Beauty bites: ULTA's 21 Days of Beauty

ULTA comes into my mailbox with in-store events and coupons but surprisingly (at my house we sort the mail according to the recipient) I hadn't seen my ULTA catalog anywhere... so I missed out on ULTA's first 19 days of their 21 Days of Beauty extravaganza.

Yesterday, Too Faced's Sweetheart Blusher was slashed in half to $15 a piece - and I found this out through Tumblr. Tumblr, the land of photoblogs and Etsy store promos and scroll-throughs for hours and hours on end. I love Tumblr. 
Unfortunately, they were sold out of the blushers when I got to the nearest ULTA (Sugarland/First Colony location) yesterday... but Too Faced is pushing out new products (is the season upon us already???)!!!

The only product I feel worth mentioning from Too Faced is the new Melted liquid lipsticks. Think of Stila's Stay On All Day cremes, Kat Von D's Painted Love liquid lipsticks, and Ardency Inn's Lip Vinyls. I swatched all of them on my left fist - which I hope is hygienic enough (pleasepleaseplease if you want to swatch a lip product on your lips, both ULTA and Sephora have applicator wands for lipsticks, glosses, mascaras, and everything you'd ever need).

Too Faced's Melted Liquified Long Wear Lipstick: Melted Nude, Melted Peony, Melted Coral, Melted Violet, Melted Fuchsia, and Melted Ruby.

Swatched straight from the tube product onto my left fist, in the same order as above. The only two that caught my fancy were Melted Violet (which is actually more purple than in the photo) and Melted Fuchsia (which is more electric Barbie pink in real life).

Speaking of electric colors, Urban Decay has a fresh (but probably not NEW new) palette out: The Electric Pressed Pigments Palette! Sorry Urban Decay, but Naked collection with or without, your original colors are pretty conservative and muted. I'm so serious. Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics breaks more "what's comfortable and what's not" color-wear boundaries when it comes to studio-quality makeup. And I like OCC more and more because their cosmetics helped fund a gender reassignment surgery to one of their beloved coworkers!

Urban Decay's Electric Palette as seen for demo at ULTA.

Urban Decay's Naked Basics Double-Ended Pencil in Venus + Crave. The highlighter end reminds me of Benefit's  High Brow Glow but more white-gold than champagne, and the burnt brunette end is perfect PERFECT for my eyebrows (i received the pleasure of being the first person to demo the tester)!

Aside from dogging Urban Decay on their always-have-been-pretty-darn-conservative-if-you-ask-me-its-just-how-they-makeup-their-editorial-photos-really their NAKED collection has got me taken with their dedication to neutrals and nudes. I'm fond of the Naked 3 rose-hues and this eyebrow/eyeliner pencil, which was probably birthed from the popularity of prim-and-proper tamed brows on the streets and catwalks of pretty-much-everywhere. (Personally, back in middle school and the earlier years of high school, which was 2006-2010, girls at my school would overpluck or draw "Sharpie" eyebrows and it was devastatingly hideously not well done and good Lord I was appalled for them.)

So after an hour of playing around... 

The only thing I happily left ULTA with was this super-mega-deluxe-sized Original Mineral Veil (without its neat little box, sadly) for $32+tax. Normally, these babies are $20 for 6g of product - but this is 24g - 4x MORE of everything you could ever want, and I could've paid $80 for four separate accounts of needing a new posh Mineral Veil but nope, all it was was $32+tax. And I even received a marvelous moxie lip gloss in Rebel! Yeah, sometimes the freebies at ULTA beat Sephora.

Mineral Veil gives a soft-focus effect. It's very lovely and feels wonderfully smooth. And the marvelous MOXIE lipgloss in "Rebel" is somewhat of a cool-toned mauve pink, something like a mauveish translucent Melted Peony.

According to ULTA's website, the color of the marvelous MOXIE lipgloss (can we call just start saying LUCIDALABBRA?) is supposed to be in "Maverick" - but hey, "Rebel" suits me just fine... because... I am one? Yeah? Okay.

Today's 21 Days of Beauty Sale is the bareMinerals' Try It. Believe It. Love It. kit that normally retails for $20 and sells for $10 today in-store and online. And... it's all gone. Let me elaborate that I love bareMinerals again. We can blame all the greedy, grubby, nasty people on eBay who bought all of it and are now selling it for a premium off $35+ - why? Just why? It originally costs $20, no one wants to buy your funk... Yeesh. People. Sometimes you want to burn them at the stake, and sometimes... sigh.

xoxo