Wednesday Reviews: EVXO Natural Coverage Liquid Mineral Foundation

So I'm thinking about starting to do my makeup reviews on Wednesdays weekly (or when I can get to it lol). What do you guys think?

Anyways, welcome to my very first cosmetic review! 

I have been using the same foundation for so long; Covergirl Clean for oily skin. So long that I forgot how difficult it is for me to find new makeup. The struggle as been real- researching into the night trying to find SOMETHING cruelty free that doesn't have a bunch of chemicals... for an affordable price. with EVXO's foundation in Bisque, I thought I'd finally found it. Boy, was I disappointed.

For reference sake, let me explain a little about my skin. I have acne prone, oily skin. It's hard for me to keep makeup on very long because it simply melts off. One of my biggest mistakes when looking for foundation was not taking this into account, because like I said, I haven't shopped for foundation for a long time.

Anyway, on to the review.


First, let's look at the up sides to this foundation. It is vegan, cruelty-free, organic and all natural. The ingredients are so clean, and it is a small business, which I like supporting.
There are the claims EVXO makes about their foundation:
Vegan / Cruelty-Free and made with Organic Ingredients! Containing: Aloe, Chamomile, Thyme, and vitamin E. These ingredients keep your skin looking fresh and give the foundation a natural looking shine. 

•Amazing build-able coverage

•Free of pore clogging ingredients

•Smooth application with a beautiful dewey finish

•Evxo Foundation is available in 6 versatile colors. We have a color for every skin type!

Let's talk about the color of this foundation. At first glance, it looks loads darker than it actually is. I got this foundation in bisque which is the lightest color, because I am extremely pale. Fortunately, the dark color is only the way the formula looks in the bottle. On the skin this foundation looks phenomenal. It matched my pale skin perfectly, which is extremely rare for me because most foundations end up looking orangey. 

Besides the color, the coverage was also fantastic. This foundation covered up all my acne, erased my large pores, and basically gave me a "blank slate" to put on the rest of my makeup. Unfortunately, this is where the problem starts. The only way this foundation achieves this fantastic finish is because it is thick- like the consistency of acrylic paint thick. I used two pumps to cover my whole face because it was so thick it was hard to spread it over my face. 

The thickness of this foundation only leads to more bad things. The wear. After about an hour wearing this foundation my face started to feel itchy, and my face felt like it was melting. Now this feeling would be understandable for the middle of summer. But I was wearing this foundation in late December. The weird thing was, the foundation actually was staying put on my face, it "looked" fine, but it felt horrible. So, if you want to look beautiful, and don't mind feeling like you dunked your head in a bucket of mud, this is perfect!

Ok, the last thing I have to say about this foundation for me was the worst. The smell. I am extremely sensitive to synthetic smells, and I prefer my cosmetics to be odorless. thank you. At first the smell of this foundation seems nice. It smells very much like marshmallows. I know right? funny scent for a face. After a few minutes though, I start getting tired of marshmallows,  It took about two hours for the smell to go away, and by then my head was hurting and all I wanted to do was remove the sticky, thick, smelly stuff from my face. I did keep wearing this foundation however, and kept applying it for about a week, assuming I would get used to the smell. However, I never did. I had a headache every day. I was trying to figure out what could create this strong smell and my sister pointed out to me the vanilla near the bottom of the ingredients. We believe that may be what created the strong odor.

 Ultimately, I wouldn't not recommend this foundation to anyone in my right mind.  I had to return this foundation due to my headaches, melty face and itchiness.  I really really wanted to like this EXVO foundation in bisque. I wanted to support the small company that was making quality vegan and cruelty-free makeup, however, it just didn't work out for me. 

I hope this review helps you decide for yourself about this foundation and weigh the pros and cons. 

Thanks for tuning in.

Peace.Love.Rats♥

-MessyRat

Weekly Favorites.

Hello!

Today I wanted to share a few of my favorite things for the first week of 2017. I don't know about you, but I am actually excited about the new year and the opportunities that it presents. If I can survive my last semester of Senior Year than maybe it will end up being a good one!


First on weekly favorites are a couple of recipes, which are both veg/vegan-friendly. Trying to eat vegetarian can be fun but also frustrating, so finding food that is better than eating omnivorously is always fun😉

This is an easy pizza "recipe" that I concocted for lunch one day. We completely ran out of mozzarella so I went with gouda, thinking it would be better than nothing. Surprisingly the gouda was really good on the pizza, in fact I think I will be making this again when I need a good lunch idea. 

Another recipe I tried this week that turned out pretty good was this 3-Ingredient Vegan Crepes. This recipe is so easy to make it might as well be a boxed mix! I would not suggest, however,  trying to half (or if you're me, quarter) the recipe. (Hey, don't look at me that way,  I only wanted one crepe!) Although this made a good pancake, it was too stiff to call it a "crepe".  Next time I will probably not try to do that again😆 I have a feeling it was because it didn't have enough flax egg in it by the time I cut the recipe so much. Top with strawberries or whatever you like😊

My next favorite has to do with my ratties. Their cage has looked really drab lately, I just haven't been the greatest interior rat cage decorator of late.  I had a feeling I needed to get more toys for them- until  I looked in my stock of rat things and was surprised to find a LOAD of junk! Those rats must be rich because they sure own a lot of goodies🙄 So for the first time in a long time I took out almost EVERYTHING they had and stuffed it in their cage. Wow, what an improvement for the new year!

Sorry about how the bars cover up a lot of the pic, still can't figure out how to make my camera not focus on them🙄

Another of my favorites this week has been the Boom Chicka Pop! Kettle Corn. I got this in my Love Goodly Subscription box. (Go Here to see my Love Goodly unboxing post). This stuff is SO GOOD! And to think I wasn't even very interested in the stuff when I got it in the subscription! Fluffy popcorn, mildly salty with a very thin layer of slightly crispy sweet on top. This stuff vegan, gluten free, GMO free, and made with only 4 simple ingredients:
popcorn, sunflower oil, dried cane sugar, and sea salt. It's addictive. I've been saving the last few kernels in the bottom so I will still have some....


The last "favorite" of the week as to be the Warehouse 13 DVD's that my family got for Christmas. We used to watch this a few years ago until the newer seasons were not available on Netflix (you are evil Netflix!) and were crazed over it then. Because it dropped off though, we never saw the end of season 4 and were left hanging for dear life while some sort of orchid was about to destroy everyone on earth.😨 Why did we wait two years to buy seasons 4 and 5 so we could see what happened? who knows. Anyways, we are making up for lost time watching at least 4 at a time😜  but shhhh! we still haven't finished season 5, so no spoilers please!

Thanks for tuning in.

Peace. Love. Rats♥

-Messy Rat

Love Goodly Dec/Jan Unboxing!

The first week of January is almost over. It's snowing outside and everyone is advised to stay in their houses. It's a great day to be blogging. Today I want to share with you guys my first Love Goodly Subscription box.😚 Just for reference I am giving the value of each product, but the box itself is always $30

Here is how the box came. I like the big Love Goodly logo, it's very bright and happy looking. Everything was very tightly packed. Recently Love Goodly made their boxes smaller so that it would use less cardboard. Even though it was tightly packed, nothing was smashed.

The first thing in the box, is this. Love Goodly personally wrote the little handwritten Merry Christmas note. One of the perks of a smaller company😄

 The second thing is another note. This includes info on the box guest curator Emily Deschanel, a long time vegan and actress (She plays Temperance Brennen in one of my favorite TV shows Bones). The card also has a little info on Farm Sanctuary, the charity for this month's box. Every month Love Goodly donates  5% of each Box to some sort of charity.
...................................................................................................................................................................

Next in the box is this Facial Steam by Mullein & Sparrow. It's supposed to cleanse and open up the pores in your face; you heat up a pot of water, put some of the leaves in it and stick your face close to the steaming pot. This is probably one of the things I am less ecstatic about. I'm not really into "relaxing" facial products. With that said,  I read a little about the company Mullein & Sparrow and their values- to say the least I was impressed (read about it here).
I've  heard this can also be used as a tea, so I'm not sure if I might try it for that instead? Value $10

Next in the box is this Boom Chicka Pop Sweet & Salty Kettle Corn. This is a vegan popcorn snack. I honestly didn't really look at this stuff very hard when I first got it. Besides its pretty packaging, I wasn't too interested. In fact, at first I thought it was potato chips because I simply didn't look at it that hard😋 More on this later. Value $1.50

Cote is a brand of vegan cruelty-free, non toxic(ish) nail polish. The bottle says it is free of dbp, formaldehyde, resin, toluene & camphor. I didn't even know nail polish had formaldehyde in it! That's so wrong.😣 Anyways, I love this color that they sent, No. 37. My favorite nail colors are either black or red, so I was super excited about this polish. Value $18

Pacifica is a brand I have used and researched thoroughly. Vegan and Cruelty-free, they have a special recycling program and all their packaging is 100% recyclable. You can read about their mission here. Value $10

The last thing in this box was this MyChelle Perfect C Serum. This product is supposed to reduce fine lines and wrinkles. Value $44 

Unfortunately, this product came damaged and was leaking when I opened it up. I wasn't worried though because I was already aware of Love Goodly's policy that they would send a new product if one was damaged during shipping. So we contacted Love Goodly and they were MORE than happy to send me a replacement. Did I mention how nice they were about it? They were more than helpful and super sweet. The replacement came super quickly in this adorable package....

Ok guys, that is all for this Love Goodly box. I hope you enjoyed the unboxing. I will try to work on reviewing the items for you soon, once I actually get a chance to try them all!

thanks for tuning in.

Peace. Love. Rats♥

-MessyRat

Don't Build your House on Sand!!!

The hardest thing for me going Cruelty-Free has been finding a decent foundation. Sure there are plenty of options, but when I started reading the ingredients the list went way, way down to, like nothing. I want a good foundation, it is the one makeup product that I am going to be slathering ALL OVER my entire face. If my foundation isn't any good, the attempt to find healthy makeup sort of disappears in the dust. Because of this, I was determined I needed to get 100% Pure's Healthy Skin Foundation, after all, from what little research I've done,  they seemed to be the only ones that were not secretly trying to poison me. Unfortunately, that small convenience comes with a hefty $45 dollar price tag.

So I decided to do some more research to find a more affordable foundation. This post is basically just info on the foundations I researched. It isn't a comprehensive guide, just my notes from what I learned while searching. The most important thing I found out that the holy grail of foundations 100% Pure (or so I thought) actually itself contained some ingredients that were not-so-happy. Don't get me wrong, it's still probably fantastic stuff, just with some poison in it (lol).

P.S. I've only put 100% Pure on this list to give you a guide as to what a "good" foundation looks like, before showing the cheaper ones.

P.S.S. What I basically mean when I listed "Good Ingredients" is that these were made by something natural like a plant. I have not researched if all of them are actually good for your skin, although some of them are.😀

100% Pure Healthy Skin Foundation $45

Red Flag Ingredients: 15% Titanium Dioxide, ((bad if inhaled) Moderate Cancer Hazard . Inorganic compound. This ingredient is found in almost all the cosmetics I've searched, especially the lower end ones) 10% Zinc oxide, (moderate concern for organ system toxicty. not good to breathe).

Good Ingredients: Aloe, Peach, Apricot, Coco Bean, Goji Berry, Acai, Pomegranate Oil, Vitamin E, Vitamin C, White Tea, Coffee cherry, Maquai Berry, Muscadine Grape, Mangosteen, Acerola, Elderberry, Grapefruit, Honeysuckle, 

Downsides: Price. 
Upsides: Vegan (some products) Organic, Free Returns. Comes in 8 colors!



Pacifica Dreamy Cover Bare Faced.  Price $17


Red Flag ingredients: Titanium Dioxide 21%, Silica: (also know as quartz. Silica dust is dangerous if inhaled. low/medium concern.) Parfum, all natural: (Means perfume, none specific, sort of like saying "natural flavors") Caprylic/capric Triglyceride (low hazard but a suspected environmental toxin).

Good Ingredients: JoJoba Esters, Chondrus Crispus (red algae used as thickener in food) Centifolia Flower Extract (extract of the flowers of the cabbage rose).

Downsides: Is sold on Amazon for $19 instead of $17 (Pacifica website) and it only comes in only 3 colors.
Upsides: Pacifica is a Vegan, Cruelty-Free company and all their packaging is 100% recyclable.

Physicians Formula Natural Origins CC Cream $8.54

Red Flag Ingredients: Titanium Dioxide 3.9% Zinc Oxide 1%, Diisostearate/polyhydroxystearate/sebacate (no info on this substance) Magnesium Sulfate (this is talc also know as talcum powder) Beeswax (not vegan).

Good Ingredients: (Orange fruit water) Jojoba seed oil, Water, Lemon, Agave Leaf Extract, Sunflower Seed Oil.

Downsides: Not vegan, only comes in 2 colors.
Upsides: Affordable, organic, all natural

Physicians Formula Tinted Moisturizer $10.95

Red flag ingredients: Titanium Dioxide 5%, Talc, Aluminum, Alcohol SD ((denatured with organic lavender oil)  Moderate hazard, low cancer hazard. Moderate birth defect hazard. But significantly smaller than the risks from drinking alcohol. Bad to eat).

Good Ingredients: Orange Fruit Water, Water, Jojoba Seed Extract, Sunflower Seed Oil, Hemp Seed Oil, Shea Butter, Olive Fruit Oil, Indica Seed Butter, Avocado Oil.

Downsides: Not vegan company, (not sure if this particular product is vegan?) only comes in 2 colors.
Upsides: Affordable, organic, all natural

EVXO Liquid Mineral Foundation. $24.99

Red Flag ingredients: Stearic Acid, most often an animal ingredient, although considering this is an all vegan company, I doubt it is. It can be found in vegetable fats as well. It can be irritating to the skin though.
Boron Nitride: (an inorganic synthetic that can leak into the skin).
 (*May contain titanium dioxide, zinc and iron oxides).


Good ingredients: Aloe (first ingredient)  Squalane (natural moisturizer)  Vitamin E, Oregano, Thyme, Rosemary, Lavender, Goldenseal. Water, Chamomile, Shea Butter, Olive Leaf Extract.

Downsides: more expensive.
Upsides: Vegan, cruelty-free, 90%  organic, gluten free, for sensitive skin. Comes in 6 colors!!!


Well, hope this helped anyone looking for a foundation. Personally, I am going with the EVXO, I was excited to find a cruelty-free, vegan foundation half the price of 100% Pure, and its first ingredient wasn't Titanium Dioxide! Yay! Now I just have to find a decent powder😛


Thanks for tuning in.

Peace.Love.Rats♥

-MessyRat