The kits in this post were supplied by Luna Star Naturals to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

I stumbled across the Luna Star Naturals site sometime around Christmas, and I loved the business concept.  They make all-natural makeup for children in two different age groups.  (They make face paints, too, if you’re looking to get a bit more costumey.)  It’s all the same high-quality, safe ingredients, just different color selections and kit combinations.

Klee Girls kits are designed for girls 8-14.  In other words, your older girls who are making their first forays into the world of “real” makeup.  The original Luna Star Naturals line was designed as safe “play makeup” for little girls, 3 and up.  I must confess, though, that when I first came across the site, it was myself I wanted the makeup for.  I saw some beautiful green, gold, and bronze eyeshadows that I wanted to try.  (I don’t put nasty synthetic chemicals on my own skin, either, if I can help it.)  As it turns out, all three of these eyeshadows were in the two kits we were sent for review!

We got the Pop Star kit and Soccer Star kit to try (MSRP for each is $19.99).  These are pretty deep colors.  A couple of the other kits are more delicate or icy colors.  There were three of us primarily interested in trying them out (the 6-year-old, the 11-year-old, and me), and we found that different portions of the kits were better colors for each of us.  Here you can see where I’ve swatched the colors from both kits on a white envelope (and labeled with the ballpark seasonal ranges they’d fall into):

(The same lip gloss was in both kits.)  The Autumn colors – especially the eye colors I mentioned before – were pretty great for me.  The rosy pink blush is fairly good for my 11-year-old.  And the clear blue eyeshadow and, especially, the strawberry-pink lip gloss are great for the 6-year-old.  (That same lip gloss looked kind of gaudy on my older daughter.  It’s just too clear for her coloring.)

Possibly because these are intended as play makeup, they are very highly pigmented.  That means that a little really goes a long way.  The two little girls (Sophia, 6, and Livia, almost 3) enjoy playing with this and their fancy dress-up dresses, but their eyes usually end up looking like they’re wearing street walker makeup, because they’re not very light-handed.  But it’s play makeup and they aren’t leaving the house in it, so it doesn’t matter to me.  What does matter is that it’s not causing them any harm while they play – which traditional play makeup most definitely would.

If we each stick to the right colors, though (and don’t over-apply!) these are quite lovely.  Here is what Raspberry Shimmer Lip Balm looks like on Sophia:

It’s just a very lovely, natural color: what those in the fashion world often refer to as “My Lips But Better.”

And I love the gold and green eyeshadows on myself (shown here with Honeybee Naturals eyeliner in “Envy” and black mascara from Physicians Formula OrganicWear):

(Given that both are so highly-pigmented, I might prefer one or the other with a more neutral shade.  The bronze, which don’t have a picture of, is rather glittery or metallic, but a very neutral color, at least on me.)

My one caveat is that the applicators included with the blushes aren’t very useful.  They’re sort of a “powder puff” style, and they just aren’t well-suited to applying such strong pigment with a reasonably light touch.  This is the best I could manage with the included applicator:

Yikes!  So just bite the bullet and get a brush.  It works much better!

I haven’t seen anything from the Klee Girls line in person yet; I think they will come available online in a month or two (in the meantime, you can order by calling, toll-free: 888-992-4332).  But from what I can see, they’re colored more delicately because, whereas little girls at play want to see that they’re wearing makeup, we teach our girls wearing “real” makeup that it shouldn’t look like they’re wearing it if they’ve done it right.

I’d really love to be able to buy these one color/product at a time (not just in kits), so we can mix-and-match the best colors for us.  But we are enjoying the kits we already have; we just divvied them up among us, as far as who primarily uses each item.