Hi there --
Although I filled out the nail polish survey already, I wanted to express my ongoing frustration with the Julep Maven program. Every single month, it seems like it's the same rainbow (by that, I mean roygbiv) of colors, usually in creams, sometimes (like this month) with shimmery versions. It Girl (the style profile that seems like it *should* be most appropriate to me) seems like the *perfect* reason to go with some way-out-there colors and finishes. Take a shade of, say, blue and give us a duochrome, a Stardust, and a satin in variations of that shade! Do an all-foil or all-duochrome box! Cream-based glitters are a *huge* thing right now! Why not dip into that pond?
I was just going through the few boxes I *did* take, and they all skew to the experimental and edgy. There may be a cream, but it will be an army green cream. No reds or oranges. This means no August, July, May, April, March, or January. I did get a June box -- because there were interesting finishes, and they were not the usual rainbow assortment. February was *fantastic* because the cream was the aforementioned army green, there was a gold glitter, and there was a dusty purple-with-hints-of-gold Stardust, and I even added on a couple of polishes. Even if I was to switch to a customizable box, at the moment, there are rarely three shades in an *entire collection* that I really want.
The good boxes that actually caused me to upgrade: The May 2013 box was *stellar* even though I wasn't thrilled with the It Girl box (two of the shades were creams, and pretty traditional creams at that). I think it was the first time I've ever upgraded to the entire collection because I wanted so many of the other things that it just made *sense*. And the duochromes in the July 2013 box gave me hope that Julep would be rolling out more bonkers duochromes -- but that hope has been unrealized.
So, basically, I feel like I have to flat-out state that if Julep wants more of my money for these boxes, whoever does the curation is going to have to curate edgier It Girl boxes! For the love of lacquer, no more reds, oranges, pinks, creams, or anything that can be described as "pretty" if there are other shades in the collection that are punkier and funkier! Is it a color deemed not traditionally office-appropriate? I work in an office, but "office-appropriate" is changing dramatically (I wore glittery tentacle nail wraps for a week or so back in April after a comic con because they were so gorgeous I didn't want to let go of *that* mani just because the con was over), and not one word was said aside from "cute nails!"), so I'll give it a whirl (as long as it's not a super warm color, just due to skin tone issues).
I also feel like the new goal is not to keep existing subscribers but to get new subscribers and lock them into being unable to skip -- and then Julep won't have to worry about people like me who already *have* all of the old stuff and are just *itching* for new things but just skip most months instead of canceling because *surely* next month will be better! There *must* be another box like May '13 or July '13 on the way! I believe I subscribed on literally day one, and at one point, I received a card that stated I was one of the first hundred or thousand subscribers, so I have been through the whole evolution of the program, and I *know* the color curation can be better. I'm just baffled as to why it's not.
(And I realize that I could just buy individual bottles, but I specifically want a *subscription*. I want polish to magically show up in my mail box every month without having to go pick them out and order them. Given the price of Julep even with the Maven pricing, I might as well just go buy Zoya rather than place a Julep order.)
Thanks,
-- meagan
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