This is my first time subscribing to this subscription box, although I’ll admit that I’ve had my eye on it for a while now, I just never actually jumped the gun until this year.
I ordered this at like the beginning of January, it shipped out about mid way through January and just arrived at my house a few days ago with DHL shipping. It sat in customs for quite a while from what I saw, which I’m guessing is due to COVID-19.
Nomakenolife is a subscription box that focuses on korean beauty and japanese beauty products. The entire point of it is to send out cute, chara-collectible items to the buyer that are also highly instagrammable. You get around 8-9 products per box. Common products include makeup, skincare, tools and accessories, masks, hair care, and bath and body products.
Since this is the February 2021 box, the theme was “Valentine, I Choose You”!
A majority of the products were Pokemon themed, featuring items from the Pokemon x Lovisia collaboration. Some of the products were directly revealed in one of the news posts on their website:
From what I understand, it looks like you could receive any one of the above Pokemon products, so there’s no guarantee of getting Eevee or Pikachu. This is my assumption though because I’m not sure if it actually states that anywhere or not.
As for myself, I completely forgot what was in this box because of how long it took to get to me. So I was pleasantly surprised to see I got mostly Pikachu products!
Pikachu is my favorite Pokemon from the series (I always have a female one in my team from start to finish in any of the games) and, of course, pink is my favorite color, so I’m really glad I got the Pikachu products.
This month’s box included 8 items:
- Pokemon x Lovisia Pressed Powder (Pikachu Ver)
- Pokemon x Lovisia Stick Cheek (Pikachu Ver)
- Pokemon x Lovisia Lip Cream (Jigglypuff Ver)
- Pokemon x Lovisia Point Pack (11 Pieces)
- MEDIHEAL PiggyMom SoakSoak Nose Pack
- Patch Holic Costopia Love Heart Eye Mask
- eyenlip Beauty Collagen Active Peel Off Pack
- Sanrio “Look At The Fun I’m Having Today!” Hello Kitty Vinyl Pouch
To be honest… I feel a little conflicted.
I can’t tell if I like the box or if I don’t like it.
I don’t hate it, but I’m also not super impressed.
While I do really like the Pokemon x Lovisia products, especially the pressed powder and the stick cheek, I can’t decide if the box was really worth $35 + the additional like 10 dollar DHL shipping fee.
I only did the one month subscription renewal so I didn’t get any discounts from purchasing a sub for more than one box. With shipping and everything, the box totaled to about $46 dollars.
For reference, here’s the prices of each product (from what I could find):
- Pressed Powder: 1,500 JPY + tax (Lovisia Website)
- Stick Cheek: 1,300 JPY + tax (Lovisia Website)
- Lip Cream: 750 JPY + tax (Lovisia Website)
- Point Pack: 500 JPY + tax (Lovisia Website)
- MEDIHEAL PiggyMom Nose Pack: 4,000 KRW (as listed on GlowPick’s website)
- Love Heart Eye Mask: $2.08 (Based on Patch Holic ENG website)
- Collagen Active Peel Off Pack: 3,000 KRW (based off BeautyNetKorea’s website)
- Sanrio Hello Kitty Pouch: ?? Can’t Find the Price ??
I couldn’t find the prices for all of the items on their maker’s websites so I had to make due with some other websites like GlowPick and BeautyNetKorea.
As for the pouch – couldn’t find the price at all. Although, admittedly, I couldn’t be assed to look that hard, lol.
Price wise alone, if I add up just the prices I have at a 1:1 conversion ratio (which is inaccurate but for the sake of simple math, let’s roll with it) the products add up to around like 49-ish dollars. So, even if the Hello Kitty pouch was only a few bucks, I’m still receiving more value than what I paid.
But the margin isn’t all that big.
Furthermore, if you convert some of these products using the current KRW and JPY conversion rates, you’ll obviously get a different price. So while I converted 1,500 JPY to $15 USD, in actuality, it’s closer to 1,500 JPY to about $14.33 USD (based on Google). Not to mention, you have to factor tax in (which is… 8% sales tax I think? Or is that just for my otome games LOL). Similarly, 4,000 KRW is about 3.58 USD.
However, I don’t know if the Lovisia products sell on any Global website (without a huge mark up) so I feel like if you factor in forwarding companies and shipping costs to get everything to your house (and it’ll have to be different websites since it’s a mix of KR/JP items) then you’d probably end up paying more just with shipping and tax costs.
So on one hand I’m like “it’s not that bad of a box” but on the other hand sometimes I feel like “did I waste my money on this?”
BOTTOM LINE: I feel conflicted. LOL.
I feel like the box just wasn’t as impressive as I expected it to be for the price point. But on the other hand, I do enjoy some of the products that came.
Ultimately though I feel like I can’t really judge with just this one box, so I will be letting my sub continue to run with the upcoming March box. I haven’t seen any spoilers on it yet but I might not bother looking and just let the box surprise (or disappoint) me when it finally arrives.
In general though I would say I’m someone who’s always had conflicted feelings on beauty box subscriptions.
I’ve only tried two other beauty box services including Boxy Charm and Allure before they increased the price.
On one hand I like beauty boxes because it gives me new make up every month to play with. But on the other hand, getting a new box every month actually overwhelms me because on top of beauty boxes I do tend to pick up new products outside of it, so suddenly I’m inundated with stuff that I’ll only use occasionally because, well, I only have one face and a lot of make up products.
I’m also not as interested in Western beauty brands these days compared to Asian brands so the other beauty boxes don’t really appeal to me. No Make No Life was like the only “make-up” box I could find. The other Asian beauty brands were all like skincare ones, aka sheet mask ones, and I’m not really interested in getting random sheet masks when I already have like 300 haha.
So while this month’s box didn’t really impress me, I’m still willing to see if next month’s box is better.
Thanks for reading!
{ Honey + Bunny } 