REVIEWS YOU CAN USE: Strobe cream applicator tools
Reviews You Can Use is a new blog series based on Shoppo’s real-person product tests. No matter how much you spend, we want you to love the things you buy through us, and to make that easier we’re getting our hands on stuff we want and telling you whether it’s good or not.
I’m new to the (oh god, so amazing) world of K-beauty, and one of the things that I’ve gotten all riled up about lately is strobe cream. Strobe cream is a moisturizer with little shiny bits in it, giving your face an ultra-dewy sheen that glimmers with all the power of the sun, or the moon, or whatever celestial body you prefer. There are varieties. It’s a whole thing.
The downside with strobe cream, however, is that it gets your hands all shiny and shimmery, and sometimes that’s not what you’re about.
I decided to test some of my Shoppo beauty tool haul to figure out if there was a way to to do it better than dipping my hands in a bunch of (gloriously) shimmery goo (that feels like magic and I love it, please do not for one moment get me wrong).
For this review, I tested 3 different applicator tools, with varying results.
1) Stainless Steel Makeup Mixing Plate Palette Thing (⬅️BUY IT)
All this thing is is a stainless steel palette, and holy moly where has it been all my life. I’ve wanted one ever since I walked into MAC one day and said “Make my face a grown-up,” and they used one of these things to blob out all of their foundations. I’m a big fan of mixing pigment with eyeliner medium to create waterproof liquid liner, but up until now made my own disposable palettes out of cut-up plastic file folders like an asshole. Now I have this thing, which cleans up super easily and is big enough for blending other things, like moisturizer and retinol or foundation and SPF.
As a bonus, the palette doubles as a full-ass mirror, which is smudged looking in the picture above because I couldn’t help myself from using it the moment I saw it. It also has a nice rubberized finger hole area so you can hold it comfortably. Essentially, this is the gift that keeps on giving.
As another bonus, it comes with a double-sided stick tool that is great for scooping out blobs of product without you needing to get your finger dirt in it. Neither side of the stick thing is very sharp, which is great because it means I won’t accidentally stab my finger off when I inevitably use it to push back my cuticles, which it definitely isn’t designed to do.
Rating: Seventy billion stars. I will use this everyday until the sun swallows the earth.
2) Silisponge Flower Puff Silicone Makeup Applicator Blob (⬅️BUY IT)
I was really excited to check this thing out, all the way up until the point where I peeled it open because I thought it was still in its wrapper:
Long story short, this thing has one flat side and one rounded side and it’s supposed to look like that: Don’t try to crack it open — all you’ll find inside is disappointment.
I’ve seen multiple video reviews of this thing used for makeup, but I’m just now getting my brain around using brushes for foundation application, so I’m going to have to skip that particular adventure this time around. However, as a quick way to slap on shimmery moisturizer without getting your hands dirty, this thing was great: It provided a smooth, even application and was easy AF to clean.
Rating: Four stars. One star off for tricking me into breaking it.
3) Fish Brush of Death (⬅️BUY IT)
Look, I’m 33 but I’m also basic and kind of desperately wanted to love this stupid thing. The bristles are pink and the body is rose gold and it looks like a fish and I’m a pretty, pretty mermaid princess who wants to have this on her pretty mermaid princess makeup table. Let me live my life.
The synthetic bristles are set wide, flat and short — ideal for liquid application — In fact, I’d wager that smoothing makeup all over your delicate face skin is pretty much exactly what this thing was designed for.
Mixing the products on the palette was a lovely experience. The cream was evenly distributed on the bristles, which didn’t separate much, leading me into a false sense of security as I prepared for a smooth ride to Shimmertown.
After getting a nice scoop of moisturizer all ready for a full-coverage-but-not-too-thick application, I took this thing to my face and went at it.
Suddenly, SCRATCH. Also, GASP.
WTF, fish brush. After sustaining an emotionally jarring minor scratch to my eyelid, I pulled the traitorous utensil away to discover that apparently, some of the adhesive used to make the brush had pooled on the side during manufacturing, clumping all the bristles in one corner together and solidifying them into a hard, sharp fucking spike that stabbed me in the face.
In this (stupid) brush’s defense, this might only be a problem with my brush, or a few brushes, since if this were a product-wide problem we’d probably all be dead by now.
So anyway, it’s a cool brush, but goddamn. If you do end up getting it (I mean, $2 total ain’t bad), do your face a favor and check that it’s not going to slice your eye out before you actually use it.
Rating: Negative three stars. (Five stars for cool design and making me love you, negative eight stars for betrayal, for which there is no forgiveness*.)
(*Note: I have since chopped off the offending spike and I really do love this brush now so I guess the moral of the story is proceed with caution.)
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