So today I got home with a splitting headache, which is weird considering that my head hurts perhaps once a year, and even then it's only because I bumped it into something...It only started when I left my workplace for the day and was all the more strange because there hadn't been anything stressful going on today. In fact, I can safely say it was a pretty neat day: I've been starting to get the hang of things lately and have been having the chance to teach again, so things are looking good. :-)

Anyway, by the time I got home I was desperate for something to pamper myself with and I had just the thing: a 15 ml packet of Schäbens' Schoko Mask I bought in Müller a while back. I had been putting off trying it, never deeming the time right to give myself over to the joys of a chocolate mask, but for someone who's totally not used to having her head being slowly split in two, a full-blown headache is justification enough to run around the house looking like an Oompa-Loompa for 15 minutes. (Just to stay on topic... :-))




Schäbens' Chocolate Mask is a strange little thing: the front of the packet already had me laughing. It says that the mask "tastes delicious". Now if it said the mask smells delicious, that I would understand. I mean we all like our cosmetics to have a delectable fragrance, but very rarely do we want them to double as a midnight snack too. However, one glance at the INCI list told me I probably wouldn't be worse off if I ingested the stuff, and being the little glutton that I am, I just couldn't resist the invitation. ;-P




One tiny lick later I can tell you that it really does taste delicious (a bit like chocolate ganache), but you'll probably be better off if you put it on your face instead of in your mouth. ;-) By the way, it smells heavenly too: it'll instantly transport you into the world of chocolate rivers, cocoa fountains and whipped cream mushrooms. :)




About the product and its benefits for skin: it's a very thick, buttery substance and somewhat difficult to rinse off completely. (I only managed to reduce the amount of mask residue on my face to an acceptable level with a terrycloth towel...) My skin has been pretty oily these days, so it didn't really appreciate being slathered with what pretty much qualifies as fragrant grease in my books, but people with dry skin might end up loving this stuff. It's rich, it's nourishing, and it leaves a protective layer of cocoa and coconut butters on your skin.

Did it manage to make the trolls with the big hammers get out of my head? As a matter of fact, it did. ;-)


Rating: 4 out of 5
Price: around 250 HUF (~1 EUR / 1.3 USD) for a 15 ml satchel
Available: in Müller stores
Ingredients: see above  

Interested in chocolate-scented products? See also my reviews on:

• Cleo's Chocolate Yoghurt Shower Cream and
• Faith in Nature's Organic Chocolate Shampoo

Another lip balm review, this time about my second favorite.

Pros:

• Color:
  
  It gives a subtle and natural tint to my lips thanks to its chocolate content. The color is not harsh or anything, but it is noticeable upon application, especially when my lips are a little paler than usual. At times when I don't want to use any lipstick or gloss, I'm really grateful for this balm.
  
  
• Scent:
  
  It's sweet, powdery and aromatic, just like good quality dark chocolate. No wonder though: LUSH claims that they use only the finest quality Belgian chocolate in their products. I can detect a slight orangey undertone too due to the orange and tangerine essential oils in it.
  
  
• Taste:
  
  It's sweet but I wouldn't say it's chocolaty. The balm contains honey and glycerin, both of which could be responsible for the sweetness.
  
  
• Ingredients list:
  
  It's pretty impressive, containing lots of beneficial oils and butters, and the oat extract is something I was very happy to find in the balm because I have a strange fondness for oat. That's probably because it did wonders for my skin each time I used oatmeal as a facial scrub... :-)
  
  Oat Infusion (Avena sativa) , Almond Oil (Prunus dulcis) , Beeswax (Cera alba) , ChocolateGlycerine , Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Olea europaea) , Cetearyl Alcohol , Shea Butter (Butyrospermum parkii) , Honey , Wheatgerm Oil (Triticum vulgare) , Carnauba Wax , Flavour , Sodium Borate (Borax) , Tangerine Oil (Citrus reticulata) , Orange Oil (Citrus Aurantium dulcis) , Vanilla Absolute (Vanilla planifolia) , Cocoa Absolute (Theobroma cacao) , *Limonene , *Linalool , Methylparaben
  
  *Occurs Naturally in essential oils
  
  
  
• Effect:
  
  LUSH's Chocolate Whipstick does protect lips from the elements and does a good job at sealing in moisture, making lips soft, tinted and tasty, but it takes a long time for it to heal chapped, cracked lips, something which my beloved Alverde lip balm is much better at.
  
  

Cons:

• Packaging:
  
  It's cute and all, but LUSH's tin pots are a real PITA, and render the whole thing entirely useless when one is on the go all day. After all, what right-minded beauty-maniac would ever rub their fingers into the balm knowing that aforementioned fingers had been anywhere but a garbage dump that day. I mean we grab onto handstraps and poles on the bus and on the subway, we shake hands with people, handle money, pack away our groceries, and by doing so we come in contact with millions of bacteria every day. Now sometimes we get to wash our hands before we apply lip balm, but other times we only notice that we'd managed to lick the balm off our lips on a crowded street or on a jam-packed bus, and that's where tube packaging wins hands down. This was a major reason for me for switching to another brand.
  
  
• I'm not sure that orange essential oil really belongs into a lip balm. When you want something to heal your lips you don't necessarily want it to contain something that could actually irritate them, because that would considerably slow down the healing process. I'm not saying that this is a major flaw but it made me wonder nonetheless...
  
  
• Price:
  
  in Hungary this balm costs the equivalent of 11.65 US dollars, whereas in the US it costs 7.95 bucks and in England you can buy it for £ 3.95. Beside the fact that this totally doesn't make sense to me (Hungary's GDP is much lower that that of the UK or US, which frankly means that people are much poorer here.) I find the price just a bit too steep for 10 grams of lip balm. It does last me about 4 months, but hey, so does Alverde...

I actually bought this lip balm several times back when I was a LUSH fanatic, but I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever buy it again. For one thing, it costs too much; for another, I'd probably buy from LUSH something that I haven't tried yet.







 

Interested in chocolate-scented products? See also my reviews on:

• LUSH's Chocolate Whipstick Lipbalm and
• Cleo's Chocolate Yoghurt Shower Cream

I've been using the Organic Chocolate Shampoo by Faith in Nature regularly for almost one and a half month and I am happy to report that I'm very satisfied with it. Faith in Nature are a Scottish brand, well-known for their use of natural ingredients such as plants, herbs and essential oils. Their products are additive free, meaning that they do not contain parabens (a kind of preservative), artificial dyes, fragrances or coloring agents, nor do they have any praffin oil, animal by-product or synthetics in them, thus the ingredients list is very friendly: there aren't many ingredients to begin with and even those are very benign, not to mention each is explained in brackets. (For example ammonium-lauryl-sulphate: "Vegetable based cleaning agent".)

I bought the chocolate scented shampooo mainly for the olfactory delights it promises and I don't think it let me down in that area. It's not exactly chocolate but it certainly reminds me of the smell of a Hungarian chocolate biscuit made with honey. (A lot of help that is, I know...) I guess if I had to be creative I'd say it's a chocolate-honey-sherbet kinda scent, and you of course would have no idea what I'm talking about. The shampoo itself is much lighter than it is in the picture: it's a transparent, lemon-tea colored substance which is quite runny and very gentle with your hair.

The best thing about this shampoo is that it cleans my hair thoroughly and it has never been easier to detangle, and all that without any other products whatsoever. You see I've been wanting to give my conditioner a rest, because I felt that all the products I was using were taking their toll on my hair. I wanted to let my locks beathe and regenerate and I can finally do that with this shampoo. A word of advice though: try detangling your hair under running water using your fingers. It's much easier that way and especially so if you have thick wavy hair like me. (I'm not boasting or anything: it the worst hair that exists on the face of the Earth. It's shaggy, fizzy, and terribly unmanagable...)

I find that in order to make it lather up I need to use a bit more shampoo than I would like, but that could be written down to the insane amount of hair I've got. Still, as I said, I've been using this stuff since the 1st October (at least twice every week) and the bottle is still only a little less than halfway empty.

I'd love to try the seaweed shampoo or the one with jojoba next time and I'm also curious about their matching conditioners.

Take a look at the brand's products here: www.faithinnature.co.uk  

Interested in chocolate-scented products? See also my reviews on:

• Faith in Nature's Organic Chocolate Shampoo and
• LUSH's Chocolate Whipstick

The Italian brand Cleo is yet another of those "Wow, I didn't know this brand was available in Hungary!". I found it during my trip to a place called Beauty Palace in the downtown of Budapest. Well, all right, despite the name the place is not exactly a palace (huge cardboard boxes lying on the floor, cheap shelves everywhere, you get the idea) but at least it was good for one thing: introducing me to this delicious shower cream.

I picked up a bottle because of the good reviews it got on various beauty blogs and I haven't regretted it one bit. We don't have many chocolate scented lotions and creams here in Hungary so I have limited experience, but I must say that this is the closest any of them has ever come to producing a real chocolaty scented product. Other benefits of this shower cream are its relatively good price and the fact that it leaves my skin super-soft and lightly scented after each shower. The latter is especially interesting because I tried so many shower creams in the past that claimed to soften my skin but none of them has left a big impression on me. This, on the other hand, has.

I bought Cleo's Chocolate Yoghurt Shower Cream about a month ago, and have been neglecting it for an especially delicious soap smelling of brambles, but now I've returned to it mostly because there's nothing more comforting than taking a chocolate scented shower after one comes in from the cold weather outside. The interesting thing though is that nowadays it smells three different ways: first, when I squirt it out onto my shower mitt, it smells like sweet chocolate. Then, when I first apply it it smells like rich, creamy vanilla pudding. Finally, after it's been lathered up on my skin, it smells like honey and cinnamon flavoured cookies. I say there's no beating that. :-)