a highly entertaining abrasive/meat tenderizer/healing agent combo that's actually good at getting rid of flaky skin and not killing my boyfriend, an overly subtle sparkle pencil with a bad tutorial, and delicious delicious honey chocolate. Not bad. I am pleased although not amazed with November's selections.

Misc misplaced makeup photos

I imagine I took these before/after shots to showcase some product, but I'm no longer sure what it was:



I'm guessing maybe it was the lip colour? It looks like I'm probably wearing some blend made with one of the obsessive compulsive cosmetics lip tar sets from sephora (A discontinued set I got on sale, but here's a superficially similar set with different colours). It's entirely possible that I was trying out the Chella pencil of my previous review, but as I said in that review, the thing is so subtle that it's hard to find in a still photo (which might explain their resorting to photographic trickery rather than a true product demo).

I am a bit concerned about the orange-yellow cast in the second photo: I'm pretty sure it's a light thing, but it's possible that my current tinted moisturizer/sunscreen doesn't match my increasingly paler skin since moving out of the desert. I guess I'll go let makeup experts colour match me sometime when I'm at the mall.

Aaaanyhow, nitpicking aside, I'm posting this to show a before/after that, to the best of my ability, does not use any photo tricks to make me look better in one photo than the other; it's just a change of makeup (and possibly some light, since it's an hour later by the time I got around to doing the 2nd photo and it is sunlight). I do cheat a bit with the smile, I suppose, but I have a few unsmiling ones and it doesn't make that much difference. Do feel free to compare with the before/after I complain about in November's review.