#beauty review

TheCupid bath bomb is super cute! It’s smaller than most of the other bath bombs at Lush, but it’s pretty adorable - a pink heart with a darker pink arrow through it. 

The claim to fame here is that this little pal contains powdered rose petals and  fresh raspberry juice, which explains why my skin was stained pink that evening. ^^; 

It smells great, and it’s cute as heck, and those are some fancy ingredients but overall I found this kind of underwhelming. I guess I expected something more exciting from a valentines special. It’s not bad, and if you’re into those ingredients you should grab one, but keep in mind that that’s about all you’re getting here. 

Right now more than ever we need to mobilize and make ourselves heard. I hope you attended the women’s march, but if you couldn’t make that, please show your support for other marches, like those for Black Lives Matter. 

After the women’s march, I was pretty zonked and my feet hurt, so I came home and took a fancy bath featuring this Happy Thoughts bath melt from my UK order. 

it has a sweet, citrus scent and contains both Brazilian orange and neroli oils. Two of my favourites! This was the perfect way to end a long day, and when (if) they start selling it in North America, I’ll definitely grab more!

I know, I know, the Over and Over bath bomb looks, um, almost exactly like Never Mind the Ballistics, but I promise it’s at least a little different. (And also I love Never Mind the Ballistics, so w/evs.) 

Let’s start with the colours. The bath bomb base is bright yellow, and the top is dipped in orange bath melt mix. Inside, it is bright pink! I wasn’t expecting that at all - very cool. 

Lush describes this one as having a fennel and lime scent, though it reminded me strongly of grapefruit and lemon. Bright, refreshing, fun. Here’s hoping they keep on the trend of mixing bath bombs and bath melts, because that is a sweet combination I am 100% behind.

They should call this bath melt something like Bath and the Holograms because every time I look at it I think about Jem’s synergy earrings. All it needs is like, a silver lustre core or something. (Hey, Lush, are you listening? I’m just full of ideas tonight.)

I Am a Radiant Being is a pink star-shaped bath melt that turns the water hot pink like a vision of the 80s. Unlike the 80s, it’s full of jojoba oil and contains geranium, rose and lemon oils for a bright, uplifting scent. 

I tossed this in with one of the valentines bath bombs available in north america and it was a pretty sweet bath, pink to the max and very relaxing. 

Furze is a bath melt rolled in elderflower, with three amaranth flowers pressed into the top. Most bath melts start to melt immediately in the hot water, but this one slowly sheds a flurry of elderflowers before it begins to spread green and bright through the water.

This looks really beautiful but has the unfortunate effect of smelling like Play-Doh. Seriously. My bathroom smells like play-doh, I smell like play-doh… it’s not a great scent. And while the flowers seem romantic, I found myself covered in blooms after the bath and had to towel off pretty aggressively. 

As with any bath melt like this, make sure you use a drain strainer when you pull the plug, and clean it out thoroughly after.

This smells so good. As soon as I opened the Lover’s Lamp bath bomb I just held it close to my face and inhaled for awhile. Seriously, it’s so, so good. Sweet, but mild, and what I didn’t notice online is that those dusty red hearts? Are tiny bath melts!

This is a little gem of vanilla and brazillian orange (two of my favourites!!) and the hearts have a sort of strawberry scent. Inside there are tiny red popping candies. The bath turned a lovely milky white and this was wonderful. I need more of these, stat!

Okay, I know, this looks weird but that’s because it had to go through the UK’s Royal Mail, customs, and then Canada Post to get to me. But it’s a LUSH UK Kitchen exclusive bath bomb, the Sacred Lotus, and I could not help myself, okay? I had to have it.

This bath bomb is designed to look like a lotus, obviously. It has a white base with tall purple ‘petals’ that rise up around a sunny yellow top in the centre. Interestingly, I found the white and yellow parts foamed up very quickly but the purple petals were slow-burners. 

The mix of colours turns your water a peachy colour, which I wasn’t expecting! That and the lovely neroli, jasmine, and tonka scents (some of my favourites from LUSH) make a heady combination. Even if you can’t get this in one piece, it’s still a really wonderful bath.

THEFACESHOP sells these multi-sticks, and I grabbed the pore smoothing version off Tester Korea. 

I would describe this as a solid-format primer. Basically it smoothes out your pores by very slightly filling them in before you put foundation or something on top. 

It’s basically transparent and has a soft finish I actually really like. I could see this being very good for travel especially. Not bad! I’ll keep it around as a backup to my NYX green primer though.

Is there a bath melt more beautiful than Monsieur Gustav? Maybe, but it’s bright purple colour was so immediately striking that this is the one that sticks out in my mind the most.

I wanted to spend most of my weekend napping and cleaning the apartment, and this seemed like a good pick. Monsieur Gustav has a sleepy lavender and rose scent, and quickly filled my bath with purple-pink. 

It’s super moisturizing, it smells lovely, and you can tell people you spent the evening with Monsieur Gustav. What’s not to like?

I grabbed this Apieu Rilakkuma Melting Hand Balm in Sweet Macaroon (Fruit flavor) off Tester Korea because I am all about cute hand lotion in my purse, and this format seemed interesting. The little tin looks like the little duck that hangs out with relax bear, bright yellow and very cheery. 

The balm inside is thick and sort of melts with body heat. It was a little difficult to get enough, but I also didn’t want to press too hard when I was just testing it out, so I might have been too gentle. 

The problem here is the scent. There is a strong perfume to this which I wasn’t expecting, and I wouldn’t say it smells like fruit. It’s just not good, and the kind of thing that sets off my allergies. :/ I’ll give this to a friend who doesn’t have the same hang-ups about scent as I do, bit if you were looking at this and have anything similar to me, I’d recommend something else instead despite the cuteness.

I don’t usually use anything in my hair because it pretty much stays put easily, but in winter I get a lot of flyaways from static. With that in mind, I splurged on a bar of Queen Bee hair balm at LUSH. 

After showering, I get a little bit of this on my fingers and smooth it all over my hair and then just comb is as I normally would. Flyaways? Gone. It’s that easy. (I don’t even own a blowdryer, okay?) The added benefit is this has a very mild honey scent, which I love. 

Based on the way this feels, I think it might be good on curly hair, too, but maybe ask someone at LUSH what might work best for you. 

‘Tis the season to use a lip scrub because your entire body is drying out, guys. I grabbed a few gifts at the LUSH holiday sale, and one of them included this LUSH Sugar Plum Fairy lip scrub.

It’s sweet, obviously, but it’s chock full of black currant with a little bit of orange in there - so nice! If you can manage to get your hands on this, do it!

Since it’s the new year, the LUSH valentines line is out, which means I picked up a whole bunch of things, including this LUSH Two Hearts Beating As One bath melt. 

I love how LUSH goes all out for holidays. This is basically two interlocking bath melts - one orange, one pink. Together they have a very mellow scent. LUSH describes it as ylang ylang and rose, and I think the rose is the significantly stronger of the two, because it had that kind of feel to it. 

This thing lit up my bath in hot pink and orange very quickly, and was just what I needed. I haven’t been able to take a nice bath in ages (work work work work work) and my skin felt so dry and itchy. ;_; Winter in Toronto, you know? 

This bath melt is bigger than most and left me feeling so relieved and moisturized. Definitely a favourite in the valentines line!

I have been in desperate need of lotion for awhile now. I tried some from Bath & Body Works and was just super not into them - too perfumey and artificial. But I’ve been looking at Sympathy for the Skin for awhile now and I finally caved and bought a giant tub of it. 

LUSH describes this as a banana-custard type lotion, but it smells, looks, and feels like some kind of vanilla heaven. There are tiny black seeds from vanilla pods in the lotion and it looks and smells good enough to eat! (Don’t eat it.) 

It’s super moisturizing, light, and absorbs in really quickly, which is important if, like me, you delay showering every morning and then have to rush to not be late to work because you were dicking around on the internet. >_> 

So: lovely, moisturizing, gentle. I love it, and you might love it, too!

One of my favourite scents ever, hands down is satsuma. When that body wash is on sale at the Body Shop? I buy a boat load of it. I got really excited seeing that this year LUSH had a Satsuma Gift / Bath Bomb. 

Good news: this bath bomb is cute and has a perfect satsuma-scent! It fizzes up yellow and orange and is just super nice for a bath. The core is a yellow, slower-fizzing almost star-shaped mini bath bomb. Pretty cool. I’m hoping this becomes a regular item!

Bad news: you can only get this in the gift (or one or two other gifts) and the Satsuma gift consists entirely of the bath bomb and the knot wrap. That’s the whole package. :/ 

When they make little gifts like this I want at least two items inside a knot wrap, so that’s kind of disappointing, but now I have another wrap to photograph things on, and the bath was great. 

Okay so I forgot to take a picture of this mask before I used it and then it was INSANE and I needed to blog about it so uh, I’m using the pic from the Beauteque page. >_>

Anyway, check out this totally normal looking NOHJ Black Intracell Boosting Mask. Looks like a normal sheet mask, right? So normal I didn’t even look at the back, I just ripped it open and slapped it on my face. The sheet itself is black so I figured that was the special thing here.

Lol, no.

About 30 seconds later it started foaming up. Like remember the Elizavecca Milky Piggy foaming mask? Like that, except it was a sheet mask and it was happening on both sides of the sheet. So obvi I started rubbing at it to see if that would make it happen more and surprise, it did.

That’s when I went and fished the package out of the trash to read the back and noticed that it says wash off mask really clearly on there. Ooops?

Anyways, this is an exfoliating/moisturizing mask that surprise foams. You can help it along with your fingers, and when you’re ready, remove the mask, rub the foam/bubbles in some more and then rinse it all off. It’s really lovely and fun! And also surprising if you don’t read the package! I’m into it, okay?