I spend too much money on makeup. I own all the crazy-shaped brushes, rainbow-hued palettes and I have enough red lipstick to literally paint the town red. The women at Sephora don’t even ask me if I’m finding everything OK anymore; they know I know what I’m doing.

So when the time came for me to really crack down on my budget and become the typical broke college student, expensive makeup was the first thing to go.  That is, until I discovered Forever 21’s Love and Beauty Line. I’m a skeptic by nature, so when I picked up the 100-shadow palette and saw the $16 price tag I let out a laugh. I suddenly had a flashback of that time my 6-year-old self bought Rose Art crayons over Crayola thinking they were the same thing. Quick to learn from the mistakes of my youth, I set it back down. There would be no way this palette was going to measure up to the Urban Decay, Too Faced, and Nars shadows that have spoiled me in the past. However, I kept coming back to the assortment of treasures on display, and being a sucker for the underdog and anything that has purple sparkles, I bought it anyway.

Someone check the sky for pigs and see if Satan has on his coat and long underwear because Hell must have frozen over, because this makeup is impossibly fantastic. Don’t get me wrong, this palette is in no way a substitution for the quality packaging, pigmentation, and pillowy softness of an expensive eye shadow palette, but it does exceed a lot of expectation. The colors are soft and extremely buildable. I found myself giddy as I swatched each vibrant color on my forearm. With the right primer and base, these shadows are a perfect way to achieve the look you want without having to spend an arm and a leg. Makeup is fun when you have a lot of options to play with, and I think that’s what hinders a lot of people from buying the larger expensive palettes. They just can’t justify paying almost $50 for a palette with maybe 8-10 colors that they’ll maybe never use. That’s the reason neutral palettes are so extremely popular, because people know that brown will never let them down. With this cheaper alternative, I feel it opens up a smarter way for people to buy makeup. If you play with colors in a cheaper palette, you can find something new to fall in love with. Not everyone is going to go out and buy hot pink, orange, or teal shades on a whim, but if it’s included with a bunch of other colors for really cheap, maybe it can become a new favorite.

I applaud Forever 21 for their fantastic cosmetic achievement that is their Love and Beauty Line.