Glossier believes that “beauty isn’t made in a boardroom—it happens when the individual is celebrated.” What first started as the blog Into The Gloss by founder Emily Weiss has since turned into a digitally-native makeup empire that is redefining the retail experience as we know it. No stranger to Forbes, Fast Company & Business Insider, Glossier’s motto is to “enable conversation” and “make products inspired by the people who use them, along with people to be inspired by.” While currently their only stores are in Los Angeles and New York, Glossier’s online store ships worldwide, and they luckily recently started shipping to Quebec! I quickly jumped on the bandwagon a few years ago and have been putting most of their products to the test ever since. If you’ve ever been curious about what the Glossier hype is all about—or even if you’re new to this brand—here’s an honest break-down of some of their best-selling products.
Solution
Glossier describes Solution as a product from which you can “expect a reduction in the appearance of redness, blemishes, and pore size.” They claim that your “skin’s texture will be smoother and softer, and the fabled glow of balanced, healthy skin will be in full force.” Solution is a chemical exfoliant (a term that sounded a little scary to me at first), and is unlike the kind of physical exfoliant I’m more familiar with. Instead of being a scrub, it’s a 10% blend of 3 acid groups: salicylic acid, which is said to help unclog pores, glycolic acid, to improve skin’s tone and texture, and lactic acid, which apparently helps with dark spots. It comes in a bottle with a dispenser you pump down with a cotton pad to then smooth the product across your face. Although I don’t have acne, I do have a few problem areas where I’ll randomly get bumps and breakouts that come and go. It’s more so annoying than being anything serious, but this product completely eliminated these recurring problem areas for me. If I wake up with breakouts, I’ll apply Solution lightly all over my face that same night, and they’ll be gone the following morning. This being said, I would definitely recommend going on their website and reading up on some of the 1500 mixed reviews of this product. While it worked perfectly for me, for some others it seems to have done the opposite.
Boy Brow
This product was an absolute game changer for me. I don’t think I’ll ever use anything else on my eyebrows. Before Boy Brow, my eyebrows were never anything to write home about. When I was in high school, I did a great job of ridding them of any kind of shape, thanks to my constant and unnecessary plucking. Thankfully though, a few years ago I started to leave my eyebrows alone to breathe and do their thing. I’m not good at makeup by any means, so I didn’t really know how to tame or style them once they’d grown out and come back to life. I would just try to smooth them out and shape them the best I could with my fingers. Glossier claims that this product is an “all-in-one brow fluffer, filler, and shaper,” and boy, did it ever deliver. I use Boy Brow in the shade clear (they have a few different tints), and it keeps my eyebrows fluffy, shaped and precisely in place for hours on end. My only issue with this product is that I find that $20 is a little overpriced considering the size of the tube. I tend to go through it pretty quickly, since I use it every day and like to layer on multiple coats.
Balm Dotcom Universal Skin Salve
I’ve been repurchasing Glossier’s lip balms for a few years now, and I tend to stock up on several at a time whenever I’m in store. My go-to flavours are the Mint, Birthday Cake and Coconut Balm Dotcoms. The salve is really long lasting, and I love the smells of each of the flavours. Yet, I think this product’s packaging could use a little help. Every once in a while, I’ll go to apply it and instead of having a firm chapstick-like consistency come out of the tube, I’ll get a little blob of greasy oil instead. This is likely a result of the formula separating, so I’ll often have to squish the tube to push the product around for the salve to come out more smoothly. When it comes to the packaging of the Birthday Cake Balm Dotcom flavour in particular, the top end of the tube is covered in glitter—which is perfectly representative of the product’s flavour and shade—but the glitter gets scraped off really easily once you’ve had it for a while. My chapsticks have a pretty rough life being constantly thrown around the house and between different bags and coat pockets, so it’s possible that this particular flavour’s packaging just couldn’t take it. So, be gentle with this product’s exterior because shedding glitter and goopey oil can make for a pretty messy lip balm.