The Face Shop BK901, Shimmery Topcoat #5 (?), and GR502

It's Friday! I meant to post earlier in the week, but work got in the way :/ It has been an extremely long and painful week at work... but hopefully this project will be wrapped up soon. Next week I'll be away for a conference (40 mins outside of LA) and I am crossing my fingers that I will not be required to work during the evenings there!

Anyways, here are the other 3 Face Shop polishes I picked up in Korea. I think these might be available in their US stores, though.

The Face Shop BK901 - (same number as the holo, but very obviously a different polish!) The bottle looked so promising for this one, but on the nail, a lot of the duochrome glitter drowns in the black base. Aw :( It reminds me of OPI Unripened / Sinful Colors What's Your Name. Formula is good, though. 2 coats.

The Face Shop Topcoat 05 over black - I'm actually not sure if this is the name. It has a tag on it and the only thing I can identify is the number '5' -.- Anyways, I think it's pretty clearly meant to be a topcoat. It contains little shimmery glitter particles that remind me of the glitter in ChG White Cap or CND Jade Sparkle, but very miniscule. I think it's very pretty! I took swatch pics of it 1 coat over black, but it is kind of difficult to see. I think it catches the light a lot better in real life :)

The Face Shop GR502 - WOW! One of my favourite polishes I picked up on vacation! It reminds me of Chanel Graphite (something I can only now admit to have been lemming) but without the awful price tag. I actually swatched Graphite on my nail at the duty free store in NRT, and compared it to this when I got home. From what I can tell, Graphite has a few larger gold particles that make it sparkle a bit more, but the base colour and finish is very similar between these two. As an added bonus, this Face Shop polish is way more opaque than the Chanel. Two coats!

DBF's parents are coming to visit this weekend since it's Canadian Thanksgiving (Happy Thanksgiving, my fellow canucks!). Is Canadian Thanksgiving always the same day as Columbus Day here in the US? I can never remember. I still need to clean up the apartment tonight, since I have been getting home late everyday this week, it's a mess!

Have a great weekend, folks!

The Face Shop holos

I'm about halfway through swatching my haul. I thought I would start off with posting The Face Shop holos I got! I'm not sure if these are available in the US stores and I'm also not sure if I got all of them. They came in pretty silver boxes, and I think cost about 6000 won (~$6USD). After a certain point, I stopped calculating how much I was spending in Korea... O_O

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?