pretty review: the face shop

A quick intro to The Face Shop: a Korean company specializing in skincare, makeup and nails. The Face Shop recently opened up a bunch of stores in the GTA area and lucky me, there are three I can visit without much effort. On a recent trip I picked up a sheet of water decals for the nails and a hand cream.


Daily Perfumed Hand Cream in Green Tea (30mL/1oz.): This looks like an updated version of The Face Shop's previous Green Tea Hand Gel Cream. I decided to give it a shot because I was looking for a small enough hand cream that I could keep in my purse for on-the-go hand moisturization. The product comes in a acrylic paint-like tube which I find kind of annoying because the tube ends up with all kinds of dents and dings which really bother the type-A in me. There are a variety of scents for the hand cream including berry mix, apple pop, tiare, rose water and the scent I chose, green tea. While there were testers in the store of each scent (The Face Shop has testers of I think, every single product in their stores), my full hands chose what I thought would be the least offending one. Being very sensitive to smells I thought green tea would have a mild, fresh scent and I was not disappointed. It's fresh and light and doesn't give me even a whiff of a headache. I would even consider this scent a-okay for men to use and will get feedback from my partner later. Unfortunately this hand cream doesn't really do anything for my hands. Other than making them smell nice for a short amount of time, I find the gel-like consistency to not do anything to retain or add any much-needed moisture. Then again, my hands are super dry thanks to a super-dry condo in the wintertime and excessive hand usage including washing dishes. I like it for the scent but people with medium-to-extremely dry hands would be best to use something different.

Lovely me:EX Water Decal Nail Sticker in 02 Flower Garden: There are five different designs of water decals from The Face Shop but the store I went to only carried two, probably because the others were already purchased. This set includes red, pink and white roses of various sizes as well as some leaves, single bud roses and Gerbera daisies. I kind of wish there were more variety seeing as how it's labelled "Flower Garden" but I guess the variety of colour should suffice.

I found these much harder to apply than the water decals from The Born Pretty store (which you'll see a review of soon). They wrinkled on my nail plate and a top coat didn't help to smooth things out. They were also more fragile than the Born Pretty Store selection as I ended up tearing a few in half. The good thing about these is that you do have some time to get your water decal into place whereas some other types don't give you that leeway; you're kind of stuck with whatever placement you do with your first application.

I can't recall the price on these two items but I believe the cream was less than $10 and the water decals were less than $5. While I'm not crazy about the hand cream for its gel consistency, I will say that I'm not completely displeased with the water decals. I'd definitely give another design a go though I didn't see any other design from the Internet that I was crazy about. I suppose that if The Face Shop were to release more of these decals in different designs I'd definitely be up for checking them out.