Etude House Flagship Store

Hellooooooo! I'm fairly excited to share this entry because only then will I be able to move on to my haul entry xD

So approx. 3 weekends ago, after finishing my last Mamacita dance class, the bff and I headed down to Wisma Atria because I wanted to go to the new Etude House Flagship store.

But first, horrible selfies after dance class!

 

See the glistening sweat lol

Lee Donghae pose xD

Here's the new Etude House flagship store that opened a couple of weeks back at Wisma Atria # B1-20/21/22.

Frankly speaking, I am not a major fan of their products because my past experiences have left me more disappointed than excited really (their lipsticks were drying and the nail polishes cheap but so hard to work with! UGH. Oh and their BB/CC creams just...).

Used to buy them because SHINee and Dara were their endorsers and I wanted to collect their merchandise (HEH.) but ever since they've switched endorsers to Sulli and Krystal, I've stopped being interested in their new collections. Sorry Etude House!

Anyway, Instagram was abuzz with the new opening of this flagship store and I was quite blown away by the sheer size of the entire store!!

It's occupying what used to be GAP (GAP kept their level 1 store) at the basement of the mall, towards the entrance to the MRT station.

And this was what really drew me to the store: Etude House x Disney Princesses Collection.

HOLY KAMOLEYYYYYYYY!! I WANT THEM ALL!!

Display of the entire range from this collection

Just how cute is the marketing stuff for this collection

Here's a quick look of the products launched for this collection.

Pics credit to Etude House.

They picked 4 Disney Princesses and came up with products after each Princess' character. I particularly love the rose blush from Belle's Happy Ending and of course the nail polish sets are just so fitting of each Princess' character!! *insert heart eyes*.

I liked that Etude House put in a ton of effort into the packaging this time around, especially with the nail polish bottle caps haha!

A closer look at the entire product range available.

Snow White Collection

For Snow White's collection, they included a red lipstick, 1 BB cream and the nail polish duo. Everything about Snow White screams red because of her red luscious lips and love for red apples (I made this up haha!).  

Cinderella Collection

Our favourite blue princess who needs to return home at the stroke of midnight had 3 single eyeshadows named after her along with the nail polish duo.

Here you can see how they packaged each nail polish set into a book because.... fairytales came from books first right? LOL.

Belle Collection

Now I was most excited about Belle's collection because of the blushes!! Gosh, that rose embossing is really to die for (Side note: Milani how about making those rose blushes that you have too permanent?). I picked up everything in this collection save for the pink blush because it was too blue toned for my liking.

Jasmine Collection

The bff was majorly excited for the Jasmine collection because her name is Jasmine too xD

A mascara was part of this collection together with the nail polish duo.

The paper packaging were quite easily bent. Wished it was sturdier. 

After paying for all the stuff I picked out in this collection, we went around taking pics of the store. It's really girly and princessy so if you're a huge fan of pink, this should be one of your favourite places to go too hahaha.

Highlight of the decor is the pink pumpkin carriage at the back of the store.

The interior of this carriage really screams pink and all things frilly/girly.

Inside the pumpkin carriage

Fake macarons anyone?

See what I mean when I said they went full out princess mode on the decor

There was also a small section at the back of the store that came with a makeover area. This is not available in other Etude House stores from what I noticed. Pretty impressive on how much though they put into this flagship store. 2 thumbs up!!

There is also a instant photo machine inside the store. Every $20 earns you a pink token that you can use for the gacha machines or take a photo inside the booth.

The bff and I had 4 tokens between us so we decided to just take the pictures as the bracelets were not really to our fancy.

Photos instantly printed out

These are $80 photos okay! HAHAHA bloody expensive but oh wells. At least the machine had the decency to add filters onto our face lol. Would have been nice if we could decorate them like in neoprint machines but I think this would really add on to the waiting time.

All 4 nail polish sets

Between the 2 of us, we both brought home 2 sets each. I bought Snow White and Belle while the bff bought Jasmine and Cinderalla.

Borrowed her 2 sets for review but I kinda like messed up the packaging on the Jasmine one so I bought another brand new one for her since she was keeping it for collection purposes and kept the Jasmine set with crappy box. Also partly because I liked the colours upon swatching them :D.

Books or nail polishes? ^^

Lighting in the store is damn good lol!

Annnnnd.... that's all for a short review of the Etude House flagship store. Do drop by if you're in the area to take a look at the store's deco and items.

I do have to say that when they first landed on our sunny shores I wasn't very into their products but as time went by, they improved several products and especially for this Disney collaboration, I really liked most of the items I picked.

The review of all the stuff I bought will be up next so do stay tuned for that.

Till then, byeeeee!

MAC x Maleficent Summer 2014 Collection

Hi everyone! This entry is kinda special because I have discovered my love for Maleficent thanks to the newly released "Maleficent" movie by Disney starring Angelina Jolie as the protagonist. 

The 2014 movie is actually told from Maleficent's point of view and how she came to curse Princess Aurora with the famous curse such that she becomes Sleeping Beauty.

To really up the hype for the movie, I actually saw this nail art tutorial on Youtube and recreated this look the day before watching the movie. Actually I was just bored and thought the tutorial was easy enough to recreate la #sadsociallife

Please check out her channel, I really love her nail designs! :)

And yes, I did manage to recreate most of the look save for the nails on my right hand because drawing the horns with my main hand was so tough I had to redo it twice :x #noskill #newbie

I didn't really make the horns as nice as Janelle in the Youtube tutorial but for a noob like me, it's quite a huge feat already la lol.

So without further ado, my Maleficent nails drawn by yours truly :D 

Angelina Jolie was on the cover of 8 Days that week. I subscribe to the magazine via their app because buying the physical copy is so wasteful. I throw them away into the recycling bin after reading actually.

Left hand with the My Dark Magic Mineralize Eye Shadow from the MAC Venomous Villains Collection in 2012 starring of course the cartoon version of Maleficent.

Right hand was much more simpler (polka dots for the middle finger!) pictured here with Revenge is Sweet Lipglass from the same MAC collection as the eyeshadow above.

Now onto the main objective of this entry - reviews and swatches of the items I bought from the MAC x Maleficent collection in conjunction with the release of the movie above.

The vinyl figurines you see here are from Funko Pop which Hidaya got me addicted to lol. The movie edition of Aurora and Maleficent are new releases and I told her to just grab it for me once they were in stock. Thank you Mas Hila :D :D :D (jangan membunuh saya ya! hoho.) You can purchase them at Simply Toys at Plaza Singapura level 7 opposite the cinema box office :)

Here's what I bought from the collection:

1. Natural Beauty Powder, USD$33.00

2. Anthurium Pro Longwear Lipglass, USD$22.00

3. Nail Lacquer in Flaming Rose, USD$17.50/SGD$24.00

I purchased the nail lacquer in the MAC Cosmetic stores locally because obviously nail lacquers cannot be shipped internationally but the other 2 items were part of my huge MAC haul with the Sharon & Kelly Osbourne Collections which if I have time I will do reviews on. They have not landed on our sunny shores yet. I hope they don't because I am tempted to get the eyeshadow quad from the Sharon collection but I am on a self-imposed makeup ban till September lol. Which kinda got broken last weekend because I caved into the YSL Fall 2014 collection FML

Ok, enough chit chat really!

Swatches :)

The nail lacquer in Flaming Rose is a true red polish and the bottle is adorned with the Maleficent wings that is on all the items released in this collection. I only purchased this colour because the other colours released looked..... plain oops! Black and beige, really MAC? I just got this for collection purposes. The packaging is really to die for! >_<

Swatches on my nails in natural daylight

Indoor lighting

Here I applied 2 coats of the polish with a top coat. I find that if you really wanna be really careful about it, you can achieve an opaque colour with one coat but I like to pile on the polish to even out things a little. Under indoor lighting, the colour shifts to a dark red (not as bright as it seems pictured in the first nail swatch pic).

Wear time was typical of most nail polishes - it lasted about 4 days before the major chipping appeared. A huge chunk just fell off this morning as I'm typing this entry lol.

Next up, the Pro Longwear Lipglass in Anthurium. Oh, be still my heart!

This is a true red that applies opaque and evenly on the lips. However, as with all lip products, you really need to exfoliate well because this really picks up on the uneven surface of your lips if not applied on clean lips.

Formula wise, it is not sticky upon application but it does fade off after I drank my cuppa this morning! So boo for that *reapply diligently*.

Applicator

I don't have much experience with prolong wear lipglasses nor normal lipglasses from MAC but this applicator is slightly flat on both sides and I find that this allows me to apply the product more evenly onto my lips.

Hand swatch

And last but not least, the Natural Beauty Powder.

I had initially wanted to pass on this because this just looks like a normal powder to me. But look at that casing!!! LOL, yup that's right, suckered in by the packaging *waves white flag to MAC*.

The powder is really a peachy, skin toned colour powder. I was unable to get a good swatch of it on my arm because the powder just blended in so you get my drift here right? Anyway, I used it all over my face as a finishing powder (you can it for anything - blush, highlighter, bronzer ya dah ya dah) and it didn't really have good oil control. I was shiny in about....2 hours? And I would only recommend this for fairer skin tones to use.

Well, that's all folks for the Maleficent products from MAC. I'm really excited for the Simpsons collaboration for Fall. Autumnal collections are popping up left and right now (in August wtf!!!) so.... pray hope I don't spend as much I did for the Summer collections D:

Till then, adios folks!

Innisfree Long Wear Cushion BB (Review/Swatch)

Hey everyone! I've decided to go on a 'BB cushion challenge' because I've accumulated way too many over the past couple of months (3 omg! And... I have an existing one from Laniege that hasn't been used up). 

I decided to use them because as you know, keeping the makeup for too long isn't really very advisable so I thought I'd make good use of them and write some reviews for everyone. Then you can decide if you want to pick them up locally or purchase them while in Korea :)

So my idea is to test each product out daily for a week and even if it sucks (touch wood!), I would have given it sufficient time to figure out how to work the product to my skin.

This is how I will test out the other BB cushions along the way. You can follow me on IG (@paulalogy) to see what I will be testing out week after week.

*****

My first new BB cushion is from Innisfree - Innisfree Long Wear Cushion in No. 21 Natural Beige.

They actually landed on our sunny island not too long ago (it was launched in Korea in May 2014) and I had seen advertisements of them from the Innisfree Singapore Facebook page so when my cousins went to Korea at the end of May/early June, I told them to pick it up for me in No. 21 because that is the colour I usually use for BB cushions.

One thing to note is that all the brands in Korea usually have shades in the same numbers i.e. 13, 21, 23 etc and they are usually the same colour skin tones across most brands. 

My usual Laniege BB colour is No. 21 in Natural Beige so I told my cousin to pick No. 21 for me from Innisfree. Wrong move, you'll see why later on!

pic cr to Innisfree Singapore

Picked the Long Wear type over the Water Glow option because I've naturally oily/combination skin. The Water Glow is more geared towards providing hydration so those of you with dry skin types should try that instead of the Long Wear version.

Here's the BB cushion pact. It comes with a mirror in the compact and a plastic cover attached to over the cushion area for you to place the sponge on top of it.

I've always thought it was an ingenious idea to have the design of the lid in this manner actually! Kudos to whoever who thought of it in Korea haha!

When you open the cushion pact for the first time, there would be a sticker seal over the cushion area to indicate that it's a brand new product. I already threw mine away by the time I started taking photos for this entry so, will try and keep that in mind for my next BB cushion next week! :D

This is how Innisfree advises its customers to use the BB cushions:

pic cr to Innisfree Singapore

 

I typically just take the flat sponge puff, press it into the cushion once and then slowly pat the product all over my face.

One thing that I've noticed from using this Innisfree cushion pact is that the cushion sponge is really tough and I really had to press quite hard into the sponge to get the product onto the puff.

My Laniege one is much softer and less 'tiring' to use lol! Ok, I'm really just plain lazy :x Use makeup also need to use strength simi logic leh? :/

  

Hand swatch in natural daylight

The colour was actually a tad too light for me :( On hindsight, I should have gone down to an Innisfree store to try the colour but I was lazy to go all the way to town just to try the colour haha.

Imagine the shock of my life when I first applied the BB cream on the first day.

My colleague told me 'Wah lau why your face so white huh' when I reached the office OTL

I thought it would oxidize on me so I happily left home looking like that. Sobs.

I learnt my lesson after that first day and after which I used my Chanel Les Beiges Healthy Sheer Glow Powder in No. 30 which is 1 shade darker for my skin after applying the BB cream to balance out the colour.

My final thought of this product - I like it! Even if the colour didn't match me lol. 

It lasted as its name suggested for a long time and each day when I used my makeup wipes to wipe off the product, there was alot left on my face actually. 

And the oil control is really superior compared to the Laniege one I used in the past (it's the Laniege BB Snow Cushion FYI) because I only found myself blotting about 5-6 hours after the application and even then, my face wasn't as oily as compared to when I'm using other face products.

So given that we live in such hot and humid weather conditions, I think they really formulated this BB formula very well for Southeast Asian countries! And SPF 50+/PA+++ too! Protection against both UVA and UVB rays wohoo!

Innisfree's Long Wear Cushion & Water Glow Cushion BB compacts retails for SGD$34 and KRW20,000 each. Does not come with any refill packs unlike most higher end Korean brands like Laniege and IOPE etc.
Refills sell at SGD$20 and KRW 10,000 each.
Hope this review helps and stay tuned for the next BB cushion review.
(Edit: Here are the reviews for the IOPE BB cushion!)
I will continue to file Korean brands under this label 'K-Beauty' so you can check those out if you're heading to Korea soon. I have a ton of Korean makeup goodies to share with you guys actually hoho!
Alright, annyeong for you! :)