Review - Jeffree Star Blood Sugar Palette and Love Sick Liquid Lipsticks

Ah, Jeffree Star. The guy who divides opinion up and down the internet, but most people outside the YouTube/beauty/MySpace communities have never actually heard of.

It's not always easy to find an unbiased review on his products due to his controversial past (and present, let's face it). You tend to either get the Jeffree stans who think he can do no wrong in life or business, or you get the people who think he's the worst kind of human to ever exist and therefore think everything he touches is dreadful.

So, as someone who collects and enjoys his makeup, but has no interest in being mates with the bloke, I'm gonna try and give this a go and be as unbiased as I can. There are things I like about these products, and there are things I don't like. I will state that I am not a fan of his Lip Ammunitions, so I didn't purchase those to review and I have absolutely zero interest in having "merch" from any kind of beauty influencer, so I gave the accessories a miss too. What I did purchase was the Blood Sugar palette and the 4 liquid lipsticks. I have collected the liquid lipsticks since the very first launch back in 2014, but I am more than willing to say if and when I find one to be crap (hello summer 2016 collection, I'm talking about you) as the different colours do not perform the same.

The Launch

So, if you are up to date with the gossip in the beauty community, you'll know that this palette launched on February 10th and sold out in 3 minutes. Yep, his first sell out in quite a while (I've not seen his products move this quickly since the launch of his Skin Frosts back in 2016), 100,000 units in 180 seconds. Even the pre orders for the next restock of palettes is sold out currently.

I managed to purchase my products with no problems at all. Added my items to the cart and checked out. I was placed in a queue at checkout but I waited no longer than 30 seconds. By the time I'd made my purchase and had a quick look through Facebook and Twitter, I was seeing people saying that they couldn't order the palette. This was a super fast sell out.

My main problem with Jeffree Star Cosmetics is their customer service. I very much prefer to buy from Beautylish if and when I can, because their customer service is second to none, and my parcels arrive from the USA in around 3 days. Despite paying extra for faster shipping on this order, it took 4 days for them to ship the package from their warehouse, and then a further 9 days for it to get here. I didn't experience any difference by paying the extra shipping costs and I think 4 days to ship out a parcel is ridiculous. Yes, all you Jeffree stans can sit there and bang on about how he's a small business and doesn't have the staff to move out 100,000 palettes, but this is a guy who haemorrages cash on nonsense like designer boomerangs and neon pink self driving cars, you can't tell me he doesnt have the financial means to employ a few more warehouse staff. However, it arrived packaged nicely with plenty of bubble wrap and despite my worries (I have seen a lot of people receive broken palettes) everything was in great condition, and no damage at all, so I was very pleased and incredibly relieved about that!

Blood Sugar Palette

Yep, another warm toned palette. Exactly what ALL of our eyeballs need right now, huh? If I'm honest, I was over the warm toned trend before it even began, I love cool tones and I love colour. I was drawn to this by the pops of colour - that bright pink and red were calling my name! I actually also really loved the look of the cool toned greige type colour in between the pink and purple shades. Actually, despite not being a fan of the warm toned red trend, there are very few colours I would never use in this palette. I don't think I will ever use the shades on the top and bottom right hand sides, or the brown shade, Ouch (I hate that shade name btw), but the others are all colours I will enjoy creating looks with.

The palette comes in what Jeffree describes as a "doctors case". Its very deep and I have to say, the packaging is probably the best I've seen in a very long time. The component is made from cardboard, with a faux leather outer and closes with silver clasps - a completely unneccessary but nonetheless incredibly clever and aesthetically pleasing touch. The palette comes in a cardboard sleeve, which has all of the ingredients etc on.

The shade names are, to put it politely, a little odd. In his reveal video, Jeffree claims that as the palette is based on a doctors case and it's named Blood Sugar, he has chosen lots of medical and dentistry themed names for the shades. I don't particularly associate dentists with diabetes, but I'm gonna let that one slide and go straight to wondering why "tongue pop" and "fresh meat" have been thrown in there. No thanks.

Swatches

I'll add my brush swatch pictures next. I did as I always do - primer, then build up the shadow to my desired opacity (or as opaque as I can get it). I do this because when you use a shadow on the eyes, you won't just swipe your brush over your eyes and think "Oh that's a patchy mess, I'll call it a day and finish now", you build up the colour until it looks good. I will say that after finger swatching these shadows, I can see why he didn't do live swatches on his reveal video - they swatch horribly with fingers, but most of the shades do build up nicely with a brush. Some take a little more work than others, but the pigment is there for most of the colours.

You can see that some of the swatches look quite messy, especially on the second image. This is because I cleaned up (or tried to) an awful lot of fallout from swatching. Fallout and kickup isn't something that bothers me at all really. Usually it means that a shadow has plenty of pigment, and I always do my eyeshadow before I do my base makeup so cleaning up isn't an issue for me. I definitely wanted to mention it though as I know a lot of people were raging about the amount of fallout from the shades in the ABH Subculture palette last year. I do think these shades are more densely packed than Subculture, but the fallout is definitely noticeable.

Is It Eye Safe?!

You may have heard that some shades in this palette are not considered "eye safe". Is this true? Well, the answer to this is that it depends where you live. If you live in the USA then there are shades in this palette that are not deemed to be eye safe, but if you live in the UK then crack on! 

The reason for this, is that certain ingredients that are known to stain the skin are not considered to be "eye safe" or to be used in the immediate eye area by the FDA. The UK has no such rules, we clearly don't care whether we have stained faces or not! So, if you use these shades then please don't worry about your face melting or your eyeballs falling out, all that'll happen is a bit of staining. I used the brightest colours in the palette for this eye look (over primer) and I have minimal staining after approximately 7 hours of wear. 

All in all, I don't think this is a terrible palette. Do I think it's that great that it should've shifted 100,000 units in 3 minutes? Probably not. Will I use it again? Yes, absolutely. Do I think it's worth the $52 price tag? Probably. A lot of the cost will go towards the cost of the packaging, this is much more impressive than the crappy cardboard components his previous palettes came in, BUT knowing that this is now a permanent item, if you're not absolutely desperate to get your hands on this then I'd say wait for one of the Jeffree Star Cosmetics sales and pick it up for a discount instead.

The Love Sick collection also featured 4 liquid lipsticks, 3 Lip Ammunitions and an assortment of "merch" including makeup bags, mirrors and some clothes (I think). I collect the Velour Liquid Lipsticks so I ordered two with the palette (Restraints and Self Control) and then I picked up the other two when they launched on Beauty Bay a few days later. The lipsticks come in the same component as always, but with the limited edition red chrome lids. I do wish he'd wrap in with the limited edition stuff, but I also understand it's a clever business move - make things seem unobtainable so that we want them more (it works like a dream on me, let me tell you).

Three of the four shades are nothing special. We have seen similar colours from him in the past (and in the case of Problematic, the very recent past) - Self Control is somewhere in the middle of Virginity and Blow Pony, Romeo is much like a more neon version of Rose Matter and Problematic just looks like hes chucked the leftovers from the Christmas shades Santa Baby and Berries on Ice in a red top tube. Restraints is completely unique to his collection, however. A metallic finish gunmetal shade, it's unlike anything he has previously released and I think that is fantastic. I fell in love with Jeffree Star Cosmetics because of the exciting shade range - rememeber how we all lost our shit over the blue collection? Or 714? That's what I expect from this brand, and it's been disappointing to see him churning out so many nude and red shades if I'm perfectly honest. I hope this latest release is a sign that he is moving back to his roots, experimenting with colours and having the most unique shade range on the market.

I actually really like all of these shades. Self Control is a very wearable, cool toned lilac. I find that Virginity is far too light for me, and Blow Pony is quite extreme for every day wear, but this shade sits nicely in the middle of the two and I would wear this as an every day lip colour.

Problematic, as I said, is very similar to the berry tones in the Christmas collection, however I much prefer the formula of this to either of the other two. It's a very bold shade, but unlike his previous berry shades, this one applies nicely and isn't patchy or streaky at all. It stained my lips slightly after around 7 hours of wear.

Romeo is a very bright, almost but not quite neon, shade of pink. I love pinks, and I'm a big fan of his shade Rose Matter. This is kind of like Rose Matter on a night out, much more bright and in your face, but also quite wearable if you want to try something a little brighter than a regular nude shade.

Restraints is a very sheer formula. Like most metallic liquid lipsticks, it does take some building up. I found that I needed two coats and had to press the wand onto my lips a little to finish off the application, but it dried down nicely and the extra coat didn't cause any discomfort or irritability to my lips like some brands do when I try and build the colours up.

I love these lipsticks. I have had lots of hits with his liquid lipsticks and plenty of misses too, but these 4 shades are all really nice to apply and wear and very much reminiscent of the "old school" Jeffree lipsticks that applied super opaque in one swipe and lasted forever on the lips, I'm very much hoping that this standard of formula stays!

Kat Von D x Divine Collection - Review

Valentine's Day 2018, what were you doing? Romantic dinner? Putting new flowers in a vase? Instagramming your new knockoff MK handbag with the all important #boydonegood?

I'll tell you what I was doing, and it was much more satisfying and heart warming than any of the above; I was stalking the Kat Von D website waiting for the Divine collection to launch. I had been waiting for this day since last October, when the collaboration was announced and there was absolutely no way I was missing out on this palette and lipstick!

Last October Kat Von D Beauty announced an upcoming collaboration with much loved, late drag queen Divine. I don't know enough about Kat to make the connection between her and Divine, so it was a little surprising to me, but nevertheless I thought it was amazing news as drag is such an inspiration in my makeup and my life. I was HERE for this palette without even knowing what was in it!

For those of you who don't know your "herstory" (yeah, I watch RuPaul's Drag Race too you know), Divine was a well known and much loved drag queen who rose to fame in the late 60's - early 70's. Her work with legendary director John Waters made Divine into a modern day icon and an inspiration for many, not just drag performers. One of Divine's most famed roles was as Edna Turnblad in the original Hairspray movie, and more recently there was a whole episode of RuPaul's Drag Race dedicated to her (season 7, episode 9 "Divine Inspiration").

I will say that despite asking for a release time and price on these items, nothing was given (in response to my query or any others that I tried to look for on social media) other than a generic "Coming soon!" which I didn't particularly enjoy. I get severe makeup FOMO and launch dates give me pure anxiety so not knowing drives me up the wall!

Anyway, I actually got an email from Kat Von D Beauty at around 9:30am GMT, so I imagine it launched around midnight. I headed over to the website, and despite the awful layout for mobile users, I completed the transaction easily enough. One thing I really like is that you pay your customs and duties at the checkout with this website, rather than having to wait 3000 years for Royal Mail to process it and then add their lovely £8 charge on top of that.

I have ordered once from the Kat Von D website and I wasn't hugely impressed by the time it took for them to dispatch my parcel - I had ordered the Metal Matte Mini last time, and by the time it arrived at my house, it was only a couple of days before Debenhams launched the damn thing! However, I was very pleasantly surprised to get a dispatch notification the following day, and it arrived 5 days after that. I was really pleased with this, especially considering I ordered from the Jeffree Star website 4 days prior and despite paying for the faster shipping option, my tracking still shows the parcel as being in the USA.

The products were packed pretty nicely, they came in a plain cardboard box with the Kat Von D logo on the inside and plenty of that big bubble wrap. I did have a slight issue with one shade in the eye palette, Babs, which was not sitting in the pan properly. Luckily it hadn't shattered, it had just come loose from the pan but it pressed back into place pretty nicely.

Here's the collection - an 8 shade eyeshadow palette and a Studded Kiss lipstick. The packaging is a crazy neon green colour, which I absolutely adore but don't necessarily associate with Divine. The palette has Divine's eyes on the front, with the shade names on the back and when you open the palette it has a good sized mirror with Divine's iconic eyebrows printed onto it, which I think is such a fantastic touch! The lipstick is the regular Studded Kiss packaging in the neon green colour and it has a vanilla scent to it (which I personally find revolting, but thankfully it doesn't linger because I love this shade).

Let's take a look at the lipstick first;

The shade name is Divine, and it's a very pretty and extremely wearable pinky nude colour. I do tend to wear liquid lipsticks most of the time, but I really love the formula of Kat Von D's Studded Kiss lipsticks. If I am going to wear a traditional bullet lipstick then I would either reach for Charlotte Tilbury or one of these as they are so smooth and creamy and the pigmentation is fab. They glide on easily and aren't patchy or drying. This is a very pretty every day shade, not necessarily something that screams drag at first glance, but in a lot of her more well known images, Divine is usually seen wearing a red or nude lip, so I absolutely get why this shade was chosen. This was the same price as the regular Studded Kiss range, $19 (or £17 in Debenhams if you're buying from the UK when it launches here).

The palette is exactly the same size, shape and layout as the Pastel Goth palette from last year. If you read my review about that, you'll know I absolutely loved it and definitely thought it was worth the price, so I have high hopes for this too! This palette is $38 (the same as Pastel Goth), so I think it'll be around £35 when it comes to Debenhams.

The shades in this palette are Babs (a shimmery champagne), Hard Magic (matte black), Baltimore (shimmery navy), Waters (pale matte blue), Filthy (shimmery gunmetal), Pink Flamingos (shimmery neon green), Female Trouble (matte white) and Hairspray (silver glitter). I am completely in love with the shade names, they are so fitting and were definitely a great choice! I am a big fan of the shade selection too, although I have seen mixed reactions online. I know a lot of people wanted to see a purple shade named Ursula (the character from The Little Mermaid was based on the way Divine did her makeup), but I have not yet met a purple shade from this brand that I have liked, so I'm personally very glad that it wasn't part of this palette!

If you already own other Kat Von D palettes, then you'll probably have a couple of these shades - there are several palettes with a matte black and white in them, and Waters is quite similar to the shade Doom from Pastel Goth. There's a shimmery bright green in the Saint and Sinner palette too, but it's definitely not the same as Pink Flamingos.

I really like these shadows, I haven't seen anything like Hairspray from this brand yet and it's a nice surprise to see such a glittery eyeshadow. It's really nothing like the Metal Crush shadows, it's definitely more like a regular eyeshadow formula, but it's so full of glitter. Waters is such a pretty blue, and can be applied lightly for a wash of colour or built up for a really bold look. I will definitely use this palette, the only shade I probably wouldn't bother with much is Filthy because I much prefer bright colours, and if I use a black or grey to deepen up a look I usually reach for a matte rather than a shimmer, but that is just personal choice.

This is a limited edition collection, it's currently available on katvondbeauty.com and Sephora, but will be launching in Debenhams on March 7th.

Sugarpill x Little Twin Stars Collection

Behold! The most beautiful makeup collection my eyes ever did see!

On January 22nd, Sugarpill announced a mystery collaboration on their Instagram page. I didn't know what it was but I knew I was going to have this! Sugarpill is by far my favourite makeup brand in the world, and I absolutely adore the quality of their makeup, and the packaging is always absolutely perfect.

There was much speculation online about who the collab could be with. Given Amy (Sugarpill's owner)'s love of drag and her close friendships with many celebrity drag queens, most people were guessing a collab with another queen, much like Sugarpill's Kim Chi products. However, on January 24th, the brand announced that the collaboration was with Little Twin Stars, a pair of adorable Sanrio characters who were popular during the 1980's (another point from me, I am obsessed with anything from the 80's).

The collection consists of an eyeshadow palette, two liquid lipsticks and a makeup bag. The eyeshadow palette is available to purchase separately, and you can also purchase the liquid lipsticks as a twin set. They aren't available as singles, and the makeup bag only comes with the whole collection.

The collection launched on February 1st and once it has sold out, will  not be returning (and unlike most brands, I actually believe Sugarpill when they say this stuff....remember the Pumpkin Spice eyeshadow and lipstick? Man, I wish they'd bring those back). The products are currently available from the Sugarpill website and Beautylish, but keep in mind that when you are buying from the US you will have to pay an import fee. I bought mine from Beautylish and the fees were £16, but if I had bought through Sugarpill I'd have had to pay another £8 on top of that for the Royal Mail handling fee.

I have contacted Beauty Bay and Love-Makeup.co.uk who both told me that they will be getting the collection in, but neither of them would give me a launch date. I absolutely needed this in my hands as soon as possible so I chose to buy through Beautylish as I know that their shipping is really fast (and they use FedEx so no Royal Mail fee) and I would probably get this collection before Beauty Bay launched it. As of the time I am writing this blog, the products are fully stocked at Beautylish and Sugarpill and have just been launched on Beauty Bay and Love-Makeup in the UK.

The prices appear to be different on both UK sites, with Beauty Bay listing the full collection at £60, the lip duo at £30 and the palette at £32. Love-Makeup are selling the whole collection at £63, the palette at £30 and the lip duo at £28.

Let's take a look at the collection:

The collection comes packaged in this really pretty little keepsake box. The box is made from cardboard and has a magnetic closure. It's fairly sturdy so can be kept to store things inside - I think I will keep my single highlighters in this box since they are currently taking over the drawer that they live in at the moment!

The box has a cardboard sleeve with the Little Twin Stars in colour, and this slides off to reveal the Little Twin Stars in gold, with the Sugarpill logo on the box itself. 

Once you open the box, there's a removable insert which holds all the pieces of the collection. The packaging on this set is just beautiful. It's so detailed and true to both the Little Twin Stars and Sugarpill aesthetics. I generally don't keep the boxes that my makeup comes in, but I will definitely be using this box again. 

Inside the box you can see the 6 eyeshadow palette, makeup bag and two liquid lipsticks. The eyeshadow palette is the same size as the previous Sugarpill x Edward Scissorhands palette, for reference. 

The palette comes with 6 rectangular eyeshadow pans, weighing 2.5g each, slightly smaller than a regular sized Sugarpill pressed shadow which is 3g. This palette contains three foiled shadows, two frost shades and one matte. I know most people would prefer to have more than one matte shade in a palette, but I have so many eyeshadows that it really doesn't bother me. I very rarely use one palette per eye look anyway. 

L-R: Wish, Sky Candy, Dream Dust, Twinkle Twinkle, Star Ribbon, Cloud Maker

The shadows swatch beautifully and perform really nicely, just as I would expect from any Sugarpill shadows. They are very pale in colour but can be built up for intensity or applied with a damp brush to really bring out the foiled aspect of the shades.

The lipsticks are absolutely adorable. There is one lip colour to represent each of the twins hair colours. Kiki is a beautiful aqua shade with gold sparkles, and Lala is a bright bubblegum pink which also has the gold sparkles running through it.

Please excuse my awful swatches, I tapped them to bring out the glitter before they had dried! Both of these shades can be worn on the eyes, and I like to use Kiki in my waterline if I'm wearing the eyeshadow palette, I think it goes so well with Star Ribbon! When I was playing about with this collection, I mixed the two colours together and got this muted purple colour, which is probably much more wearable as an every day shade than either of the two lipsticks alone.

The makeup bag is fairly small, but it can fit a decent amount of products inside. I am not a collector of makeup bags really, I prefer to have everything out so that I can see it, and I don't ever travel at all but this is very cute. I like the frosted plastic on the front, which means you can see what's inside but you can't see through the bag completely. It's a very cute design with the Little Twin Stars sitting on a cloud and the zipper is the Sugarpill logo.

I'm so pleased with this collection. I think it's so cute and such a refreshing change from the constant stream of warm toned red and orange palettes we've been bombarded with lately. Yes, you may need to incorporate another palette if you're using this one for a full eye look but it isn't necessary and the foiled shades make a great accent to a neutral look if you want to change up your eye look now and again. I absolutely adore the lip colours, but if you're a nude lip kind of girl then you might want to skip the lip duo and just go for the eyeshadow palette - or give bold lips a try, you never know, you might love them!