Arriving home from work yesterday, relaxed and ready for a hot date with my man (kids are at grandma’s – its school holidays), I find my husband is sick and moping around. So dinner and the movies scrapped, I started to feel a bit down, then I saw a box. Oooh goodies. It was the sampler box, my very first one and I was very excited to see what was inside. Lots of delicious bath goodies, my hubby grabbed the bath bomb (from sheba’s secrets) and the spa soap (from Lindsay’s candles & stuff) and went straight to the tub for a soak – he was much recovered and relaxed and smelt lovely too afterwards.

I thought the scented oil candle (from sweet as you please) looked and smelt good and put it on while I rummaged through the rest of the box.

One lucky winner of this months whiplash will get a three month subscription to the sampler.

My three favourite items had to be an interesting vintage pin (from Pimienta negra), a recycled bottle cap magnet (from Emily Kirchner) and a cute felt toy with dangling bells (from gifts define).

The most impressively packaged item in the box caught my eye immediately, a beaded bracelet prettily packaged in a black box (still haven’t quite figured out the clasp) (from sparkle plenty), then I noticed a simpler but quirky item, a bracelet made from a tape measure – very crafty nerdy, love it (from pins and tomatoes). The difference between these two items got me thinking about the power of presentation. What kind of difference it makes to a product. On the one hand a lovely but not very original bracelet is packaged grandly, getting my attention, and then a quirky item is packaged very simply, it gets my attention anyway.

Moving on… quite an abundance of beauty products in this box, the shea and coconut butter soap (from my girl friday) looks and smells good, I was also impressed by the two different lip balms: the hemp lip balm (from botanical earth) is simply divine – the lemon grass flavour is good but it actually is a really good lip moisteriser with organic products, hemp and shea, beeswax and walnut oils it feels and smells good. The other lip balm – chocolate and cream (from sud n scrubs) smells good enough to eat, a bit distracting have chocolate flavoured lips though. It is a lovely feeling lip balm with beeswax, coconut oil and shea butter – mmm yummy.

We both felt a lot better but still no hot date, my hubby went to bed and I did the dishes!