ELF Haul Mineral Brushes, Neutral Eye Beauty Book and Hypershine Glosses

I got my latest order from ELF Cosmetics today. I have an initial review here of their new mineral brushes, the neutral eye beauty book and some of their hypershine glosses. I was really excited about the new mineral brushes since I am a brush junkie but, I gotta say straight up, these brushes are not great, which is a disappointment, read on for all the stuff that I got from ELF!

After getting the Smokey Eye Beauty Book earlier, I decided to pick up the Neutral Eye Edition as well since I liked it so much. I am more of a neutral eye girl anyway and I liked all the purple-toned colours that were in this one. The colours are very pigmented, however some are very soft, meaning you get a lot of product out at once, they are super smooth, but I wonder about the staying power because it's so buttery. I can do a full review later on if you guys are interested.

I've been obsessed with ELF's Hypershine glosses recently and almost have them all now, however I only recently found some nice opaque creme ones which I am happy with. The ones I mean are Flirt and Bubblegum in the picture above, as you can tell these are nicely opaque, Bubblegum especially is really really nice, I recommend this one for sure. The Frenzied Fuchsia is a new colour (notice how the packaging is slightly different) it looks great in the tube, despite the giant air bubble that was in mine, and even better on the site, it looks lilac, but swatched it's clear, huge disappointment. Fairy and Joy are too shimmery for my liking. The bottom one in the top pic is a Luscious Lipstick, slightly different than the Hypershine glosses, I will do a full review of these soon too.

And lastly, the new mineral brushes, lots of people are probably wondering about these and my initial impression is not a favourable one. I picked up 3 of the face brushes: powder, complexion and angled blush brush, they retail for $5 each. Everyone is wondering why these are so much, but all of ELF mineral line is more expensive, so the brushes are too, there is a 50% off mineral items on right now until October 12, 2010, so it's a good time to order if you want these, enter the code "50MIN" with any $20 order.

These brushes have synthetic, anti-bacterial taklon bristles. The bristles are soft, but the bristles are also quite thin and floppy. The brushes smelled like paint when I received them, and the white bristles reminded me of the Loew Cornell craft store brushes that I have. The powder brush is my biggest disappointment, it's huge and doesn't really work for anything besides setting powder because it's not dense enough, it resembles the Complexion brush from ELF's Studio Line. The complexion brush here reminds me a lot of the Ecotools blush brush, same shape and performs the same way, but I prefer the Ecotools cause it doesn't smell funky. The angled blush brush is just okay, very small and not very dense. I would not recommend these mineral brushes and will not be buying anymore, sorry ELF.

Oh and look at how much ELF paid to ship these items to me, $20! I only paid $6.95! If you are from Canada, you probably know this trick already, but in case you don't.. when you pay with paypal you only get charged $6.95 and avoid getting the extra $8 tacked on for Canadian shipping, I've been doing this for over a year now and it always works, however I gotta say I feel a tad bad after seeing how much they paid to ship it!

If you want any in-depth reviews please let me know below.