Review: Maybelline Eyestudio Mad for Mauve Quad

Yay! My first cosmetics review. My blog posts thus far have been primarily about hair, and so I decided I wanted to switch it up a bit. Because not only do I love hair, but I love love love make up too.

Now, I'm a girl on a budget, so Maybelline is right up my alley. For me though Maybelline can be a pretty hit or miss affair. Some eyeshadows I've purchased by them were chalky horrors with no pigmentation and others were velvety, smooth, and pigmented. Yeah, I know, it's wierd and inconsistent. I digress. Thus when choosing to buy Maybelline eyeshadow I'm a very conflicted lady. Luckily the Mad for Mauve quad from the eye studio series was anything but a disappointment.

Price: As I mentioned before, Maybelline cosmetics are very affordable. I picked up this palette for about $6 at Target when shopping for a rug to go in my room. I had heard about this new Maybelline collection and figured a quad was the more economical choice over their baked eyeshadow duos.

Packaging: The packaging isn't really anything special. The top of the case is clear so you can easily view the colors in the quad. The bottom is black. One of the shadows is almost twice the size of all the others, which would be great if it was one of my favorable colors from the palette. In general though, the eyeshadows are quite small as is the quad itself. I wish the uad was bigger to be honest, but that's just me.Here's a picture of the packaging:


Product Quality: I really love the texture and the colors of these eyshadows. They glide on smoothly and are pigmented. They are easy to blend. They're basically everything you'd want in an eyeshadow, but I do have one gripe. This may just be my brushes, but I did have some issues with fallout, it wasn't severe so I wouldn't say don't purchase the quad, just saying a fair warning. Overall I really do love these shadows though. I want to try the other quads now.
Picture of the colors:


Summing it up.
Pros
+Smooth & Blendable
+Affordable
+Pigmented

Cons
+"Ehh" packaging.
+Some fall out

The Points
Price: 5/5
Packaging: 4/5
Product Quality 15/15

Final Grade: 96

Review: Aussie Moist

Today I’ll be reviewing Aussie Moist, which is my HG (Holy Grail) cowash/wash conditioner. I was kind of skeptical at first at because of I this conditioner was all hype. Well, I have to say, for me it definitely lives up to the hype.

Quick Note: I’m a fine-normal haired relaxed 4a/b.

Price: This conditioner was about $6 for 1 liter of product when I bought it in walmart. I bought this in June and I’m STILL using it. It’s definitely is a bargain, especially for someone who is dead broke like me. (Ah, the fun of being a high school student whose parents are unemployed.)

Packaging: It has the signature Aussie packaging. A bight and highly saturated purple, blue, and white are the color scheme of the bottle. It’s a very attractive bottle in my opinion, but I didn’t enjoy how difficult it was to get the nozzle/pump dispenser to work the first time. Remember the most difficult test you ever took in school? The one even though you studied for, it still stumped you? Well, that’s what trying to get the nozzle to work was for me. I asked basically all my family for help and to no avail. I wanted to cry myself to sleep, contemplating my place in this world and why I was such a failure for not being able to open a nozzle. Then the god of all conditioners shined his light upon the bottle, and the nozzle suddenly popped up with ease. Wtf? I was glad it opened, but that annoyed me.

Either way, although it wasn’t user friendly in the beginning, the nozzle gave just enough conditioner in one to two presses for a cowash on my hair when it was APL. That factor didn’t quite make up for how it was hard to open, but I did enjoy it quite a bit.

Product Quality: I’m about to gush, so if you don’t want to read too much…It’s an A+ conditioner for relaxed hair. Okay, so, first things first. These are the ingredients: Water, Stearyl Alcohol, Cetyl Alcohol, Stearamidopropyl Dimethylamine, Glutamic Acid, Fragrance, BIS Aminopropyl Dimethicone, Benzyl Alcohol, EDTA, Ecklonia Radiata Extract (Australian Sea Kelp), Simmondsia Chinensis Seed Oil (Jojoba), Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice Extract, Butylene Glycol, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothiazolinone

If you’re a lady opposed to cones, this is not the conditioner for you. However, it is the conditioner for me and I’ll tell you why. My first cowash with it left me speechless, and by speechless, I mean exclaiming things like “Holy moly!” and “I can’t believe it’s not butter nexxus!” Aussie Moist makes my hair feel like absolute silk upon rinsing, and helps me detangle and gives me slip like a dream. I don’t think it’s quite as effective at moisturizing on natural hair, because my newgrowth doesn’t take to it as well as my relaxed hair does. That’s no surprise to me, the ingredients to me from the beginning seemed to be more beneficial to relaxed ladies anyway. Just a warning though.

Summing it up.
Pros
+Great for relaxed hair
+Excellent cowash/wash day conditioner
+Extremely affordable, it lasts forever.

Cons
-If you’re bad with opening things, prepare to cry yourself to sleep at night after the first day with aussie moist.
-Not great on natural hair.
-If you’re a cone hater, this ain’t for you.

The Points
Price: 5/5
Packaging: 3/5
Product Quality 14/15

Final Grade: 88

The Review Formula

How it works:
Alright, for my reviews, everything in the end gets a letter grade. It is kind of like school (except you don’t hate it!), and three things determine this grade. These things do not change depending on the type of product, either. What determines the grade are: price, packaging, and product quality. The three P's! I'm so catchy.

Each category gets an amount of points awarded to it upon careful review. For every con I find with that particular category I’ll subtract 1-3 points depending on how irksome that particular con is. The maximum points each category can get are as following: Price: 5 points, Packaging: 5 points, Product Quality: 15 points.

If you’re wondering, there’s a reason why I decided to distribute the points like that. To me, although price and packaging are important, they certainly aren’t nearly as important as the overall quality of the product. Not only that, but all of you math wizs out there must have notice those points all add up to 25 at their maximum amounts. Multiplied by four, that equals 100. The amount of points I get after multiplying the overall score (the points added up) determines the ultimate letter grade.

Hopefully that wasn’t too long winded or confusing, I just wanted you guys to see HOW I review things and what not so you can have a full understanding of the process and the reviews when you read them. Many hair and beauty websites I see on the internet seem like they just pull numbers out of their hats, Lol. I didn’t want to do that too.

All is fair in beauty and hair,
Marissa.