FACT OR FICTION:A Beauty Haul including a Kiehl's set for $10.00!

Contents:

Kiehl’s Boxed Gift Set:
30 ml Ultra Facial Cleanser
7 ml Ultra Facial Cream
40 ml Ultra Facial Toner


A Trio of Magazines:

Elle a’ Seoul - Elle Korea’s Seoul lifestyle supplement showcasing new eateries, new brands, new must-do’s in Seoul.

Elle by Hera – Hera’s sponsored beauty supplement filled with Hera product descriptions and images of Sin Min Ah.

Elle Korea – book –thick and a joy to browse through. For that alone, magazines here in Seoul rock! And if you’re like me who loves perfumes, it’s always a bonus to find sniff pages such as the one pictured below, so we can get a whiff of the newest fragrances at no cost ☺

All these, 3 Magazines + the Kiehl’s set, I got for only $10.00. I kid you not. This is how cheap magazines are in Seoul. And most of the fashion magazines offer samplers of expensive products to its target women to try (a.k.a. the beauty conscious ladies in Korea!) so they can try out the products and hopefully purchase them at the stores. For October 2011, if I remember correctly, Vogue Korea was offering a set of Aveeno facial wash and toner (Or was it Aveeda? ), Nylon was offering a full-sized Vitamin C serum. There was also a local mag. offering a Clinique Facial Wash but I chose to get Elle because I kinda liked the feature, My Home Project, for my home decorating ideas. And well, because autumn has come and I wanted to try Kiehl’s supposedly amazing Ultra Cream for my suddenly dry skin.

Caveat: The only thing with these magazine product bundles is that these are not advertised at the bookstores’ online shop, so to get hold of the bundles, one needs to purchase them at the physical stores. But it works fine for me ha because Kyobo Bookstore’s main branch is a 15 minute walk away from my office so I pass by once in a while to check the new releases *grins *.


Oh, and yes, the magazines are in Korean ☺ But then, I buy them for the images and the freebies not for the write-ups.

[A HIGH CUT Rave] What Can You Buy With 25 Pesos in Seoul?

500 WON (approximately 25 pesos) is not enough to buy you a popsicle or even a pack of junkfood in Seoul. What it can buy you is this:

HIGH CUT: Secrets of Your Celebrities is an amazing, value-for-money glossy lifestyle-slash-fashion-slash beauty-slash-celebrity news magazine!

I first stumbled upon this mag when a friend who sells KPOP stuffs showed me the mag. He told me that frenzied KPOP fans in Pinas dig the covers and photos in this magazine since most of the covers and fashion shots are with KPOP stars. Apparently, it is so saleable that some KPOP sellers sell this uber-cheap magazine for as high as PHP 300.00. Talk about unethical opportunism!

Frankly, I am not much of a KPOP fan and have no plans of selling this magazine in bulk, so I will not comment on that. But I do like this magazine because it’s cheap and always contains a lot of fashion spreads, new product updates, plus infos on product how-to's. Yes, all are in Korean but the mag is so chocfull of pictures than for PHP25 pesos, and with all those how-to images , I think this is such a great buy.

It comes out about twice a month, and have just began buying every issue. PHP 25.00 for a bit of indulgent girly read is well worth it. They also cover events that only the super famous Koreans attend, like this extravagant launch of the Tory Burch freestanding shop in Seoul:

The first May volume of High Cut has 71 pages! One does wonder why it is so cheap? I guess because it is actually in tabloid glossy white paper. No, expensive hard magazine covers though the paper itself is super white and so unlike the newsprint used in even the US tabloid sheets. For a cheap tabloid sheet, you’d be amazed at the ads in High Cut, all from chi-chi brands. The issue I have contains ads from Cartier, Nina Ricci, Kuho, Hunter, Kiehl’s and Aveda.

I hope our Pinas lifestyle magazine publishers will also conceptualize something like High Cut, because even for me, a PHP 75.00 tag (the cheapest mag I've seen in Pinas) is sometimes enough for me to think twice of buying one no matter how much I like the features. If a magazine such as this can sell for PHP 25.00 in a super-expensive country like Korea, why can’t we have something like this in Pinas?

**Wishful Thinking ON***