Boyah Shop Korean Buying Service Review + Haul of Hanbang & Sheet Masks

I use Korean buying services a lot, probably more than your average K-Beauty fan, for reasons ranging from "I'm a spreadsheet nerd who likes to min/max my costs for the best deal" to "I'm dangerously close to being a K-Beauty hipster looking for the next obscure thing" to "I like putting weird things on my face."  I've used 3 Korean buying services to date, and liked all of them, and today I'm going to review Boyah Shop.  I'm also going to post some haul photos, as peeps requested on my Instagram.

My buying service order has arrived! My heart sank when I saw a giant leak or possible rain damage on the box, worrying that my preciouses might be damaged. But thanks to the stellar packing skills of @boyahshopkr, my products were safely sealed away from what turned out to be massive rain damage.😱☔💧💧💧 I also received a sweet note and I'm a little 😭❤😭 over how amazing this service is. I'm not even sure if I want to write about it on my blog, because I don't want her to be buried in an avalanche of thirsty #kbeauty fans looking for their buying service fix (RIP @Dowaja, you were not long in this world), but spoilers: this buying service is amazing. AH-MAZ-ING. I just ... I can't even. The responsiveness, the customer service, the cute ... so cute. A++++ 😍😍😍 I need to find something I want just so I can use her service again and bask in the cute. 😍😍😍 (in addition to great service, obvs) Working with her is like hugging a pile of kittens, but without allergies involved. #koreanbeauty #koreanbuyingservice #hanbang #haul #cremorlab #jungsaemmool #sheetmasks #snailunit #rasianbeauty

A photo posted by Snow White and the Asian Pear (@snowwhiteandtheasianpear) on Mar 14, 2016 at 3:44pm PDT

I suppose the caption of this is a bit of a spoiler, heh.

In this post:

• How a buying service works
• What Boyah Shop offers
• My experience with the ordering process
• What I bought
• Would I recommend their service

Also featuring some gratuitous unboxing photos of my goodies, because that's how I roll.

Beginner Friendly: Simple K-Beauty Starter Kit #2 - Dry & Stressed Skin Type

Here's the second installment of my Beginner Friendly: Simple K-Beauty Starter Kits for 4 Skin Types series, where I share the actual suggestions/gift selections/starter care packages I have selected for 4 real people as their beginner's intro to Korean beauty products.

Historically, I've avoided recommending specific products for my readers (and still do) as I'm not licensed to be giving skincare advice and I'm very adverse to veering into Dr. Internet territory, but I realized that even though I can't recommend products to people, I can share the products that I've assembled as starter packages for K-Beauty beginners in my life.  By that I mean my family and friends who continually get beauty products for their birthdays and holiday gifts as I attempt to get them hooked on the good stuff.  I'll get my mother into snails one of these days, mark my words!

This week I will be sharing Starter Kit #2, which was for a college-age friend with dry, stressed skin who needed something simple that would give her a huge boost in moisturization without interrupting her studying and would also soothe her skin.

Left: simple. Right: eeeeek!  Both are examples of the daily routines I post on Instagram.

I've been pleasantly surprised at how much people seemed to like the first kit (link here: Simple K-Beauty Starter Kit #1 - Oily & Acne-Prone Skin Type) but as fellow Snailcaster Fiddy of Fifty Shades of Snail pointed out, sometimes it's easy for skincare nerds like us to forget that not everyone is a skincare hobbyist.  (I actually wrote an entire post about having skincare as a hobby, in fact!)   I tend to shy away from simple, because the endless possibilities in customization is what excites me about K-Beauty, but it's a good reminder that not everyone feels that way!

Making K-Beauty more accessible is something The Snailcast discusses quite a bit (our podcast episodes frequently touch on this topic as a recurring theme) and this series was inspired by the excellent example routine that Tracy of Fanserviced-b posted: Easy Starter K-Beauty Skincare Routine for $100 on Amazon for normal skin types.

In this series:

All starter kits will feature 5 items or less, what they're for, and how to use them.  All lovingly selected with thought and care, because when I make kits for my friends and family, it's a box o' love.  Obviously not everything works for everyone, patch testing is necessary, etc etc.  These are just my personal picks.

• Starter Kit # 1: My college-age friend with oily, acne-prone skin (link here)
• Starter Kit # 2: My college-age friend with dry, stressed skin (you are here!)
• Starter Kit # 3: My mother's sensitive, dehydrated, aging skin kit (link here)
• Starter Kit # 4: My mother-in-law's normal, hyperpigmented, aging kit (link here)

• Bonus Kit if I haven't thrown myself off a cliff from creating all these visual (yes, visual) kits:  My personal kit if my house burned down and I had to start over with nothing but Amazon gift cards, which won't be simple, less than 5 items, or anything else straightforward.  No promises. Done! K-Beauty on Amazon: Rebuilding a 15+ Step Routine if My Stash Caught on Fire

Once these posts are live, I will link them here.  Done!  As I mentioned in the original post, these items will be from Amazon for accessibility reasons as a counterpoint to the more internationally-focused From Beginner to Expert Mode: Where I Buy K-Beauty & Asian Cosmetics post.

Time for soothing skincare!

Beginner Friendly: Simple K-Beauty Starter Kit #1 - Oily & Acne-Prone Skin Type

Earlier this week I mentioned that I was going to be doing a series of K-Beauty Starter Kits, which sounds all fancy and deliberate, when in fact it's a matter of me telling you all about actual starter routines that I have given (or recommended) to real, live people.  Although I still can't recommend a product for you, nor can I give you specific advice as I would need a license for either, I can, and I am, going to share with you the care packages I have made for family and friends to introduce them to K-Beauty.

I want to get them hooked on my skincare obsession, but beginners want a routine that looks like the leftmost routine in the background of this image, not the rightmost:

Left: simple. Right: eeeeek!  Both are examples of the daily routines I post on Instagram.

As I mentioned in the last post, this idea was inspired by the discussions The Snailcast has been mulling over on how difficult it is to simplify something that is endlessly customizable.  Tracy of Fanserviced-b posted a fantastic Easy Starter K-Beauty Skincare Routine for $100 on Amazon, and I hope to build on that by giving examples of starter routines I have given actual people.

Let me recap last week's post explaining how came to a place where I'm comfortable with talking specifics, since that's a thin line:

I still can't make recommendations for you.  (No, seriously, I can't.  No blogger can.)  But, if you'd like to see what I would personally select and put into a "routine in a box" for my personal friends and family members who are interested in this skincare obsession of mine but can't be bothered with all the research and customization and ordering things from Korea.  I can hear my mother now: "This is too fussy, I'd rather just mix up simple things in my kitchen." NO, mom!  Not unless you actually have a background in science when you're DIYing skincare like Chel of Holysnails, please just ... let me send you some stuff.  In a box.  You don't even have to do any work, just use them in the order I put on the letter, ok? 

Then I realized ... if I can pick things to put in a box for my mother and others, and in fact have already done so, why can't I share them with my readers?  After all, I am not recommending that people buy these products to treat a skin condition, I'm just sharing what would go in my care package for that person, based on their general skin type, needs, and most importantly, are simple.  All of the kits will have 5 items or less!

Lemme tell you right now, the 5 item limit is tough when a routine can easily have 15-20 steps in it.  I am determined to stick to it, though, because although are limitless places that you can take your customization, it's good to start simple first.

In this series:

All starter kits will feature 5 items or less, what they're for, and how to use them.  All lovingly selected with thought and care, because when I make kits for my friends and family, it's a box o' love.  Obviously not everything works for everyone, patch testing is necessary, etc etc.  These are just my personal picks.

• Starter Kit # 1: My college-age friend with oily, acne-prone skin (you are here!)
• Starter Kit # 2: My college-age friend with dry, stressed skin (link here)
• Starter Kit # 3: My mother's sensitive, dehydrated, aging skin kit (link here)
• Starter Kit # 4: My mother-in-law's normal, hyperpigmented, aging kit (link here)

• Bonus Kit if I haven't thrown myself off a cliff from creating all these visual (yes, visual) kits:  My personal kit if my house burned down and I had to start over with nothing but Amazon gift cards, which won't be simple, less than 5 items, or anything else straightforward.  No promises. Done! K-Beauty on Amazon: Rebuilding a 15+ Step Routine if My Stash Caught on Fire

Once these posts are live, I will link them here.  Done!  As I mentioned in the original post, these items will be from Amazon for accessibility reasons as a counterpoint to the more internationally-focused From Beginner to Expert Mode: Where I Buy K-Beauty & Asian Cosmetics post.

Let's get going with the first one, for my college-age friend with oily, acne-prone skin!

Beginner Friendly: Simple K-Beauty Starter Kits for 4 Skin Types

I meant this to be one megapost, but as it grew longer and longer and the delay was getting longer and longer, I realized it was better for me to break this up into a small series of posts, and get this show on the road!  This post is meant to be a follow-up/expansion post on Fanserviced-b's fantastic post Easy Starter K-Beauty Skincare Routine for $100 on Amazon-- and in fact the podcasters at The Snailcast have been chatting lately about the struggle to simplify what is, at it's heart, capable of infinite complexity.  Actually, that's why we like it!

K-Beauty is like cooking; there's so many ingredients (products) and ways to use them to suit your taste.  Sometimes that can get a little frustrating for people like us who are trying to help, because answering "how do I cook" doesn't really have a simple answer, right?

Cooking can be simple, or it can be complex, and K-Beauty is the same.  It can be either, like these two examples:

Left: simple. Right: eeeeek!  Both are examples of the daily routines I post on Instagram.

The problem with answering "what should I buy?" and it's variants such as: "I bought this list of products, what do you think?" and "Here's my cart of items, are they good?" and "What do you recommend for acne/aging/hyperpigmentation?" is that we quite simply can't.  As in, legally can't.

On the other hand, learning does require a progression from "simple to complex."  How to make it simple?  Tracy's post outlined a simple, fun, and inexpensive routine for normal, non-sensitive, non-troubled skin, and kept things wonderfully simple and beginner-friendly.  So what's the next step, without getting too complex?   As we were discussing all this last weekend, I realized that I had made similar "K-Beauty Starter Kit" recommendations to friends and family members, including care packages with a simple starter routine.

Aha!  Lightbulb flash!  Could I share these starter kit boxes with people, since it's not specific advice?  Why not?