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!

Review - Sugarpill Pro Palette

FINALLY Sugarpill have released a pro palette that is available outside of trade shows! I had always wanted the original pro palette, but couldn't get hold of it. So the news that they were releasing a pro palette that was not only pink, but totally customisable made me feel all warm and happy inside!

Sugarpill's original pro palette was black, and contained the 3 Addicted to Pretty eyeshadow quads - Burning Heart, Heartbreaker and Sweetheart. 

The new palette is white in colour with the Sugarpill logo in huge pink and green lettering. It's incredibly girly and looks so pretty! The palette arrived in a matching sleeve and is HUGE!

Unlike a Zpalette, which I usually keep my single and depotted shadows in, this palette has 12 pans for you to fit your shadows in, rather than the usual magnetic open space on the Zpalette. I love the way both palettes look to be honest, and I don't have a preference when it comes to having pans in my magnetic palette or not.

The only drawback to this palette is the size. Personally, I love a large makeup item, I feel like I'm getting more for my money! But it could definitely be problematic for travelling. I keep my Kat Von D Metal Matte palette at home rather than in my kit due to it's size, and I'm unsure yet whether I will use this Sugarpill palette for work. I may swap it out for the Urban Decay Electric palette I keep at home, that way I have bright shadows in the salon and for my own use! 

Here's the Sugarpill palette compared to the Metal Matte, as you cans see it's slightly smaller in width but it's a little longer, so around the same size if you want a comparison for storage purposes! 

There are 12 magnetic pans to keep your shadows in, they are really easy to pop in and out, but very secure once they're in - I use a spatula to release the pans from the palette if I want to change the layout. 

My biggest problem was choosing which shadows to put in it! There are 12 spaces, but I have 14 Sugarpill pans. Obviously now I need to get another palette and 10 more pans to fit inside!

I depotted my Heartbreaker and Sparkle Baby palettes, as well as depotting some single pans to fit inside. I decided to leave out Frostine as there was way too much purple going on in here, and this is what I ended up with:

Isn't that just one of the most glorious things you've ever seen?!

The pro pans retail for $10 each on the Sugarpill website, or £7.95 on Love-Makeup in the UK. Sugarpill sell the palette for $20, but you get it for free if you buy 12 pans. I believe that Love-Makeup are offering the same deal at the moment, but if you just want the palette on it's own, it's £15.95, almost exactly the same price as a Zpalette.

The pan sizes of these shadows are crazy! They are absolutely gigantic, 3.5 grams, in comparison to Makeup Geek's 1.8 grams (£6 per pan) or Mac's 1.5 grams (£10 per pan) and the pigmentation of Sugarpill shadows is absolutely incomparable in my opinion. They're just not the brand to go to if you like to stick to neutrals!

Sugarpill Hotsy Totsy compared with Makeup Geek Brownie Points. You can see the size difference here, in my opinion if you love bright colours then there is no better brand for eyeshadow than Sugarpill. You do sometimes have to wait for certain products and colours to be in stock, but keep in mind that this is a small business and there will be wait times on occasion. I can never seem to catch their loose eyeshadow in Lumi in stock!

I definitely think that this palette is worth investing in, particularly if you buy the 12 pans and get the palette free. It's also great if you have some Sugarpill singles or palettes that you want to depot for storage space. It's definitely something I'll be looking at getting another of in the future!

Sugarpill Kimchi - Review

I ordered Kimchi from the Sugarpill website (quite a while ago, I just haven't got round to writing this review) with no problems at all. The lipstick was $18, I forget how much shipping was but I didn't have to pay any additional customs costs on delivery so I was a very happy makeup addict! I had wanted to get Trinket too but it was out of stock at the time, so my review for that will come later.

The lipstick arrived in around a week and was posted through my door. When I opened the packaging this very cute yellow and gold box was inside, along with the most adorable sticker I have ever seen! I love pink and I'm a bit of a crazy cat lady so I definitely appreciated this, it now lives on my laptop.

Now, on to the product itself. If you are familiar with the packaging on Jeffree Star Cosmetics, Dose of Colours or Makeup Monsters liquid lipstick then you'll recognise this bottle! Amy herself said on Instagram that they get the packaging from the same suppliers but the product inside is different. The wand on these lipsticks is the same as the Jeffree Star Cosmetics liquid lipsticks which I LOVE because it is my all time favourite wand ever!

The lipstick is a muted lilac shade, leaning ever so slightly grey. It's very pretty and has tiny sparkles of glitter in it if you rub it when it's dry. I have to say that I have not had much luck with getting the sparkles to show up very well, but I am happy without them (something I never thought I would say!) as the colour is just beautiful. Here's a swatch of it before rubbing to activate the glitter.

As you can see, its a cool toned nude lilac colour and I have been wearing this almost daily lately. I keep forgetting to take a picture in good light of a lip swatch which is a pain, but I will insert a terrible selfie of me wearing it so you can see what it looks like on my NW10 skin.

Yikes, that eye makeup is dreadful - the joys of having hooded eyes and being silly enough to put glitter on your lids!

This lipstick goes on really nicely, the curved wand really helps to get a nice line around your lips and the flexibility of the applicator means it hugs the curves of your lips to ensure really great coverage and flawless application. I like to wear this with some lilac highlighter (Anastasia Beverly Hills Purple Horseshoe or Jeffree Star Cosmetics Lavender Snow) on my cupids bow just to make my lips stand out.

The lipstick wears really nicely, I get a good few hours out of it and after eating I don't feel like it needs touching up unless I have something particularly oily to eat.

All in all, I love this lipstick and cannot wait to try Trinket and Pumpkin Spice!