April 2014 Birchbox

Oh no, I somehow managed to skip over my April and May boxes in the rush to talk about June apparently! Or I just got May and March confused like I frequently do. But here we are still in my Birchbox Throwback, let's talk about April 2014!

This month's box was themed for "rainy days" and it was so perfect because it arrived on rainy day. And I'm actually writing this review after a dreary rainy day, so obviously I'm back in the right mindset for it. The box itself was pretty good, had a couple great discoveries, some not so much, and as always lots of cute themed stuff. One thing Birchbox does well is their themeing, each month the box is very well put together. These ladies know what they're doing.

Gilchrist & Soames Spa Therapy Body Wash: Okay, this was the gold star for me in this box. I really loved this body wash, and it's high on the list of what I'm going to splurge on when I finally use up my cheaper body wash that I stocked up on a year ago and need to finish before I can spend money. I liked the smell, it worked really well, and it just felt great. The right amount of lather, just all around a really good product. I've since become a fan of this brand, even if their prices are sometimes a little high for me.

Sumita Color Contrast Eyeliner: I can't remember which color eyeliner I got in this box, except that it was kind of purple. This was my first experiment with colored eye liners, and while I thought it went on well and was easy to use, at the end of the day my major problem was it didn't matter how much eye makeup remover I used, or how hard I scrubbed, I still looked like I had a black eye whenever I tried to remove it. And I didn't have the best of luck with it staying put, so the dark purple just ended up making me look bruised. The eyeliner itself was probably great (except it was a bit smudgey), but the color didn't work for me.

KIND Healthy Grain Bars: The bar I got was pumpkin seeds with sea salt, which I expected to really not like. I'm not a big fan of pumpkin, and while I've liked quite a few sea salt flavored things lately, usually those words are followed by "caramel." I almost gave this bar away without trying it, but I did and I'm glad because it was actually pretty good. I learned that pumpkin seeds don't really taste like pumpkin, at least not what I'm used to. I have started buying more KIND products now that I had this and liked it, though they have been hit or miss since then.

Color Club Gala's Gems in Gold Struck: I got some Color Club polish in a previous box and if you read that review you'll see I was generally unimpressed with it. Since I wasn't sure if it was the fact that it was a metallic polish I was willing to give the company another try, but this polish was also a more metallic finish and so to be perfectly honest I ended up trading it without opening it so I could get a better swap out of it. The color also wasn't my style anyway.

Davines OI/Shampoo and Davines OI/Conditioner: Since I jumped the gun and went out of order, my previously reviewed June box was actually the second time I got a Davine's set of products. I don't mind getting multiples from the same company though, and these were different offerings from the brand than my other box. That said, I wasn't overly impressed, or even upset about them. They were fine, just completely fine. All the shampoo and conditioner samples I've gotten in my Birchboxes and there's still been only one I might think about getting once in a while instead of my current cheap brand. Shampoo has definitely not been a thing where I've been convinced to go higher end.

So, all in all, it was a pretty good box, no giant standouts but my introduction to a few good brands that I liked and want to try more from. Which is the entire point after all. You may have noticed one of my common themes is that I'm actually really cheap when it comes to things like beauty products, and Birchbox doesn't always go for stuff that's in my typical price range. So on the one hand, that's great because I get to try stuff I would never pick up on my own because of the price. Plus, with their points system if I find something I love I can splurge for it later. But the problem is, sometimes I feel like there's a long line of stuff that's just proving to me that my cheap ways are good because the expensive stuff isn't that much more impressive.

All that being said, I still adore Birchbox because it lets me have that trial and error to figure that out through actually using products and not just guessing that something might be better because it's expensive.

Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology - Exhibit Review

I thought I'd do something a bit different and talk about an exhibit here in D.C. that I recently went to visit. I've lived in the city almost a decade now, and I've been to the Smithsonian Museums multiple times, and several other places around town (The Newseum, the Museum of Crime and Punishment, and so on). But I had yet to visit the National Geographic Museum, partially because there's an entry fee for their exhibits and with so many free Smithsonian museums around, you really have to have a good reason to spend money to get in the door of a place here.

But earlier this month I found out that they were going to be hosting an exhibit called Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology, which I'd actually heard of a while back and wanted to see it so I was glad it was coming here to D.C. That made it easy to buy the tickets, though I'll get into the price point in a few minutes.

Going into the Indiana Jones exhibit, I knew that there were some video portions because a professor from my grad school helped create them. But when the guy at the desk asked if we wanted the "video walkthrough" I had no idea what he meant. I've seen museums offer audio tour supplements for an extra fee, but this actually not only comes with the price of the exhibit but it's an integral part of the experience.

It becomes clear very quickly when you start out how this exhibit is very different from what I'm used to. The little video tablet walks you through how to use it (that's what video is playing in the picture) and basically instead of lengthy signage all over the items on display, there's a short description and a number. You type in the number onto the tablet, and it starts either an audio description or a supplementary video. This means that unlike a lot of other exhibits where there's a ton of overlapping sound and some things get very hard to hear, you're listening to your own headphones and watching the videos at your own pace. There's not as much sitting through the second half of the video then seeing the beginning as it loops back around.

I have two very distinct opinions about this. The first is that it was amazing, and really innovative. I actually know a slight bit more than the average person about exhibit design, since members of my family have worked at art museums, and I thought this was just ingenious. What a great way to bring in multimedia without being too overwhelming with it, and let each museum patron move at their own pace. Not to mention how easy it makes it for you to tailor the experience to your own desires. And I imagine that eventually they could use this for metrics data to see which videos are the most popular, and which parts of the exhibit people weren't paying as much attention to.

The only major problem this brought into the situation though is that it made everything take MUCH longer. I can skim/read a descriptive plaque in a few seconds, but when the audio is being read by someone I have to take the full 90 seconds that they're devoting to it and go at their pace and not mine. In a few parts of the exhibit, that started to really bother me, especially because I'm not the most healthy person and there just simply weren't enough benches and places to sit throughout the space. If you're going to make it take almost a full two minutes at every single item, then people need to sit down more often. Not because they are lazy, but because you need to think about your patrons who are disabled but aren't in wheelchairs.

The other issue was that the video/audio created bottlenecks at certain points. The start of the exhibit was actually kind of difficult to get through because we happened to walk in at the same time as several other people and we were all watching the same videos at first. It wasn't until I decided to skip a description that that pack of people finally was offset enough that we weren't bumping into each other. Basically in the end, I didn't listen to many of the audio parts because they were all pretty lengthy and I was getting tired, but I did watch all of the videos (except for one I apparently missed because my mom mentioned it and I hadn't seen that one, still no idea how I didn't see it).

The videos were great because they included behind the scenes footage, animations, and really fascinating extra knowledge. And I'm sure the audio had all kinds of extra info too, but I don't even really like listening to audio books so it just wasn't catching my attention. The videos held me more, and that could just be me (I am a filmmaker after all).

The exhibit was done in release order for the films, moving from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Temple of Doom, then Last Crusade and Crystal Skull. Each film was followed by a section on the science of archaeology that explained how something that Dr. Jones did in the film is also done in the field, while also debunking a few things that a real archaeologist wouldn't do. My favorite connection was after the display about Last Crusade, the exhibit had artifacts and real life examples of scientists using the context of the artifact to "decode" it's meaning and use, like how Indy "decodes" the grail to determine which is the correct one.

Each film was represented by a few costumes, some of the prop artifacts, concept art, marketing materials, and a few looping video clips (some of the only looping video in the exhibit, it was silent unless you typed in the number on your tablet, and it would then play the looped sound synced up to what was airing at the moment. It was a neat feat of technology). The costumes were fantastic, and the choice of which props and concept art was perfectly curated. The "artifacts" they had on display were exactly the ones I wanted to see, from the Ark of the Covenant to the Sankara Stones to the Cross of Coronado. And yeah, okay, there was some cool stuff from The Crystal Skull in there too.

The videos had a lot of making of stuff, and information that even as a big fan of Spielberg's films, I had never heard before. It was well worth the visit, and just the Indiana Jones exhibit would have been worth the ticket price for sure. There's also a lot of great branded merchandise in the shop, and for the price of admission you get to see their other current exhibit, Monsterfish. We didn't spend as much time at Monsterfish because we were pretty exhausted from the wonderful but time consuming exhibit, but it was also really well done. There were a lot of interactive elements that I think kids would enjoy, and a great opening video. I know I went on about looping videos, but they're not bad when sparingly used and this exhibit did them right.

The only thing that gives me pause about the whole thing is that we paid $15 for the entry fee, and while I have no problems paying that for the Indiana Jones exhibit, and I highly recommend it, until this week that entry fee only included Monsterfish, which was cool but not worth that much (I think the fee was only $11 at that point, but still too much). When this set of exhibits closes, will the entry fee still be worth it? I really don't know. It seems to me like it could be really hit or miss on the value, so maybe I'll keep an eye out for exhibit reviews before I go back there for anything new.

And if that's what you're doing then I'll just say again that the Indiana Jones exhibit is absolutely worth the price of admission, you should go.

June 2014 Birchbox

A photo posted by Elizabeth (@onegirlsreviews) on Jun 15, 2014 at 7:11pm PDT

Time for another flashback Birchbox review! This time we're going to the way back, June 2014. Like May of 2014, it was mostly not that phenomenal but one really great item that makes up for it.

Perlier Intensive Nurturing Body Balm Shea Almond: This body balm worked well, but there was something about the Shea Almond scent that I just didn't like. I ended up giving this away because it just didn't work on me, and I had so much lotion at this point there was no reason to keep something I didn't love. But a lot of people loved the smell, so maybe it was just me.

Harvey Prince Hello: This is the gold star for this box. I'd heard a lot of good things about this perfume from other blogs, and so I was really excited to get to try it. It smells so fantastic! I really love it, and it works great on me. This also started my Harvey Prince addiction, I had no idea that they had so many fantastic fragrances. But this is definitely a favorite, and a great find.

Caudalie Polyphenol C15 Anti-Wrinkle Defense Serum: This serum and I didn't really get along. It was a bit more liquid than I'm used to serums being, but the big thing for me was that it made my face a bit too far onto the oily side. It was generally okay, on another type of skin it's probably fantastic, but for me it was just alright.

Davines Love Smoothing Shampoo: I remember liking the scent of this shampoo, but honestly I don't remember much else about it. It was nice, my hair was nice after I used it, but it wasn't significantly better than my grocery store purchased shampoo. I do really like the packaging though, there's something about the sort of simplified bottle and label that's fun.

Davines Love Soothing Conditioner: When this sample went out I kept seeing people saying that the size of the foil packet was too small, and Birchbox has actually stopped really doing these kind of packets all that much in their boxes. Which part of me thinks is just silly, I mean it's a sample/discovery box. But I do also dislike these packets because it's actually way too much for me to use at one time and so I have to figure out how to make sure the open one doesn't fall over and spill and waste a bunch of product. Anyway, the conditioner was much like the shampoo, nice but not revolutionary or anything.

Davines OI All in One Milk: This leave in product was nice, smelled good, but was a little more product than I like leaving on my hair. Maybe I used too much, but I decided to stick with my No. 4 Comb and Protect that has done me so well so far.

Cynthia Rowley Beauty Creamy Lip Stain in Sugar: I do really like this lip stain quite a bit, I actually just used it yesterday. It's a good long lasting lip color, though it's a bit liquid-y, I guess that's what you get with a stain. The color is nice, kind of bright, but fun in general. I'm a fan, I might buy some more shades one day when I'm not drowning in lipsticks.

I did love the getaway theme for this Birchbox, and in general it was another fun one, even if only one of the products was a hit. If you think Birchbox sounds great, then please remember to try my referral link!