What Was That?- Jaclyn Hill's Surprise Valentine's Mystery Box Collection
- Kristen Oliphant
- Mar 10, 2021
- 3 min read
Jaclyn Cosmetics launched a seemingly random mystery box collection on February 05, 2021. Why was this random? Usually, mystery boxes are made when brands and companies are trying to get rid of some leftover stock that they have of a product that did not perform as well as they thought. This is odd for Jaclyn Cosmetics because she did not have any permanent items launched yet and none of the limited edition products were in the mystery box.
Launch day:
Jaclyn Cosmetics like most other brands launched the mystery box at 11 am pacific standard time, which would be 2 pm over here on the east coast. If you have purchased from any e-commerce brand before, you know they upload their products 1-2 minutes before the actual launch time. Even though this is standard practice, most of the products for this collection sold out before the actual launch time, due to the amount of traffic on the website.
There were 4 mystery boxes to choose from: Lip Locked ($25), Light of my Life ($45), Self-Love Starter Kit ($35), and For the Love of Makeup ($65). Each set contained different amounts of the items as well as variations of colors for the highlighters. When I went to purchase the $65 kit, I got all the way to the payment page before it sold out and was removed from my cart. Luckily the Self-Love Starter Kit was still available which gets you a little bit of everything from this collection. In this kit were the liquid lip trio, gloss, a loose highlighter, and a baked highlighter similar to her holiday 2019 pressed highlighter formula.
After purchasing, I was surprised that my shipment was packed and out to be shipped that day! I received it on February 12th, just in time to be used on Valentine's day.
Review/ Impression:
Let me start with the packaging. The box was beautiful and each item was packaged carefully and beautifully. However, it did have paper packing confetti which I hate because it gets literally everywhere. The lip trio was in its own box which I thought was interesting. Just by that individual packaging of the lip trio made me think that this "mystery box" was supposed to be launched individually but since "Lipstick gate" in 2019, I can see why she just included it in a mystery box. The highlighter and loose highlighter/glitter packaging were probably my favorite. The "J" on the top of the loose highlighter/glitter is so classy, sleek, and clean- by far my favorite packaging from this collection.
Products-wise, the lip trio is lightweight and PIGMENTED! These liquid lips are also very long-lasting. I think Jaclyn wanted to see how these lippies did first before she launched her bigger line of liquid lips, as she announced today March 10th that her next collection is liquid lips. The baked highlighter is absolutely beautiful as well, it is a little too dark for my skin tone which is a little bit of a bummer. I wish there was an option where you could put in your skin tone for these mystery boxes but then again they are a means of flushing out the old products, so I can see why they keep the mentality of "you get what you get". The only issues I had were that the loose highlighter/glitter seemed like a private labeled product. Sure the packaging is beautiful and original, but absolutely what is that. To me, its quality didn't match up to the other products in the box.
Overall Thoughts
Overall do I think this was a good value? Absolutely. I am a fan of Jaclyn Hill and have been since 2015. I have almost every product that she has put out and I can say they have all been really good (besides the moldy lipsticks, sorry girl). I think this collection was for her die-hard fans who like to collect her products. This was not a launch meant for the general public, it was for sure one meant for her loyal subscribers and followers. I think she priced it well but my biggest critique is that the marketing behind it made no sense. There were no Jaclyn Hill products and then there was a mystery box. It was confusing because as a consumer you're wondering, "what could be in there?". I think the marketing team could've found a more creative way to showcase this launch. Maybe instead of a mystery box, they could've just framed it as exclusive Valentine's bundles so the customer knew what they were getting.
Comments