Pop Mart resells its rarest Labubu figures for hundreds of dollars on secondary markets. People still line up outside Kmart at 6am for Ooshies. Pokemon booster packs from the 90s now sell at auction for more than a house deposit. None of that is really about the toy or the card – it’s about the split second before you open the packaging, when you still don’t know if you got the good one.
Lust Minerals is betting that same split second can sell eyeshadow.
The Australian mineral makeup brand is today launching Lust Minerals Collect & Glow – eight eyeshadow shades released in waves over six months, each one concealed until you open it. One shade in the set is ultra-rare. You won’t know what you’re holding until it’s already yours.
The Blind Box Playbook, Applied to Your Makeup Bag
Blind boxes work because they turn a purchase into a small gamble, and gambling – even low-stakes, plastic-figurine gambling – is compelling in a way straightforward shopping isn’t. Pop Mart built a multi-billion-dollar company on it. Trading card manufacturers have run the same play for decades: you don’t buy a specific card, you buy a pack and hope. McDonald’s has leaned on the same instinct with Happy Meal toys for forty years.
What’s different here is the category. A Labubu doesn’t need to function as anything other than a Labubu. An eyeshadow, mystery packaging aside, still has to blend, wear through a workday and not crease by lunchtime. Lust is layering a toy-aisle mechanic onto a product that has to hold up under actual use – which is either the interesting part of this campaign, or the part most likely to expose it as a gimmick, depending on how the shades perform.
You can unlock Mystery Shades free through eligible orders, Lust’s Rewards Program, and scheduled “incentive days,” storing everything in a refillable magnetic palette called The Vault. Collectors swap and trade duplicates within the community rather than letting them sit unused – a detail borrowed directly from trading-card culture, where the swap is half the fun.
A Genuine Point of Difference, Or Just Good Timing?
Founder and CEO Stacey Hollands has pitched the concept as a break from beauty’s usual drop cycle – “the next launch and the next thing you need to have,” as she puts it. Beauty brands have spent years training customers to chase the next limited edition before the last one’s even sold out, so a campaign built to stretch out over six months is at least a change of pace.
But the mechanics tell a slightly different story. You can’t just buy the shade you want. The only direct purchases available are a $49 Collector Kit (palette, brush and one shade), a $36 standalone palette, or an $18 brush – everything else has to be earned through orders, the Lust Rewards Program, or scheduled “incentive days.” It’s less a limited edition you can walk in and buy, and more a loyalty mechanic dressed up as a treasure hunt – closer to the way loot boxes in video games reward continued spending than to a straightforward product drop.
The Formula Underneath the Novelty
Strip away the mystery-box packaging and the shadows themselves sit within Lust’s established mineral positioning: talc-free, vegan, and coloured using mica, iron oxides and titanium dioxide rather than synthetic dyes. Boron nitride and rice powder are doing the textural work, while jojoba esters, macadamia and Vitamin E round out the skin-feel claims. None of this is radical for the mineral makeup category – it’s consistent with what Lust has built over the past decade – but it does mean the brand isn’t asking customers to trade performance for the gimmick. Whether that holds up shade-to-shade will ultimately come down to how the products wear, not how excitingly they were unwrapped.
The Bigger Picture
Collect & Glow is a useful case study in where beauty marketing is heading: less about the single hero product, more about the drawn-out experience around it. Community swapping, staged reveals, six months of anticipation – it’s built for social sharing as much as for skin.
The real test won’t be the first Mystery Shade – everyone likes a surprise on day one. It’ll be month four, when three people in the Facebook group still haven’t found the ultra-rare shade and the swap requests start piling up. That’s the point where blind-box campaigns either turn into genuine communities, like the Pop Mart resale groups trading duplicate figures, or start to feel like a treasure hunt nobody quite signed up for.
Collect & Glow launches 13 September 2026 at lustminerals.com.au.
