Sephora Play! All Stars Edition

This month, Sephora VIB Rouge members were offered another limited edition Play! box. August's curated box was themed "All Stars Edition" and featured six trial size products from Sephora’s top luxury brands that all boast an average five-star review. The box was listed for $20 and made available to other membership tiers following the exclusive Rouge access period.

The luxury Play! boxes have way better bags in my opinion. This one was fabulously holographic. The marketing materials were designed as beauty-themed tarot cards and arrived in a jacket envelope with matching holographic foil stamping. Oh to be a graphic designer at Sephora...

SK-II
Facial Treatment Essence | $99

Sephora lists this as, “An award-winning, signature essence that moisturizes and brightens, revealing youthful-looking, radiant skin.“ Translation: A hundred-dollar bottle of alcohol and some weird strain of yeast called Pitera. My googling skills turned up scant evidence that this fancy ingredient is actually proven to do anything beyond moisturize. All I could find is that yeast has peptides, proteins, amino acids, carbohydrates and nucleic acids. All good things. But so do many other products you can get at CVS for pocket change. There’s nothing in this Pitera stuff that’s special in any sense or rigorously backed by science. So, what we’ve got is pretty much just a moisturizer. Hydration is awesome! This stuff hydrates! But it doesn’t really do much else! For a hundred dollars, I want to be wowed. I want visible or tangible results beyond what a basic moisturizer can do. Which is why I gave this sample to my coworker. Maybe she’ll have the patience with it to see if it does anything in the long term. I do not.

Hourglass
Veil Mineral Primer | $54

I’ve sampled this primer many times, Sephora loves to give away little vials of it with your orders and rewards points. And no wonder, it’s a high-performing product that sells reliably and does the job beautifully. It goes on like liquid silk, dries to a perfect, translucent matte finish, feels weightless on your face, and makes your foundation lay down flawlessly. It also gives you an added boost of sunscreen. So I’d say if you are looking for a good primer to help prep your skin and to prolong the wear of your foundation, this is absolutely a fantastic choice. It’s ideal for those with normal, oily, or combo skin, but perhaps a little too mattifying if you have dry-leaning skin. However, if you are in any way sensitive to silicones, you’re going to want to skip the Veil Mineral primer. There’s a boatload of them in this stuff and they did not play well with my skin. So, your mileage may vary, depending on your skin type.

Dior
Diorshow Mascara | $28.50

This is my third free sample of Diorshow mascara and I’ll happily take any more that Sephora sends my way. It’s pretty damn good! It gives excellent volume and noticeably lengthens lashes. Most mascaras do one of those two things well but Diorshow hits a home run with both. No clumping. No flaking. No weird spidery lashes. No transferring. The brush is big and fluffy, which I like. All in all, a fantastic product. It’s at the far end of the price spectrum has far as mascara goes. You can easily get one at the drugstore for less than $10 (L’Oreal Lash Paradise) that performs just as well. But if you were wanting to splurge on something high end, this is a solid purchase to make.

AMOREPACIFIC
MOISTURE BOUND Rejuvenating Crème | $150

On one hand, I’m thrilled to get a big fat sample of some fancy face cream I’d never ordinarily buy. On the other hand, 99% of these luxury moisturizers are just bullshit. I mean, does anyone actually go looking for pure, stabilized bamboo sap? How is bamboo good for me? I have no idea. I can’t find any real evidence that it does anything aside from sound healthy/natural/organic. But whatever, let’s assume bamboo is great and will make your face as soft as a baby panda. What else does this cream have? A shit load of alcohol. Alcohol will dry your skin up and leave it irritated. Possibly both. So while you’re putting moisture in with this bamboo sap, you’re just sucking it right back out with the alcohol. And if that’s not enough, there’s a strong perfume to this cream. That can also be irritating.

With all of these factors in mind, I did not put this on my face. I patch tested it on my wrist. It’s a light weight fluffy cream. It absorbs quickly. No greasy texture. The perfume lingers for quite some time. Moisture effects aren’t really above or beyond any typical moisturizer. I’m not a fan of the jar packaging. Scooping my fingers into the cream always feels a bit gross and personally I think it’s hard to measure out a standardized amount that way. So ultimately, nothing about this is selling me on anything. I’ll stick with my regular moisturizer and save some cash.

TOM FORD
Lip Color | $54

This is one of those samples you get that totally makes the cost of the box worth it. The full sized tube of Tom Ford lipstick is $54. Now, I make a tidy living and certainly do my share of treat yo' self splurges, but a lipstick at this price point would give me pause. Not saying I wouldn’t fork over the cash for it, but I’d certainly have to be head over heels in love with a lipstick to throw down that kind of money.

The sample I received was Indian Rose. it’s that sort of dusty peachy pink color that nearly every sample lipstick from a beauty box sub will arrive in because it’s billed as a “universal shade” even though such a term is hilariously inaccurate. But whatever. Indian Rose is a nice color. It’s close to my natural lip color and is very wearable (for me). The formula is creamy and opaque. The finish is satin and quite comfortable to wear. Not drying (but not really moisturizing either). It stays put a reasonable amount of time, which it should at this price point.

Overall, a solid bullet lipstick. Worth the price tag? Not really. You could take that money to a MAC counter and get three lipsticks of equal quality and still have $3 left over for latté. But if money is not a concern, it’s a gorgeous lipstick. I’ll have fun using up the sample, but I don’t think I love it enough to really need a full sized tube. If I’m dropping fifty large on lipstick, I’m buying Guerlain Rouge G and getting the kickass built-in mirror.

Viktor & Rolf
Flowerbomb | $30-$215

This is THE best-selling perfume and the number one signature scent of millennials. Crafted in 2005, it’s crowd-pleasing sweet gourmand with soft floral notes that are “yummy” and “pretty.” It comes in a sparkling glass bottle with crystal pink liquid that shouts girly. And to top it off, it’s super affordable. Which is, I suspect, a contributing factor to it’s surge in popularity among the generation heavily burdened by student debts and inadequate salaries.

I’d never sniffed it before, as it seemed to be akin to a Victoria’s Secret body spray. But perhaps my judgement was wrong! Maybe I was suffering from preconceived notions built around the few people I know who wear it. So I decided this sample would be my chance to set aside bias and truly give Flowerbomb a chance.

At first spray, Flowerbomb is actually quite lovely. There’s fresh citrus (bergamot) and a gorgeous green tea. The patchouli comes in behind that and it starts to get truly interesting. I started to wonder if maybe I would become a closet fan of Flowerbomb after all. But then came the fruity sweetness and drowned it all to hell. Freesia is often cloying to me and it certainly is here, in abundance. The osmanthus flower is like a sticky fruit basket set outside in the heat to over ripen. The rose smells like it was dipped in whatever that red stuff is they make candied apples from. And I swear there’s a vanilla in here, even though none is listed. It’s just all too much. It IS like a Victoria’s Secret body spray if you pumped it full of steroids and gave it pink glitter stilettos to walk around in.

Even when the dry down turned the volume back to normal on the fruits and gave me powdery musk, I still couldn’t deal with the sweetness of it all. So I guess the lesson here is that sometimes preconceived notions are spot on. Hard pass for me. If it’s your thing, that’s perfectly fine. You should enjoy it. And if you want a free deluxe sample spray of Flowerbomb, let me know.

The beauty-themed tarot cards included with the sample bag. I wish they created a full-sized deck of actual tarot cards. I would totally buy that.

Overall Thoughts
As far as monetary value goes, this box (like the last limited-edition box) works out to roughly $84.00, so it's well worth the $20 admission price. For me personally, value boils down to what I'm actually going to use vs what I'm going to give away or toss. Both the lipstick and mascara are fantastic and I will use them both up. The bag is also adorable and I'll bring it to work as my new office makeup bag. So, for $20 I think I'm a happy customer. I'm a little bummed I didn't like the other products as much, but I will likely opt in for another luxury box in the future based on quality and sample size.