One of the best thing about beauty blogs is that they provide makeup addicts (like me) with swatches of products that they can refer to before making a purchase, as drugstores often don't carry testers for everything! When I am makeup shopping in stores, I would literally whip out my phone and google for swatches right then and there.
However, the thing with online swatches (even ones from major makeup bloggers) is that they can be incredibly misleading.
Firstly, the lighting. I understand that not every blogger has access to awesome natural lighting or professional equipments and sometimes swatches turn out kind of bland. In fact, I much prefer swatches taken by "amateur" photographers. The problem I have is with the professional lighting most major beauty bloggers use. The lighting is just TOO GOOD! I don't know if that even makes sense, but when they use light boxes and those umbrella thingys to photograph their swatches, the product often ends up looking a hundred times better simply because the lighting is good. So when someone actually goes and buys that product, they will be largely disappointed when they try it on themselves because it will not look as beautiful as it looked in the picture taken with professional photography equipment!
The second thing is the way a product is swatched. A few days ago, I was looking for swatches of Revlon Lip Butters because my drugstore had only testers for a few colors. I found several blogs that provided absolutely gorgeous arm swatches and I was just so impressed I picked up several of the colors that looked the most pigmented in the swatches. When I got home, I was pretty darn disappointed when I actually swatched and tried on the product myself, because the pigmentation was no where near what was shown in the swatches. The bloggers must have used at least six or seven layers of the product to attain such intense pigmentation! Why would you do that? No one applies that thick of a layer of product on their lips!
The third thing is editing. I don't think editing poses an issue, I certainly edit my pictures because the only light source I have is my camera's flash, my lamp, and the gloomy Vancouver sky. So often times I need to edit my pictures to make things clearer. But when I edit, I try my best to make sure that the color and the quality of the product looks the same in the picture as it would in person. Yet a lot of swatches I find online seem to be over saturated or overexposed due to bad editing.
So anyways, those things really bum me out. I realize that all beauty blogger wants their blog to be filled with bright and beautiful images, but they need to take into account how accurately those pictures actually portray the real thing. I am not trying to alienate or attack any bloggers or accuse them of intentionally providing misleading swatches because I myself am guilty of some the above mentioned things; I simply wish bloggers become more aware of them and instead of trying to create beautiful magazine quality photographs, they should strive to provide more helpful swatches that accurately portray products.
