this bathroom is brought to you by etsy.com

today my soap dish arrived, and i love it. i spent enough time in the bathroom, admiring how it adds colour and interest to the sink, that my kids started banging on the bathroom door and yelling for me. in other words, about 15 seconds. i hope to spend longer admiring it after my babies go to bed tonight. this beautiful item was purchased here.

i had been using body shop facial cream and it was ok, but i don't like body shop ethics. naturally, i went to etsy when i saw that it was time to replace my cream.

my search led me to summerland scrubs, where sample-sized jars of goat milk and cocoa butter souffle cream are less than 2$. i was surprised and delighted to see that the 'sample' contained almost as much as the body shop jar (1 oz vs 1.7 oz, if the body shop charged as much per ounce as summerland scrubs i would have paid about 3$ for my old jar)

the moisturizer itself is light, with the texture of chocolate mousse. a tiny bit goes a long way. it rubs in really well without residue. the body shop stuff left a residue. it was gross.

i'm not wild about the 'chocolate fudge' scent, it reminds me of chocolate skittles (bleugh!) in that it's a fake chocolate scent. sort of like how grape flavouring smells nothing like grapes. i'm not discouraged, though. i'll happily use up this cream and next time try another of her fantastic-sounding scents. maybe lemon cilantro.

the final way that my new cream kicks my old cream's ass is the ingredients list. the etsy stuff has about 1/4 as many ingredients as the body shop cream, and i can pronounce all of them. most of them i could find at the health food store. the body shop cream has the usual mile-long list of scary-sounding ingredients.

overall i give the summerland scrubs goat milk and cocoa butter souffle cream an enthusiastic two thumbs up and the body shop soy & calendula daily moisturizing cream a distasteful shrug.


the final etsy-based product i plan to review today is my bag of cocoa butter bath melts from bubbles n suds. these fizzy little bombs of joy are tiny - just look how shrimpy that one looks next to the huge, hulking lush bath bomb - but it's exactly as big as it needs to be. instead of being mostly fillers and air, these melts are dense and intense. it fizzed hard, and when it was done the bathroom smelled like a belgian chocolate factory and my skin was coated in delicious cocoa butter. all the patches of dry skin that had been forming on my body disappeared that day. i'm officially converted, and there's no going back.

to make things even better, a typical lush bath bomb costs ~6$. these delicious little treats are 6.50$ for 6. instead of a moisturizing bath being an expensive extravagance it can be an ordinary luxury.

seriously, these are the shizznit. buy them, and if you don't like them, send them to me. and when you're buying some, check out the lego shaped soap, the fight club soap, and all the other cool stuff to be found at the bubbles n suds soap company.