I have a complicated relationship with makeup. I love looking nice, as most girls do (although this is perhaps particularly apt for Russian girls), and I’m also mostly a girly-girl, so I enjoy playing with makeup. However, I’m never actually as into makeup as I think I am.

My problem is two-fold. The first is that I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to makeup. My mother doesn’t wear makeup much, so she never revealed any great secrets. I’ve just been playing around with look after look, product after product, never getting it quite right. Things like Pinterest and Youtube have been a godsend, but it still took me until the age of 25 to finally figure out how to do an awesome winged liner. The other is perhaps a bit odder. If I do a full face of makeup, I don’t feel like myself anymore. I look into the mirror and see a porcelain doll, all large-eyed and pale-skinned.

What I’ve finally figured out is that I enjoy makeup, but just subtle touches of it. I live and die by good mascara, but eyeshadow is take it or leave it. Contouring seems super interesting, but less as a daily look and more in the same way that I find using makeup to turn myself into a zombie interesting. I can’t leave the house without putting something on my lips, but I usually prefer lip stains and tinted balms to lipstick or anything that requires me to wear lip liner.

Instead, what I decided I like best is having skin good enough that I don’t feel the need to wear more than a modicum of makeup on a daily basis. I’ve (slowly, painfully) learned than if I’m good to my skin, if I take care of it, my skin will be good right back. At first, this meant using a moisturizer daily, and only using the most gentle of face cleansers (even if this meant staying away from all the fun looking things at the drug stores). Then I began using the occasional face mask. Not the fun ones I liked as a teenager mind you, which were weird gels that dried into peelable films. No. Just simple, hydrating masks, like the lovely rose one by Fresh that I couldn’t afford, but would occasionally score samples of, or like the Glamglow hydrating masks, which simply sank into my skin (and which I couldn’t afford either).

It’s pretty hard to play around with beauty products on a college student’s budget. I make my annual Black Friday Sephora haul, where I buy all the little $10 sets that let me try higher end brands (and how I used to stock up on my favourite Buxom mascaras), I wander into Sephora to play with stuff, and I occasionally buy a thing here and there, but I rarely step outside my comfort zone. Discovering beauty subscription boxes like Birchbox and Ipsy helped, but the problem with those became twofold – they kept sending me the same sort of things over and over again (numerous hair oils, plentiful blue eyeliners, etc.), and I couldn’t check ingredients beforehand or notify them of my allergies. Then, one day when I was spending too much time on Buzzfeed again, I stumbled on a list of cult Asian beauty products. I read the cult beauty lists all the time, but I usually can’t afford most of the things they suggest. $40 NARS blush? Nope. $60 tin of Guerlain Meteorites? Not gonna happen. $3-10 Tony Moly sheet masks and delightfully scented apple shaped hand creams? *grabby hands*

It started off slow. I walked into Urban Outfitters and picked up a single Tony Moly sheet mask.

Then something terrible happened.

*cue dramatic pause*

I discovered the internet. I know, I know. To be specific, I learned that websites like Rose Rose Shop exist and that they are infinitely cheaper than anything I can find in NYC. Mizon All In One Snail Cream? $38 at the Urban Outfitters across the street from work, but only $16 online. My favourite hydrogels? $5 (and a trek) from Chinatown, or $1.50 online. This makes both the Jew and the beauty junkie in me want to jump for joy. There are, of course, a couple of downsides. Namely: you can’t try anything, the item descriptions may be… less than stellar, and, well, then there’s the shipping. The ETA on the shipping methods varies from a couple of days to 10 weeks, and the shipping is by weight, so on my last $200, 4.3 kilo (9.5 pound) order, that (painful) number came out to around $50. Mind you, this is still cheaper than getting things in person in NYC (and if you’re somewhere less urban you may not have access to any of these things period – although they are gaining in popularity).

Let’s do the math here: I started the haul because I wanted to save on the Innisfree hydrogels. RRS lets me save about $3.50 a mask, and I bought 20 of ‘em (wot, I’ve been going through at least one mask a week, and this way I don’t have to save my favourites for special occasions!). So I’ve already saved $70. Even after shipping, I save $20, and the shipping would have been much lower had those masks been the only thing I bought, because they only accounted for probably about a fifth of the weight (hydrogels are pretty heavy). You might see where this is going though. You can’t just order a mask or two, cos then you’re losing money, and don’t have enough stuff to last you while another order takes its sweet time shipping out. So instead you end up ordering All the Things and it becomes a HAUL, and well…

I present to you my entry to the slippery slope that is Asian beauty, and my very first haul from Rose Rose Shop. (Oh, and I’ve already ordered my second).

So this ordinary little box arrived for me in the mail. I’ll be honest, considering the fact that the order weight was 4.3 kilos or so, I was kinda surprised by how compact it was.

I was much too excited to see this. Also slightly terrified, because foot peel.

Look at all of my pretties! RRS separated them all into a bunch of pouches for shipping ease. Kinda neat, but also kinda confusing, cos half of my Innisfree hydrogels were in one pack, and half were in another, all mixed in with other random masks. I was briefly Concerned because I thought they only sent me 4 aloe hydrogels, and not the 15 that I ordered.

My shinies set free. The Boy suggested that I roll around atop my hoard like a dragon. I would totally make an awesome dragon ^-^

The mess of samples that came with my haul. I keep hearing that RRS is pretty terrible at giving out samples, so I guess I got lucky? *shrug* Super excited/terrified about that Benton mask.

This was one of my samples. No idea what it is…

I bought a lot of masks. Like… A Lot, a lot. These are just the assorted sheet masks.

Assorted hydrogels.

A random rice mask I decided to try cos it looked weird and interesting.

The Innisfree stash that started this whole mess in the first place. Hydrogels in the middle, surrounded by sheet masks on other side.

Various hand, foot and nail masks, so that all of me is soft and smooth. Also, the foot peeling liquid that both intrigues and terrifies me – the descriptions going around the internet are along the lines of “you soak your feet in this, and then a week later your foot falls off” @.@

Eye patches. The hope for these is that they will lessen post-sleep dep. bags and bruising, but at the very least I’ll keep them in the fridge and see if they feel nice and cool and soothing on my face when my allergies explode.

I’ll be honest. I got these purely because I think they’ll look neat and I’ll be able to pretend to be a superhero. 😛

A face scrub mask thing that the internet seems to love, and the cutest of bunny face mists.

Black head peel off strips, which I am informed are terrible for me, but I cannot help but love.

The token amount of makeup that I could not help but buy. What can I say, I have a weakness for good/interesting lip gloss and mascara.

Swatches of the Peripera glosses, at slightly different angles. The coral is surprisingly wearable on me (I generally look terrible in coral), and fades to a more pinkish color.

Some oil blotting sheets, cos I’m told that the Asian ones are waaaay better than the stuff from Sephora. The Missha ones have the cutest packaging.

What I thought was two packages of acne spot treatment patches, but turned out one pack of acne treatment patches and one pack of…something.

Proper reviews will come after I’ve had a proper chance to try things, but let me know in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to know more about!