Back in November, when Colourpop launched its collab with Bretman Rock a new product surfaced and very quickly the owner of Lemonhead came publicly to tell people how CP had copied their product.
People were quick to find the argument invalid since Lemonhead did not invent glitter or self-adhesive glitter, and in fact, they did not, but LH was not trying to say they had invented that, but that colourpop product simply tried to go and get as close to LH has possible. From the way the product was being shown, the colours, and the fact that CP was mixing different sizes of glitter to give more of an opaque glitter feel.
Colourpop, who can mass produce product after product, is now offering a way cheaper version of a product that is made by an indie brand. This to me is where the issue is at, drugstore imitates high-end makeup a lot, offering people a lower price version of things, but here you have a big company offering a cheaper version of a brand that is smaller and that they only have one type of product on their inventory.
Doing this undervalues the product from an indie brand, an indie brand often does not have their own factory or can’t invest on producing big quantities of products, and this tends to make the product more expensive to produce and therefore more expensive to sell to the public.
As a big fan of CP, I assumed at first this wasn’t a copy and simply a coincidence until I got to see all the glitters that were coming out for the Holiday collection. Many of the shades did remind me a lot of Lemonhead specifically Eternal Sunshine from colourpop did look a whole lot like Houdini from Lemonhead.
Houdini is the most magical thing I have ever used, it looks like white glitter, but it catches light in many different ways, sometimes it looks purple other times it has a yellow hue. So I placed an order and wanted to compare these two and see how close Colourpop got to Lemonhead.
Lemonhead glitters tend to be in a paste form, they are quite opaque and easy to even work detailed line work with without having to keep layering the product.
Now, I either got a bad batch of colourpop glitterally obsessed or this formula isn’t as amazing as they showed on their social media. It definitely has a more dry and grainy feel (kinda like wet sand), it can’t really be used to do a winged liner like I have done with my LH, the Houdini ‘dupe’ is lackluster when seen in person, the glitter is way smaller and less reflective.
It is likely that the swatches on the CP website were achieved by layering the product, but considering this product has a grainy dry texture I wouldn’t really be layering it too much on my eyelid, as that would become uncomfortable after a while.
This fact makes me believe that this is your kind of ”instagram product”, it will look amazing overlayered for a picture but it would not be comfortable to wear for hours, which is something I have done with my LH Houdini, I wore it a full shift (around 10 hours) and it still looked good at the end of the day.
Now, which one should people buy? It comes down to the consumer to decide. If you want to support an indie brand, have a long wearing product that is very good for detailed work and can invest, I would go for Lemonhead, for someone who just wants glitter for fun photos and doesn’t care about wearing it for hours and wants to save some money and buy more options instead, I would say colourpop.
If I was personally to chose a shiny product from CP I would skip the glitter and go for the Jellies instead! Now those are really nice products and can be used on a more versatile way.
colourmelime 