My experience at The Face Shop in Korea was much better than my experience at both the Manhattan and San Jose stores. I always feel unwelcome in the US stores and the SAs seem snobby, but they were so friendly and nice in all the Korean stores I went to (I went into about 5 stores). The girls at Tony Moly were the complete opposite, but I will save that story for when I post those swatches :)
The holo is actually a bit stronger than they appear in these photos, but not by much. As you know, I rarely take the time to photograph in real sunlight (my main defence is that in real life, I almost never see the light of day) so keep that in mind! :) Pictured are 2 coats and I quite like the bottles and brushes (wider than a ChG brush, but narrower than CND).
The Face Shop - RD301 - A real red holo? I guess so! It's a warmer red, leaning towards the orange side. This was the least holo out of the three.
The Face Shop - PP401
The Face Shop - BK901 - More charcoal-y than black. Somehow, I bought two polishes at TFS both with the "name" BK901. Not only are they too lazy to come up with real names, but they even re-use codes in Asia??? WTF?!
About a week before going on vacation, DBF and I decided we should watch some Korean dramas to get used to the sound of the language and maybe pick up a few words (as this is how we have come to know our Japanese vocab... tons of anime when we were in high school / college!!). We started watching Boys Over Flowers because I was familiar with the manga and it was available on Netflix. By the time we got to Seoul, we had watched the complete series.
The Face Shop was one of the first "road shops" I went to in Seoul on my trip. DBF and I were on our way to the Nfu Oh HQ and we stopped in here first. I hauled the polishes here and also picked up some black head removing clay. When I was checking out, DBF noticed a poster behind the cash register and said, "Isn't that Jihoo?" (one of the male leads in Boys Over Flowers). I said, "Oh my god, it is!" and the cashier turned around to see what we were looking at it. She went "Ohhh, Kim Hyun-joong!" and then said something in Korean (I only recognized the English word "poster". There were posters at the entrance, but we couldn't figure out if they were free). On the way out of the store, we looked up at the facade and noticed his huge face plastered everywhere! I kind of furrowed my eyebrows that a guy was advertising a cosmetics company... and that his skin looked amazing.
This isn't the exact store I went to, but I took a picture of another store later during the trip. Observe:
Anyways, I'm sad to be back, but vacation can't last forever, right?
