We finally come to the last of my Althea Holiday boxes, and it feels great to be back in the box game! The Althea Red Sparkling Box (PHP 1420, 7 items, 4540 worth for 68% savings) was a panic-buy after falling in love with the Black Sparkling Box and just needing to get the Gold Sparkling Box for the two then-untested Chica-Y-Chico palettes - my box logic is wonk, so sue me.

I rationalized that I had a lot of "big hit" items for this box; the Missha BB cream, the Face Shop eyeshadow and the Masil color treatment. Here's what I think of the items in order of favorites (discussed in order of use in the video):

I was pretty excited about The Face Shop Mono Cube Eye Shadow in RD01 Red Peony, especially after reading about its jelly to powder formulation. It didn't really feel jelly-like but the color is so gorgeous and on-trend. I love the gold glitter and bold color, even though it's a little bit cool.

The Hello Skin Jumiso Chewy Lasticity Mask Sheet  (PHP 110) claims to be made of a 100% cotton sheet. The sheet was so completely oversaturated with essence - and that's a good thing. This allowed the cotton to feel soooo smooth, like some sci-fi ectoplasmic membrane! The sheet was super comfy and the essence made my skin really plump. I personally like it, but 110 for very regular mask-use is sort of iffy for me.

Skin & Lab Red Cream and Red Serum Pouch Sample (PHP 930, Althea) supposedly has the 'energy of 100 million damask roses.' The texture is a drippier gel cream, and the fragrance is nice. I enjoyed this item! I'm a little alarmed though that my 50ml jar was halved.

I'm 50/50 on the following:

One of my 'big hit' items was the Missha Perfect Cover BB Cream in #23 (PHP 560). Obviously, I didn't realize that it wasn't a very expensive item, and while it was an Althea best-seller, I was a little underwhelmed. I found the finish nice enough, but I thought the color looked gray on me. I'd have to use this more fully figure out what the hell is up with it because my mind changed during filming so many times.

Pom-pom Rabbit Key Ring is just a fun add-on. I think people who are really into K culture will appreciate this. Trends that take on in Korea hit it quite big; they have a bit of a hive mentality. One of my friends gave me a huge white version of this, saying she found it cute and had seen all the girls in Hongdae carrying it around. It's a great talking piece for people who are die-hard Korea fans.

Tony Moly New Delight Tony Tint in #02 Red (PHP 150, Althea) is a very-well reviewed lip tint online. I wasn't too sold on this because I don't really enjoy lip tints - they leave me with a patchy mess. Sure enough, it didn't apply evenly on me despite lip balm prep and throughout the video it just gets worse.

I really didn't like:

I didn't realize the Masil Color Treatment Dual Tint (PHP 260) was a pretty affordable item. It just assumed hair color would be in the 500 range? I expected at least cellophane levels of color here, but I ended up with nothing, which is a heartache because it's a "big hit" item for me.

IN SUM:

This is the first time I'd been wrong about the big hit item/s. Expectations were not met with this box. The only thing that makes up for it is variety and quantity (7 items vs. Gold's 6 and Black's 4,) with the only item I unequivocally enjoyed probably being The Face Shop Monocube Eyeshadow and the Hello Skin Jumiso Chewy Lasticity Mask. Everything else had considerable cons. The fact that I was banking on several different items also hurt this box's enjoyment by a lot.

And now I just realized, all the boxes cost about the same at around PHP 1500 but my favorite, the Black Box, had the least items (4.) This means it had more expensive and maybe better items. The boxes that had more items (Gold's 6 and Red's 7) had lots more so-so items and didn't really work out for me.