Star Wars Makeup capsule review

Even though I'm definitely a Star Wars fan, I have to admit that when "Force Friday" rolled around, I mostly just rolled my eyes. It felt like the worst kind of cash grab. Sure, I love Star Wars, but other than maybe a t-shirt of the poster, I'm not going to buy movie merchandise before I've seen the movie. How would I choose? I don't know which characters will be my favorites or which moments I'll want to watch again and again; frankly, even in an established franchise, I'm not even sure if I'll like the movie.

So I wasn't one of the diehards frantically refreshing Toys R Us and Amazon trying to score a BB-8. Nothing that was on sale particularly interested me. Sure, it's cool that Captain Phasma - one of the main new Stormtroopers - is a woman, and I liked that there were toys of her available from the beginning. But I didn't really want anything. In fact, I wandered into a Target on Force Friday and was distinctly underwhelmed. I bought a can of Spaghetti-Os with Darth Vader on it because I thought it would amuse my husband, and went home.

I was, however, pretty excited about the collaboration with Cover Girl to produce a Star Wars collection. It seemed to reference the franchise as a whole, and I liked that it was a product specifically for women. Despite Cover Girl's near-comical inability to direct me to any site where I could actually purchase any, I eventually found and ordered some from Drugstore.com. Once it arrived though, my excitement quickly returned to disappointment.

I purchased the gold, silver, and red lipsticks from the collection, and one each of the regular and waterproof mascaras. The gold and silver lipsticks are very sheer, so you can't really do a metallic effect at all. The gold one can be used over another color to sort of engolden it, but that seems to be a pretty small range of looks. The silver is sheer as well, but it's in sort of a pale-pink base - it looks solid silver in the tube, but when it goes on, it just sort of obliterates my lips except for a faint shimmer. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't build it up to a little more silver with a heavier coat until I wiped it off - it comes off pale pink with silver shimmer on the tissue.

The mascaras are fine. They have those tiny spiky brushes which aren't my thing, but they darkened and lengthened and seemed to stay. I did not notice a major difference between the waterproof and non-waterproof, but I don't generally have problems with my mascara coming off, so I'm not a good judge of that.

All in all it was pretty half-assed, even the packaging. I wasn't expecting MAC here, but I've definitely had better drugstore makeup. The pigmentation was just not great - the pink base on the silver lipstick is particularly badly chosen - and they seem to have shied away from making the makeup too "costumey". I think that's a bad call, honestly; it seems to me if you're buying a gold sci-fi themed lipstick, you're going to want it to be gold. But Cover Girl has played it extremely safe, making the shades subtle enough you could work them into a "normal" makeup routine. How very unimaginative.