Review categorising

Reviews are a vital part of the indie makeup community. Most companies do not have physical stores where customers can go in and look at the products before buying. Some companies, especially newer ones, do not have the equipment or skills to take really good product shots. Thus potential customers, those with tight budgets or particular tastes, look for bloggers to review and swatch products, so that they know what they are getting into, in terms of product quality and customer service.

Because reviews are based on opinions, they are quite difficult to categorise in terms of 'negative' and 'positive'. Some people might prefer sheer products, and this will not 'rate' a product or company lower for having products which are not so pigmented. Some people don't mind paying a lot of money for shipping, whilst others will avoid a company based on shipping prices alone.

Sparkledex aims to give our readers as much information on indie make-up as possible, and this will of course include directing you towards a variety of reviews on all the companies we talk about.

To avoid bias and confusion, we have separated our reviews into three very broad categories:

Would buy again: this category will be applied to reviews in which the blogger was happy with the product, customer service and would reccommend it to their readers (regardless of whether or not all of the products worked with their particular skin tone or type).

Would not buy again: this category will be reserved for reviews in which the blogger had a particularly bad customer service experience, or a bad reaction to products due to mislabelling (ie not specifying whether something was vegan, eye-safe etc) or the company is obviously a repackager.

Unsure: this category will be for reviews where the reviewer cannot fault the buying experience or the products, but does not feel comfortable in reccommending the company and/or products.

If you can come up with a better system for categorising reviews, please feel free to suggest it.