Feel Unique Pick N Mix Samples
When I was a kid, my mother wouldn’t let me eat sweets. It was the height of the mad cow disease scandal and her, rather erroneous logic, was that I would catch mad cow disease from the gelatine in a bag of haribo. I fully blame her for my sweet obsession.
Each month, for £3.95, Feel Unique offer a service where you can pick 5 beauty samples. A pick n mix if you will, except this is makeup and skin care and not stale fudge a toddler has licked. The postage of the samples is then refunded to you in the form of a voucher, to be redeemed against any future order, making them essentially free. We don’t have much of a sample culture in the UK, so it’s always worth a browse in the pick n mix section to see if there’s anything you’d like to try. The samples I picked are as follows:
Cerave SA smoothing cream
I’ve heard Cerave is excellent for sensitive skin, so I was most excited when I saw they had several samples on offer. The smoothing cream claims to exfoliate, soften and smooth rogue skin. I currently have a nasty patch of dermatitis on my face, so this was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, the cream did absolutely nothing for me. It also, despite claiming to be unscented, smelt strongly of urine, which I assume is due to the high urea content. It was vile, made me feel sick, and my dermatitis lives happily on.
Clinique moisture surge
Well Clinique is one of those brands that everyone seems to love and swear by. I added this to the sample basket as it claimed to provide 72-hour hydration or some such nonsense. The cream was thin, and had a pleasant, nothing-y sort of smell. It didn’t hydrate my skin, and the next day where I had applied it, I had broken out quite badly. Another fail.
Nars Orgasm Blush
Finally, a sample that I liked! The sample is pathetically thin, just a little strip of card, but even so there was enough for 4 applications. The formula of the blush is gorgeous, it’s soft and smooth and blends easily. It lasted well too, a good few hours, although I didn’t test it in the gym. I can see why people go gaga over Nars blush. Unfortunately, although I loved the golden shimmer throughout the blush, the pink shade just wasn’t right for my skin tone. I look best in a mauve-y pink or an orangey sort of shade, and the fleshy pink of Orgasm didn’t suit me at all. And there’s a sentence I never thought I would type.
Nars Climax mascara
Jesus, Nars, we get it, you had sex once. Enough with the names already. This sample was a decent size, probably enough for a fortnights worth of applications. I was quite curious to try this, as the Climax mascara launched recently, and all the beauty Youtubers were wetting their knickers over it. Well fuck all of them, because this mascara is shit. I genuinely laughed out loud when I tried this mascara because it was so awful. This mascara made my lashes slightly blacker, and that is it. It didn’t lengthen, it didn’t curl and it certainly did not volumise. As though that wasn’t bad enough, it then started dropping off my lashes and raining onto my cheeks. I can’t believe Nars have the audacity to charge £21 for such an awful product.
Up Circle Body Scrub
And the final product is, drum roll please, a coffee scrub. I do love coffee scrubs. I choose the body scrub in the lemongrass scent. Unfortunately for me, a coffee lover, this meant that the scrub had a fresh citrus smell, and disappointedly smelt nothing like coffee. The actual scrub itself had a nice consistency, some scrubs tend to be too scratchy. There was just enough product in the sample to scrub my arms, and my butt. Although in fairness I do have a big butt. It left my skin feeling smoother, but not exceptionally so. It still doesn’t beat my favourite ever coffee scrub, which was a Christmas special from Superdrug last year. I am currently haunting their aisles hoping they bring it back.
So that is all the samples. I think next time I will just stick to perfume!