What I'm Not Buying: Dose of Colors Desi X Katy Collection

Dose of Colors has teamed up with YouTube beauty personalities Desi Perkins and Lustrelux for a collection that includes an eyeshadow quad, two highlighters, two liquid lipsticks, two cream lipsticks, and a lipgloss. 

And I won't be buying. 

Up front I want to say that I really respect a lot of what is happening in this collection. I like that the majority of products are inclusive and can work/were created for skin tones that are very often excluded. I also like that, in addition to this being a collaboration between brand and influencer(s), this is also a collaboration between two women. 

But I have written before about how I am generally just not a fan of collaborations. There are many reasons for that, and I have discussed them at length, but I also feel there is a bit of added pressure to buy when your favorite beauty influencer had a hand in creating something. So many people buy products simply because they like the person attached to it, even if they don't need the products. 

And that's exactly what I want to talk about in this post. Why I don't need any of the products in this collection. 

Let's look at it:

The entire collection costs $167. The lip products range from $15 to $18, and the eyeshadow quad and highlighters cost $28 each. 

Let's first talk about the eyeshadow quad, called The Girls:

This quad is exclusively shimmers, and while I think the colors are pretty and straddle the line between being neutral but also interesting, the recommended method of application is one's fingers. Now, some people might imply that eyeshadows are "cheap" if they can only work with fingers, and while that can be true with some shadows, it is not true for all. For example, some of my Natasha Denona shadows can only be applied with a finger, and they look absolutely stunning. But on the flip side, some shadows in my Sephora Pro Editorial palette can only be used with fingers, and they still look awful.

Let's look at swatches:

As I said, while I think these colors are very pretty, I already have all of them elsewhere in my collection. Mainly, I have them in my custom palette:

The colors are essentially a shimmery champagne, copper, taupe, and bronze. I imagine most people, especially those interested in a collection by a non-mainstream brand and two YouTube influencers, already have plenty of these colors in their collections as well.

Let's move on to the highlighters. There are two shades.

Mírame:

And Fuego:

While, like the eyeshadows, these highlighters are very pretty, I'll repeat what I say often about new highlighters on the market: a highlighter is a highlighter is a highlighter. I honestly feel like once you have one or two highlighters that work for you and your complexion, you really have all that you "need." And I feel like most highlighters on the market really do the same thing for your skin, which is to give a nice glow. So having an entire drawer of highlighter really doesn't make a ton of sense, because most of them, essentially, perform the same. 

What I like about the highlighters in this collection, however, is that they are more inclusive than the majority of highlighters on the market. It's a well-established fact that the beauty industry heavily skews toward favoring lighter skin tones, and in the past, when companies have released products that are more inclusive, like the Makeup Geek X KathleenLights highlighter palette:

People with lighter skin tones complained that the palette didn't work for them. And I find that to be incredibly tone-deaf and obnoxious. So I enjoy the fact that in this big collaboration, both highlighter shades are deeper than those typically sold. 

With that said, I already have more highlighter than I know what to do with. (And that is especially why I feel that once you have found a highlighter you enjoy, a highlighter is a highlighter is a highlighter.) And personally, I have two highlighters that I really enjoy that work great for my skin tone. 

They are Becca Moonstone:

And Becca Opal:

As you can see, I have used up quite a bit of Moonstone, and that picture is actually a few months old. Since it was taken, I have cleared out the upper right side of the product. (I would take a picture to show updated progress, but I am still not able to get up after surgery.) 

And while I am certainly not suggesting that these two highlighters are duplicates of the ones in the Dose of Colors collection, they are similar colors that work for my skin tone. 

Let's look at the lipsticks. The collection has two nudes. A lighter one, called No Shade:

And a deeper one, called More Creamer Please:

Now, I have to say that the lip swatches of all the colors in this collection are absolutely gorgeous. But with my coloring, I have found that finding the right nude shade can be a little tricky. But over the years I have found a few that I love, including MAC Velvet Teddy:

And NARS Barbara:

There are countless nude lipsticks available, but these are two that I absolutely love and that work for me and give me the variety of a lighter nude and darker nude. 

The collection has two liquid lipsticks, an oxblood color called Saváge:

And an orange-red, called Hot Fire:

Okay, let's take a moment to talk liquid lipsticks. So, I know this is blasphemous, but I am actually not the biggest fan of liquid lipstick. I tried the trend out when it first appeared, but I immediately found that it was just not for me. I tried several formulas, including those raved to be "the best," and struggled with my lips looking like cracking Play-Doh or drying out to the point of extreme pain (Colourpop, I'm looking at you). So, I jumped off this train pretty soon after I got on it. 

With that said, I do still own a few liquid lipsticks, and two of them are from Dose of Colors (Cold Shoulder and Campfire, which, ironically, aren't too far off of the colors in this collection.)

Cold Shoulder, while not oxblood, is a deep purple color that I am not brave enough to wear most of the time. It's easily the deepest shade in my collection, so it completely satisfied my desire for any dark lipstick. And since I wear those colors so infrequently, it wouldn't make a lot of sense for me to have more than one dark lipstick. 

And in terms of an orange-red, yes, I have Campfire, but that shade is not nearly as bright as Hot Fire. Instead, my orange-red of choice is Besame Carmine:

And finally, the lipgloss:

This gloss, called Over the Top, is full of glitter and is meant to make your lips look incredibly shiny. I'm not really a lipgloss person, but I do have a couple, including one that is new to my collection, Jouer Skinny Dip:

And Skinny Dip, while maybe a little extra shimmery, is essentially the same concept as Over the Top. 

 So there you have it. I literally own a duplicate or a close duplicate of every item in this collection. And my guess is, since this is targeted at the makeup addicts of the world who want to support their favorite beauty personalities, that most people who lust after this collection already own a duplicate of most of everything too. Now, as I write this post, this collection is already sold out. And I don't know if the brand is planning to restock or not or what the situation is. The collection just launched yesterday, so I find it kind of eye rolling that the collection is already sold out. And I know people will mention that this is a small brand, but when you have a collaboration of this sort, you very obviously know the demand for it. After all, it's why you are collaborating with these people in the first place. 

Typically in these anti-haul posts I show multiple examples of products that look similar to the new product, but in this post, I honestly felt showing multiple highlighters, nude lipsticks, lipglosses, liquid lipsticks, and basic neutral eyeshadows would be a little overwhelming. So I kept this post to just the duplicate items in my collection. And while I shouldn't be, I was actually a little surprised to find that I did actually own something very similar for every single item in my collection. 

This is a beautiful collection, and the packaging is no exception:

But I feel strongly that there is no reason to continually buy the same thing over and over. And I get that there are more emotions attached to this collection because it is a collaboration with not one, but two popular beauty personalities. But just because you are proud of the collaboration and the women who made it, doesn't mean you need to buy a ton of products you already own. 

And like I said in my Jaclyn Hill X Morphe anti-haul post, some people will just by anything a person attaches their name to or had a hand in making. It doesn't mater if they already have twenty eyeshadow palettes that look exactly like that, they are going to buy it for their fandom. And I get that. I was that way when I was younger. At one point in time, if Justin Timberlake had a makeup line that sold the worst products imaginable, I would have purchased every single piece from it. And from what I have seen thus far, the products in the Desi X Katy collection are performing well. I will never enjoy applying my eyeshadow with my finger, so that was an easy pass for me, and there is just no need for me to add all of these products that I already have to my collection. 

So, if you have fear of missing out over this collection, maybe it will give you comfort to know that no one will ever know people are wearing items from this specific collection when they go out. If you wear a highlighter or nude lipstick that flatters you, that's great. It doesn't need to be the specific one from this collection. As much as I enjoy a lot of elements of this collection and feel this collaboration is a positive move in the beauty industry, I don't personally have a "need" for any of the products. So I won't be buying.