RealTechniques by Samantha Chapman STARTER SET

 Hello everybody! Heres the first of my blogstream: the RealTechniques by Samantha Chapman Starter Set! So if you look at the picture below, I've already opened it without taking a picture (sorry) but you can easily Google it and find the original ad kind of thing? I don't know if I'm making sense anymore... Hold tight cause this review is going to be pretty long! Lets get started..

Packaging: okay so its an average packaging like usual drugstore/superstore products. The plastic is made of that same hard plastic you usually need to cut with an X-Acto Knife but this one has a slit like other boxes so it's easier on hands and you don't have a risk of cutting yourself.

So this is the back of the plastic (sorry its sideways) but it goes through every single brush in the set and shows what it's purpose is. And the face is the designer/makeup artist Samantha Chapman. 

Okay so this is a picture I stole off Google (credit to breathebeautyblog.com) so it shows you exactly what brushes are in the starter kit: the deluxe crease brush, base shadow brush, accent brush, pixel point eyeliner brush and brow brush. 

Deluxe Crease Brush: it's very fluffy and dome shaped. It's slightly tapered, which is nice but just by looking at the picture, you can pretty much tell that the dome is huge and it may or may not fit your crease therefore defeating the original purpose. Before I bought this set, I checked out a lot of other people's reviews on it and they said it works great when blending out concealer for your under eye area. I haven't actually tried mine for that because I don't usually get dark eye circles (lucky me) but when I plan on using this brush, I use the accent brush to pack the corner in my crease then just blend out using this brush. But with my method, it's really easy to blend too far up so that's the only downside for me personally I guess.

Base Shadow Brush: it is what it's called. It's just a general brush you're supposed to use for packing color on the lid but I find that it's almost too fluffy to pack it on properly. It gets the colour onto my lid but not as pigmented as I would like sometimes. This brush is also tapered as you might be able to see from the picture above but I find you can use this as your crease/blending brush because it's much smaller and it probably fits in more people's crease.

Accent Brush: this is pretty much a smudger brush. It works well for putting colour around the inner tear duct but aside from that, I find that it doesn't have many other uses. I don't typically smudge colour under my eyes because a smokey eye is too dramatic for school and it might be okay if you're planning on smudging an eye pencil or something so for me, not that many perks.

Pixel Point Eyeliner Brush: okay so if you look at any of these pictures, you can see that the pixel point eyeliner is not actually pixel point and it's pretty big. I agree with the pictures because even though Samantha apparently likes thicker lines for gel liner, I have smaller eyes so I don't think thicker eyeliner is going to do anything. It just looks fat and creates a fat line so I'm probably not going to be using this brush.

Brow Brush: I typically don't need to fill in my brows, but on occasion that I do, it's a decent brush for it. I'm more used to angled eyeliner brushes because they're pretty much the same shape, but this one is much softer and I'm not used to it as I stated above. I also tried using gel liner with this brush (look two pictures down) but I find that it's really soft and although its better than the pixel point eyeliner brush, it's not my favourite. If you look at the picture right below this one, you can see my eyeliner brush in the corner of the photo (its the one with the pink and black cheetah print) and I bought it for $15 HKD which was about $2 CDN so not too bad considering I don't even do gel eyeliner that much. I'm planning to go buy the Maybelline one when I go to the States next week because I only have the Maybelline cream eyeshadow in Tenacious Teal but we'll see what I feel like splurging on.

 So if you research this product a lot, you'll find that almost every blogger/reviewer hates the case that these brushes come with. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of it either. The RealTechnique brushes have a rubber grip at the bottom but the case has elastics so it's a pain to pull out and place back in. I tried doing one of those pretty DIY makeup brush holder/cup things but mine turned out awful so I pulled everything out and I'm just going with this case for now because I have nothing else that's better. As you can see from the picture below, I store pretty much every brush I have (limited when you look at it) in this case and the left side with my four brushes is going to stretch the elastic like crazy, which sucks! But although Samantha made this with the toggle so the case can stand (below), the elastics are horrible for her brushes with rubber and I feel that she should probably have done it like one of those metal things that you can slide back in or push it in and it'll click and stay? I don't know if that's even possible but anything is better than this combination of rubber and elastics.

 So while everyone else hates this case (and I agree), I actually found a decent way to use it. I was surfing Michelle Phan's website for all of her tips because she's actually really good even though she typically does costume-like makeup tutorials (in my opinion) she comes up with this way to clean your brushes and dry them: DIY Brush Cleaner & Drying Brushes. I saw it and I'm like "hmmmm I don't have those clips, what can I do to my clothes hanger?!" so I looked at my case and the toggle was practically screaming at me to use it. So what I did is that these hangers have a flat part at the top so I loosened the toggle until the hanger could fit in between the case covers then I tightened the toggle so it wouldn't move. And tada! I dried my brushes that way! When you read her page that I linked earlier, she makes total sense of how you shouldn't dry your brushes tilted upwards or else the water will slide down and destroy the glue holding the bristles. It's like whoa, that't totally true and I never thought about it that way. She is a genius. So I just hung my creation on the glass door for my shower but you can also hang it off cupboards or anything that has a handle and is just not touching another surface at the bottom. My eye brushes took around 3 hours to dry completely and my sister's huge powder brush took about 12 hours (@.@) so overall, not too bad. Btw, I tried Michelle Phan's DIY deep cleaner from that link (that's why it took so long to dry) and it's not actually bad way to clean even though dish soap and extra virgin olive oil look pretty gross on a plate.

So this time, I reviewed along the way but I'll recap anyways. The brushes as a whole are decent price because I bought mine for $20 CDN and you can get it for $19 US at Walmart or Target so they're pretty cheap and I didn't expect much. What I use them for aren't what they were originally made for but it's okay because I technically only wanted a crease/blending brush from this set anyways. They're soft and pretty decent at application if you take good care of them and the case is still iffy for me even though I developed my own creative way to use it.

Compared to Expensive Brushes (Sephora, etc...): 3.5/5
Compared to Drugstore: 4.5/5

xoxo, Michelle