makeup that's not actually like all totally awesome like everyone says it is

Some makeup is overly glorified without being superfabulous, eg. Maybelline Great Lash, which is universally praised in beauty magazines yearly but is generally known to be mediocre. I mean, it's not terrible. It's not really wet, it doesn't glop or nothing. It's just okay. It doesn't really lengthen or volumise or anything, possibly it makes your lashes black for like blonde people or something, possibly it makes your lashes a tiny bit thicker by coating them. It gives a slightly nicer than natural look which is, you know, nice, I mean, it's okay. It's just not superfabulously amazing that it deserves to be plugged again and again.

I mean, It's not even like a Maybelline advertising scam or nothing because they make better mascaras. Almost every other mascara they make is better including the one where you have to put the white bit on and then the black bit and if you don't put in the effort to let the white bit dry and then coat it properly with the black bit, bits of your eyelashes will be white. I'll tell you what this Maybelline Great Lash thing is: it's a conspiracy. I bet it's some kind of hideous social experiment by behavioural psychologists in which they attempt to convince women to buy a product that they (the women, also the military-industrial-cosmetics-marketing complex) know is just mediocre, just to see if they can. I bet you Maybelline Great Lash isn't America's #1 mascara, and those Cosmopolitan magazine beauty editors don't actually really love it and buy it and use it daily. They're magazine beauty editors, they're using some freebie mascara they got to review - trust me, I interned at a beauty mag for a month after university. There's just all this fabulous press about it and, even though you've tried this mascara once, and you probably didn't hate it but you just didn't want to buy it again, when you read about how awesome Maybelline Great Lash is supposed to be it just kind of makes you want to give it another go doesn't it. You start thinking: maybe you used it wrong and you had to zigzag your brush, or comb your lashes before or after with a comb or something, and maybe you're right, but Maybelline also makes like ten other mascaras that don't require all that effort to look a whole lot better.


Maybelline Great Lash sure don't look like that on me.

Some MAC eyeshadow shades are totally overhyped as well, and I'm not really ashamed to say that I was swept up in the Parrot euphoria. I wasn't into bright makeup the first time Parrot came out (I'd just started earning my own spending money and was buying essentials...like lipgloss and suchlike) and I just kept hearing about this eyeshadow again and again and again for years: parrot parrot parrot parrot parrot. There were people getting all excited because this one eyeshadow kind of looked like Parrot and then someone swatched it and then it was like, oh no, it's not a real dupe! Parrot's that tiny bit more blue! People were layering eyeshadows on top of each other to try to recreate Parrot, people with far too much money and time were buying Parrot for like a million dollars on American Ebay, etc. etc. And then Parrot came out again and everyone went crazy before they realised Parrot was just, you know, a nice blue-green eyeshadow and in their quest for the perfect blue-green eyeshadow they'd actually found a better one some time ago. And that was the end of Parrot. I wanted to buy Parrot when it came out in the MAC Originals collection and it was sold out - I always underestimate the amount of initiative people will take to buy a MAC eyeshadow - but I recently bought Parrot cheaply on livejournal. It's actually a pretty nice teal, but kind of like Barack Obama, it's kinda sorta good, yeah, it just ain't the second coming of Martin Luther King.

It's next to Aquavert which I'm not that sure about.



Yeah, Parrot totally rocks my world.