I read about The Garden Bath on one of the millions of beauty blogs I check daily. I think it might have been The Lip Print - I can't swear to it, but I know the girl who writes it is a perfume junkie like myself. Anyway, The Garden Bath sells perfume oils, body butters and body scrubs, and you can get samples of everything. I bought samples of the body scrubs in Gingerbread Cookies, Lemon Chiffon and Southern Pecan Pie. The Gingerbread Cookies doesn't thrill me - it smells strongly of cinnamon rather than ginger, and I'm not a big cinnamon fan - but the other two are just gorgeous. Southern Pecan Pie is a warm Winter scent, and Lemon Chiffon smells like sweet lemon custard, but without the eggs.
In the body butters I got Amber Grove and Angel Food Cake. I really like both, but I have only sniffed them briefly from the jar, so I'll talk more about those when I've tried them out properly. I also got a cute little tin of six perfume samples - Ginger Bergamot, Southern Magnolia, Fresh Roses, Mint Julep, Chocolate Passion and Mulled Cider. More on those when I've tried them out. Oh, and I also received two free perfume oil samples on top of all of that - Butter Rum Cafe and Jade Gardens. How sweet!
I should add that the customer service was excellent - I ordered this the week of Thanksgiving and there is a note on the site saying international shipping is only done on Saturdays. I thought there was no way it would be shipped on the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend, and I'd have to wait until the following weekend, but it was, and I received it within two weeks of ordering. Excellent!
More NYX stuff from Nonpareil. I have to admit, I've pretty much reached saturation point with makeup at the moment, but there was a 25% off sale over Thanksgiving weekend so I had to buy something. This is probably the last I will buy for a while (at least until something new and shiny comes along). I'm pretty happy with this lot, though - lots of pretty colours. There are two trios - on the left is Barely There/Champagne/Root Beer, and on the right is Lake Moss. In front we have a couple of packs of blotting papers (Noodle Arms uses those), Jumbo Eyeshadow Pencil in Slate, lip pencils in Mauve, Natural and Pinky, eyebrow pencils in Brown and Taupe, and Round Lipsticks in Mars, Peony and Eucalyptus. I have to say, I LOVE the Eucalyptus lipstick and Pinky lip pencil. At first I thought I'd go blind from the brightness, but I wore them both yesterday with just a bit of charcoal eyeliner and lots of black mascara and it looked really good. Well, I thought so anyway.
Finally there is the Sigma Travel Kit brush set. I've been a bit torn on Sigma - there was a bit of a stink in the makeup blogging world over some of the youtube gurus having been sent free brush sets from Sigma and then all giving them rave reviews. So on the one hand, they get the thumbs up from those in the know, but on the other hand, can you really trust the source? Anyway, they had $10 off the travel kits on Black Friday, so I figured what the hell. At first glance, a few of them look a bit cheap and nasty to be honest, but I haven't used them yet, so I'll reserve judgement until I have. I also received a free foundation brush (I'd most likely use it for concealer as I like wide, flat brushes for concealing my many flaws!), and a really nice, shimmery gunmetal grey/taupe-ish eyeshadow called Indian Girl.
The final package I received (I forgot to get The Photographer to take a picture) was a little box of six Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab samples from The Perfumed Court. My friend Millie and I have a plan to delve properly into this little world of cult fragrances in the new year, but when I saw some available at The Perfumed Court, I couldn't resist trying them. I have no idea what to expect - I just went by the names I liked the sound of. I'm very excited to try these - they have a diehard following.
So that's it. I'll try to get some swatches of the NYX stuff done on the weekend. In the meantime, I have to go and put a face on - I'm going out for lunch!
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