Beauty FAIL: Color Samples
By Glinda
You know, there’s something to be said for a spouse who knows you really, really well.
We’ve been a couple for coming up on 20 years, married for almost ten. So the man knows better than to get me flowers on Valentine’s Day. Hell no, he took me to Sephora and pretty much told me to get whatever I want. The man certainly knows how to make me swoon.
I’ll have some posts up on what I bought later on, but I wanted to share a pet peeve that I was reminded of when browsing the displays at Sephora.
We can explode protons, but we cannot figure out how to truly represent the color of makeup? I’m talking specifically about those horrid plastic things on the end of lipstick testers that purportedly tell you what the color is supposed to be. Eight times out of ten though, the color looks pretty much nothing like the color representation. And a lot of the time, the lip pencil and eye pencil ones aren’t any better.
Which kind of sucks, because then you know that you can’t really discount what it looks like on the tester and you have to try it out on your hand. I still am not comfortable trying the stuff on my lips or my eyes, no matter how many times they wipe it and tell me it is perfectly sanitary.
I definitely have fun trying out colors, but it would be nice to know that the color sample I’m looking at is fairly accurate.
Is that too much to ask?
February 15th, 2011 at 11:13 am
They used to give out little sealed pouches of the actual lipstick colours — YSL does it, as did Merle Norman (remember them?). They were smaller than a Smartie but you could use the fresh packet of lipstick colour on your lips once or twice, sometimes more. You were free to try it on alone or see how it looked when you put on your other makeup.
I’m not sure how much more it would cost to make these available for every lipstick product out there, but honestly, mark up in make up is astronomical. Maybe the problem is storage space–finding out how to store those samples so that they don’t eat up all the space in the store!