So this year, the advent calendar I chose to buy is the essence one. For one, because the Douglas one has great value but they’re always the same brands and it has a lot of skincare products in it that you use only once and then it’s gone. I figured essence may have more makeup products that I can use for longer and I like the products as they’re one of my favorite drugstore makeup brands. I will do some mini reviews for all the products and I decided to split everything up into 8 parts, 3 days for each part. I will also try and add up the products to see if the calendar was a good deal in terms of value or not. Since I bought my calendar from the Pink Panda website I’ll look for the prices there first, but if a product isn’t available there, I’ll look up the prices elsewhere.

I bought my calendar for 130 lei, which was a bummer because they sold it for only 115 lei after a couple of weeks, so I guess it would have been better to wait but I was afraid it would be out of stock quickly, like most advent calendars are. So 130 lei is about 27 euros now (in Romanian money I mean).

The calendar is very cute, it’s formed of 24 small boxes that you can reuse. I’ll keep the packaging because I like it so much and I’ll do an advent calendar next year for someone else or even for myself. Each box has also a cute saying on it, regarding the product it contains. The theme of the calendar is “Spread the magic!”

essence I Love Extreme Volume Mascara

A mascara is always nice to have. It’s a black mascara that I think I had before and I liked it. essence mascara are great and they’re also cheap so they’re ones of the best on the market in terms of drugstore products (in my opinion, at least). I didn’t use it yet, because I switch up my mascara tube every 3 months. The tubes are always almost empty and I don’t keep old mascaras for safety reasons. The mascara is full size and has a retail price of 14 lei, which is 2.91 euros.

essence mini nail polish 02 a season to sparkle

Day 2 came with a nail polish in the box. I expect to find a couple of these in here because nail polishes are the cheapest products you can buy as color cosmetics. It’s a limited edition nail polish created for the advent calendar with a winter design. On the bottle it say “happy snow” and it has snowflakes on it. It’s a gold glitter nail polish.

I already did my nails with it and I did what I normally do: base coat, two coats of nail polish (just to be extra safe that it lasts longer and there are no streaks) and a top coat (shout out to my previous Douglas advent calendars). To be honest, it’s very similar to a golden essence nail polish that I decluttered recently, just that the glitter is not as chunky. I don’t think I will use it that often because glitter nail polishes are a pain to remove. The product is a mini size one (5 ml), so I don’t know the exact price of it, but considering the prices of normal essence nail polishes, I would say it’s about  6 lei (1.25 euros).

essence mini glitter nail file

So, yeah, I hate these little nail files that you can use only for a short time before they become useless. I couldn’t find the price of a mini nail file, but a regular one is around 7 lei, so let’s say this one is 3.5 lei (0.72 euros). I’m a little disappointed, but at least it’s pink and sparkly, so I find it to be cute.

So far, the first 3 days were alright. I like the mascara and the nail polish was ok, but the nail file is really not that great. We had one full size product and two mini products so far, having a total retail value of 4.88 euros. Hmm…not that great of a value so far to be honest, but let’s see what the next 21 days have in store (or should I say boxes).