The Pearls of Makeup Academy

It seems as if the whole twitterland and bloggosphere has been talking about the release  of the MUA (MakeUp Academy) range at Superdrug for the past week. Why such a buzz? Because the collection  was boasting to deliver a range of over 100 Lipsticks, eye colours, blushers, mascara, and nail polishes, all costing £1 each. How much quality should we expect from a £1 product? All the products have been available to purchase online for a few days now, but I really wanted to see the products for myself to see if I was tempted and I was thrilled to see that there was a store not far from where I live which stocked them (Check here  to see if your local Superdrug stores the MUA range).



I’ll spare you the details on how I was excited on Saturday to take the train to go the store because it’s quite embarrassing frankly.

I really did not know what to expect from the brand but before setting off, I had already visions of a messy display unit, with lots of broken shadows and hardly anything left because of the affordability of the products. I was pleasantly surprised to find a very very tidy unit, with all the eyeshadows and eyeliners conveniently placed at eye level. In fact, this was primarily my interest, to sample the eyeshadows and eyeliners.

Like a kid in a sweet shop, I started to swatch the shadows and just could not believe how bright and pigmented they were. To be honest, I wanted to buy more, but I tried to be good and bought 4 shadows It would have been a nice touch to have names for the shades instead of just numbers, but I guess for the price, one can’t be too fussy.


 

From left to right:

- Shade 5,  looks acid lime green in the pan. In reality it’s a lovely shade of bright green which reminds me of tinkerbell
- Shade 14, absolutely gorgeous, looks like black with a tinge of green in the pan, but looks much brighter in real life. I can’t wait to play with this!
- Shade 9, In the pan, looks like dark purple with blue iridescent specks. In reality, it swatches much brighter. The colour (not the texture) really reminds me of urban decay fishnet.
- Shade 13, delectable shade of dark purple, which looks better swatched than in the pan.
These were swatched over moisturised hand, without primer, and photographed in bright daylight outside.



Overall verdict: I love those 4 shades very very much and I am absolutely thrilled.  The pigmentation is incredible for the price. I am very new in beauty blogging so please excuse my ‘beginner’s terms’: the shadows are soft but after you swatch them, they leave some kind of waxy /shiny indentation where you swatch them, which makes them feel a bit cheap. But unlike the shadows from the 120 palette ( my favourite palette in the whole world) they won’t crumble within an inch of a fingernail and won’t leave you with too much fall out.  I was a bit sad (all right, all right, I was totally upset) not be to able to buy shade 18 (a matte purple) as they only had the sample version left.





As for the glitter eyeliners, MUA released some fantastic shades. I was really tempted to buy the neon purple, pink and green eyeliners: The colour was funky and cool and I really wanted to take them home with me but sadly, they were not worth it and I could not work with them. Even after a few coats to try to get a decent line of eyeliner, with not too many gaps, the eyeliner left a feeble trail of transparent gel liner with some interspersed glitter specks. By the time I went to check the new limited edition ‘Festival Lashes’ from Girls Aloud & Eylure, the eyeliner had already smudged and disintegrated.

Have you bought anything from the MUA range, perhaps lipsticks or nail polishes? Let me know what you think, and feel free to leave the address of your blogpost or youtube video below.
Thank you for reading, mua(h) xx