essence mini nail polish 06 meet me under the mistletoe

Soooo, here’s nail polish number 6! I can’t believe we get 6 nail polishes in this advent calendar, that’s like 1/4 of the products which I think it’s a little overdoing it.

This is a dark blood red color, a little more vampy, which I also hope is really the last one because between the nail polishes and the nail file and the nail stickers I had enough of all the nail products. At least if the nail polishes were good, but I redid my nails after only two days because I took a warm bath the other day and some of the nail polish chipped on 2-3 fingers. That’s really not good at all. The nail polish has a retail value of 1.25 euros.

essence ring & bracelet tattoos

This is another product I’m really not excited for because I’m not a kid anymore and I don’t apply temporary tattoos on my skin. It’s like having stickers that no one uses. I’m gonna be generous again and say these are worth about 1 euro, although I think they would be overpriced.

essence eyeshadow palette

Finally, the star of the show, the biggest item in the advent calendar is this 9-pan eyeshadow palette that doesn’t have a name. The colors are all neutrals, they have a silky texture and most of them have a satin finish with a couple of mattes thrown in there. The palette contains 7.2 grams and it’s not vegan because it does contain carmine.

I would say this is a nice everyday palette for school or for the office and the color payoff is similar to other essence eyeshadows, meaning that they’re not that pigmented or long-lasting, but they’re good for a neutral, discrete makeup. I like it and I will certainly use it.

I looked up similar palettes from essence and given the smaller pan size, I would say this has a retail price of about 15 lei (3.1 euros).

So all these three products are worth 5.35 euros, which brings our grand total to 37.49 euros, so only about 10 euros more that what I initially paid for the entire advent calendar.

Final thoughts

It was fun opening up the calendar, I liked the design with the numbered boxes a lot because it means I can reuse it or just store it for a while on my desk and some of the products were great. I will definitely use the eyeshadow palette, the highlighter, the mascara, the eye and lip pencils, the lipstick and the lip balm.

However, there were too many nail polishes and nail products (6 mini nail polishes, a nail file and nail stickers). I would preferred to receive miniatures of other powder products like a blush, a bronzer and a face powder instead or even some cream products. A lip gloss would also been nice.

The filler items like the stickers, gift tags and tattoos were simply useless for me and they were actually a let down. The best products were for the most part in the first half of the calendar and then it went downhill up to the final product on the 24th.

I don’t know if I would choose this calendar again next year, but also I’m not willing to pay a lot of money for other calendars that are also full of miniatures, samples and filler items. Probably if the design were cute, I would give it a shot again because I like most of the essence products (except for the nail polishes which are honestly not good and I hope they toned it down next year).

I had fun opening the advent calendar this year and I hope you will join me again next year!