Temptalia Part 2

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Mkuplvr
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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by Mkuplvr »

lovelystrange wrote:
Mon Nov 07, 2022 11:27 am
Has anyone else noticed a massive downgrade in the quality of her site this year?

-The addition of perfume reviews. First of all, perfume is far more subjective than makeup. If she gives a lipstick an A+ I'm much more likely to be interested in it, but whether or not she gives a fragrance a glowing review makes no difference in whether or not I want to buy it. I know my personal fragrance tastes, and I would never buy a perfume based on a single person's review. Plus, she reviews extremely expensive niche perfumes almost exclusively. I get that she enjoys perfume (so do I), but these reviews shouldn't be a part of her site.

-She NEVER posts eye looks anymore. I really appreciated seeing the eyeshadows she reviewed actually applied on her eyes (although I do wish her eye looks had been made up of 3-4 shadows rather than like 8 so we could pick out the individual colors more easily). Just seeing an arm swatch isn't as helpful.

-Her dupe lists have been really wonky and inconsistent for the past few months. Sometimes when she posts a product review it's missing a dupe list altogether, and other times a list of 3-4 "dupes" (that usually aren't even close) is created by an algorithm. She has to be aware that dupes are basically the #1 reason people use her site. To let that aspect of the site slide seems like a massive oversight.

I do like Christine, but I've been really disappointed in the quality of her content for several months now.
She’s been letting the blog go stagnate for a while now. It’s just becoming more obvious now. Thankfully the perfume reviews have really slowed down and only pop up on occasion but for a while they were coming every day. While I know her swatches are inaccurate I can at least get a decent idea of what a product looks like. I cant know what a perfume will smell like. And her flowery descriptions make it clear she’s been spending a lot of time on perfume sites. I swear a lot of perfume collectors try to outdo each other for the silliest, most extra descriptions and she’s learned that language. And she also started a game website. She has plenty of time to review makeup but she’s spending it on new hobbies.

She stopped doing eye looks consistently over 2 years ago. She claimed it was because her dog passed away but it was before that. Idk how she’s wear testing eyeshadows and I’ve long suspected she’s just going off arm swatches. There was a period of time she wore eyeshadow everyday but it was always her own palettes, not the ones she was reviewing.

She’s really slacking with big releases and the dupe list has really been neglected so there’s not much use going to her site. She tends to be one of the last to review a hyped up item when she always used to be the first. Idk 🤷‍♀️ I know she hopped on Reddit with a quickness when this topic was brought up recently and said her wrist hurts but I feel like there’s more going on that she isn’t saying. One thing that would probably help a lot is to tell Colourpop to stop sending every redundant release. I thought about it being money related and maybe she’s prioritizing PR but that’s not it - she gets hyped releases and takes a few months to review/dupe while buying entire $$$ lipstick collections that no one is talking about

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by Salti_Stars »

Made an account because of this:

Image

Holy shit.
Last edited by Salti_Stars on Sun Feb 26, 2023 2:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
:FU:

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by Alliecat_57 »

Oh my god. Her face just goes bigger and bigger and her blush gets worse and worse

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by No time for buffoons »

Her blog is on life support. Everything is Colourpop, Colourpop, Colourpop with useless filler posts like “What’s your favorite eyebrow wax?” The woman gets three replies max on all of the posts, and it’s always the same people. Sigh. I miss beauty blogs. Good photos are better than videos.

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by DrowningInMelancholy »

Why doesn't she hire people to review products and create looks for the blog?

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

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Salti_Stars wrote:
Sun Feb 26, 2023 2:13 pm
Made an account because of this:

Image

Holy shit.
I don’t understand the cheek swatches lately. Not only is this unrealistic because nobody but drag queens and rodeo clowns wear their blush this heavy, but it doesn’t tell us what it would realistically look like with a normal application. We see the pan pics and the arm swatch so we know what the color looks like at full opacity. Lately her cheek swatches are either abnormally heavy handed or so light handed you can’t even see the product. The latter is the most frustrating IMO bc she always had good cheek swatches before.

And speaking of opacity what is up with her descriptors? Semi sheer, moderately sheer, semi opaque, moderately opaque…so it’s not opaque? Just say that then! Why make it needlessly complicated?

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by Salti_Stars »

I don't initially have any issue with all the Colourpop swatches.
I can't find real photos of most of Colourpop's catalog (despite how many people buy their stuff consistently), and their photos of products and swatches are so different from what you actually get they might as well not include any.
However... Christine's photos aren't that helpful, either. But like Musingsofamuse, her content dominates search results. Mediocre content in high volumes you can't get away from.

She took on more than she could handle. In today's market, attempting to keep up with releases while coming up with legitimate reviews is virtually impossible. It's partly why most of her reviews are from a small handful of brands.
I think if Christine "outsourced" some of her blog's content instead of trying to do it all herself, she could start to "fix" the declining quality. Maybe it's because she likes the control. But even if you just have two or three trusted reviewers who know how to write and take photos, you're set! Doing it all yourself, of course you're gonna be burned out. She sort of did this with "user reviews", but not really.

Also noticed that while she condemned the ebil Harry Potter collection and made a huffy statement about it, she sorta just... said her piece and continued to endorse Cololurpop. I don't have a problem with beauty people reviewing "problematic" brands, but Christine is one of those people who cares waay too much about that sort of thing. Who "supports" what. As though it weren't all just a bunch of conglomerates getting us to buy more makeup than they know we can't use. She's aligned with people who believe the same, and I'm surprised they haven't noticed yet. She's stopped reviewing other brands for less.


On a final note, I've always wondered why she calls herself a "founder" in the press. Founded what? A website? A bigger beauty blog is still a beauty blog. Just because you make money off of it and pay to have a website doesn't mean you own a company. Am I missing something here?
:FU:

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by No time for buffoons »

She could also just do swatches of things without reviews. I’m sure she gets a lot of PR. Take photos and post them. Leave it up to us to decide what to buy. Her photos are a little off, but they’re better than a lot of the YouTubers’ swatches. Those almost always suck.

ColourPop used to be a favorite of mine and now I almost wish they didn’t exist. I’m so sick of the same thing in a new package, over and over and over. At this point I’d rather see Too Faced, but of course she can’t review that because of one of her politically correct reasons. 🙄

I really don’t understand her blush application. She can’t be serious. Just hire a darker skinned woman to model for you.

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by Garfield Phone »

I don't know why she doesn't just go strictly to full arm swatches at this point. Arm swatches are all people need or want. Karla Sugar's arm swatches still hold up and she's been off the internet for over a decade now.

The face swatches serve no purpose - she clearly hates doing them, and her application/placement is so ridiculous that it's useful to no one. "It wore well for twelve hours." No shit it did. You applied half of the pan to your face. "It didn't blend well." Yeah, can't imagine why that was.

She's really the only source out there in the blog space for swatches of certain products and would likely get way more traffic to her site if the first thing that popped up when you did an image search for a product were a bunch of arm swatches, not her clownlike face swatches. The face swatches are unrealistic and ridiculous.

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by Kunty_Brewster »

Well, it looks like she is retiring partly. I felt she was slowing down and tired of running her site. The eye looks were gone and she seemed exhausted by it all. :https://www.temptalia.com/an-open-lette ... w-chapter/

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by DrowningInMelancholy »

Despite some of the flack i give her for the atrocious eye and cheek swatches, she genuinely was the encyclopedia of makeup

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by CheriBeriBem »

Garfield Phone wrote:
Sat Jul 15, 2023 11:00 pm
I don't know why she doesn't just go strictly to full arm swatches at this point. Arm swatches are all people need or want. Karla Sugar's arm swatches still hold up and she's been off the internet for over a decade now.

The face swatches serve no purpose - she clearly hates doing them, and her application/placement is so ridiculous that it's useful to no one. "It wore well for twelve hours." No shit it did. You applied half of the pan to your face. "It didn't blend well." Yeah, can't imagine why that was.

She's really the only source out there in the blog space for swatches of certain products and would likely get way more traffic to her site if the first thing that popped up when you did an image search for a product were a bunch of arm swatches, not her clownlike face swatches. The face swatches are unrealistic and ridiculous.
I totally agree with you, some of the top dupes on her website aren’t accurate at all! It would be a lot more helpful if she did arm swatches side by side where you can see for yourself how similar the shades really are!

In light of recent updates It has been clear that she was having some sort of burnout, I mean she doesn’t even bother with removing her earphones before taking pictures, also working 10 hours a day is a lot for a website like Temptalia, I suspect it’s due to her lack of practicality for the most part.
I do feel sorry for her though losing a family pet is really difficult and I’m glad that she’s been venturing into other fulfilling purists

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Re: Temptalia Part 2

Post by No time for buffoons »

What’s happened to her blog? I know she was scaling back but is this it? It’s just a bunch of stupid questions. It’s too bad she couldn’t have lasted throughout the holidays and reviewed more holiday collections. The only other one left is Beauty Look Book but it’s all astronomically priced stuff.

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