Giveaway! Anita's La La Land Lip Butters

Everyone ready for a giveaway? This time around I am giving away two lip butters from Anita's La La Land in Chocolate Candy and Key Lime. Both balms are unopened and shrink-wrapped. These are some of my favorite balms (read review here) and I am excited to share the love! 

TO ENTER you must be a follower of this blog. Just leave a comment with your email address. For an additional entry, you can tweet about this giveaway. Leave an additional comment telling me your twitter username.

Giveaway ends at 11:59pm PST on February 28th. Only open to U.S. residents. Winner will be announced March 1st.

Good luck! :)

Anita's La La Land Lip Butters {review}

When I stumbled upon Anita's La La Land, I was drawn in by the pictures. The balms looked like perfection. And with free shipping offered for sets, how could I resist?

{the balm}

The balms are just as good as they look. They are indeed proper "lip butters". The balm goes on all creamy and buttery. The texture is a marvelous silkiness that I'm quite addicted to. My lips are left soft and moisturized and with a gentle gloss. This may be one of my favorite lip balm formulas.

My only small complaint about the balm would be the labels. I like the clear balm tubes - that makes it easy to see how much of a balm you've used up. But the labels have a weird texture and easily get sticky. They're easy to peel off though - you just have to remember which balm it is!

{flavors + ingredients}

All of the flavors are made using natural flavorings instead of flavor oils. There's also a bit of sweetener added to all of the flavors. That bit of sweetness makes these great kissing balms! ;)

Chocolate Candy - Super chocolatey goodness! My favorite!
Iced Peppermint - Lightly minty without being overpowering. Slight tingly, but not irritatingly so!
Key Lime - This one is lightly scented. I smell the citrus right away but it takes a bit longer to pick up the distinct lime scent.
Sunshine Orange - Smells just like orange peels! I wasn't sure if I'd like this one (not too into orange scents) but it's quite lovely!
Vitamin E - Unscented! And if you're looking for a good unscented balm where you can't pick up too much of the natural scent of oils and butters, this one's great. And it's still sweetened.

Ingredients include shea butter, soya butter, olive oil, coconut oil, beeswax, stevia leaf extract, vitamin e, and essential oils.

{conclusion}

I truly love these balms from Anita's La La Land. They are creamy goodness with sweet and natural flavorings. I don't usually buy repeats of balms, but I am well stocked up on these balms. That is how much I love them! I highly recommend the lip butters from Anita's La La Land!

Long Winter Farm Lip Balms {review}

I'm sure you have all heard of Long Winter Farm. The shop is quite popular, especially in the lip balm world! Amanda, the owner, has even started a bit of a fart craze! Want to know more? Read on…

{the balm}

These lip balms have excellent consistency. They are nice and firm but still glide on smoothly with no tug. There is a lovely creaminess about them too. The kind of creamy that you just can't get enough of and might end up applying frequently and smacking your lips a little too often.

The balms leave a gentle and natural looking gloss on the lips. The wear is about two hours and it leaves my lips feeling soft and moisturized, as any good balm does. I am really in love with how these balms feel. To say it again, they really do have the perfect consistency!

{flavors + ingredients}

Here's the list of flavors I've tried out (so far!):

Black Currant Walnut - This is a good combo of nutty with fruity and sweet. It's a unique balm flavor that kind of reminds me of cookies with dried fruit in them.

Chai - I can't really detect the chai in this balm. It smells like almond and cocoa to me. Still pleasant though!

Cherry Almond - I love this one! You know those cherry chip box cake mixes? This smells like cherry chip cake! So yummy!

Pistachio Chip - This one is sweet and nutty with a hint of cocoa. The milky sweetness is the strongest scent note. I kind of want to eat it!

Rosemary Litsea - This one has an herbal lemony scent. It's very soothing as it has essential oils rather than flavor oils.

Unicorn Farts - Ah, the ever popular Unicorn Farts! The scent is a combination of spearmint and cotton candy. It's kind of like an ultra sweet version of mint chip ice cream.

Ingredients include natural beeswax, sweet almond oil, grapeseed oil, jojoba oil, unrefined cocoa butter, unrefined shea butter, vitamin e, flavor and/or essential oils.

{conclusion}

Long Winter Farm makes some pretty darn fantastic lip balms which I see myself purchasing many more in the future! The creaminess of the balms is among the best in the balmy world. The flavors are unique and delicious. And you know, they're popular for a reason. Go check out Long Winter Farm!

Alchemic Muse Foaming Body Scrubs {review}

It is a shame that I am just *now* reviewing an Alchemic Muse product on this blog. I have had a love affair going on with this shop for well over a year now. I know, I know… bad me. My excuse (because I always have an excuse) is that I am so in love with Alchemic Muse products, I have a hard time taking photos of them before I want to hop in the shower with them. Sorry it's taken me so long to calm down a bit!

(And even more of a shame that I wrote most of this review, including the above paragraph, months ago… *hangs head*)

Shall we continue? Up for review here are the foaming body scrubs. Please note, you might have to wait patiently for reviews on other products from this wonderful shop...

{the scrub}

This happens to be one of all-time favorite Alchemic Muse products. I love me a good body scrub and the foaming body scrubs deliver.  I hate the scrubs that are so dry they crumble away before you get it to your body. Or the kind that is to hard it forms into a ball when you try to rub it on your skin and rolls away before you get to scrub anything. 

This scrub is nothing like those. It has the perfect consistency that is soft enough to scoop out and apply but still offers a good and gentle scrub. As it is a foaming body scrub, there is some bubbles that offer a gentle and soothing lathering. And after all is scrubbed and lathered, it rinses off easily and doesn't make the tub messy or slippery.

After I get out of the shower, my skin is wonderfully soft and moisturized. And fragrant! The beautiful fragrances lightly linger for hours and make me feel happy and clean. Yes, the foaming body scrubs offer quite the experience.

{scents + ingredients}

Alchemic Muse offers seasonal fragrances. The ones pictured are from the summer line, and are my favorites from the summer line. The Caribbean Coconut and Waikiki are sweet and tropical and perfect summer scents.

Other scents I've enjoyed from Alchemic Muse have been Pumpkin Honey, Cocoa Bee, and Silhouette. Pumpkin Honey from the fall line is the perfect pumpkin scent! It has that spicy pumpkin pie scent with the sweetness from the honey so it's not overwhelmingly spicy. Cocoa Bee from the Valentines line (available now!) is sweet and spicy and simply intoxicating. Silhouette which was a limited edition vanilla release (which hopefully comes around again!) is the perfect vanilla scent! It's a sexy and sophisticated and airy vanilla which I can't get enough of!

I know, these are poor scent descriptions. I find Alchemic Muse fragrances to be a bit complex, more sophisticated than what I can accurately describe! But they're all amazing and there's always something for everyone!

Ingredients in the foaming scrubs include... Organic Cane Sugar, Distilled Water, Vegetable Glycerin, Sorbitol, Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate, Disodium Lauryl Sulfosuccinate, Sodium Chloride (Salt), Mangifera Indica (Mango) Seed Butter, Macadamia Ternifolia (Macadamia) Oil, Cucurbita Pepo (Pumpkin) Oil, Prunus Avium (Cherry) Kernel Oil, Vitis Vinifera (Grapeseed) Oil, Oryza Sativa (Rice) Bran Oil, Fragrance, Phenoxyethanol, and Tetrasodium EDTA.

{conclusion}

I simply love Alchemic Muse products. And although I've been moving away a bit from products scented with fragrance oils, I don't think I'll ever stop purchasing from Alchemic Muse. Everything is phenomenal, especially the perfectly exfoliating body scrubs. The scents are beautiful and unique and hard to resist even for someone who's been leaning more towards unscented/essential oil products! If you haven't given Alchemic Muse a try, you should probably do so. Try the scrubs! Or anything, really! :)