Holiday shopping made easy online! Places with affordable shipping in Canada!

Happy shopping season everyone!
I happen to have a lot of gifts to send and do not like trekking to the post office, have to package and wrap the gifts carefully and then pay for postage.
Just seems like too much....work!
 In this modern time it seems much easier to buy gifts online.
The only issue is if you are not careful you can spend tons on shipping. Just thought I would post some of my favorite websites to buy gifts in Canada.
Most of these websites have free or very well priced shipping.

1) Well.ca free shipping for any item in Canada. There is a charge to send items to the US, so for  US based gifts something else is faster and better.
But for sending a gift in Canada, this is great! Well.ca also sells a lot of nice handmade soaps,candy,food!
Prices are usually better than a retail store for the most part.

2) Chocodirect.com
This is one of my favorite places to buy candy and gifts. Shipping is $5 for any order and I just noticed this week they made some gift baskets for the holidays!
The website is based in Quebec and usually an order takes at most 5 days to be received.
Chocodirect only ships in Canada, so not really good for US gifts.
The price of their baskets is quite good and compared to most of those "basket shops" shipping is very resonable. They do not seem to be charging a crazy ammount just to have items in a basket.
I calculated the cost of their $20 basket and the value of the items is $19 if you buy them without a basket!
Speaking to my mother who happens to order gift baskets for the holidays, she told me that she pays around $15-20 to send gift baskets from a local store (she is in Montreal).
I have been shopping at Chocodirect for a few years now and have not had any issues with shipping. One good thing they do for the environment is they seem to reuse or "repurpose" their mailing boxes. My last order, the outside packaging was a box used to hold a large  quantity of chocolate bars (it was a giant Valor chocolate box). The packaging inside to protect my items was mostly paper and my glass items had bubble wrap!

Hopefully this helps your online shopping. I will try and find more sites and add links later today!

My Pretty Pink Box July 2010 Beauty Loot!

I have enjoyed receiving the My Pretty Pink Box cosmetics samplers for the past few months and find they always have some interesting brands I have never heard of before.
The July 2010 box seemed to travel through the postal system much faster than the last boxes I have ordered.
Here is what was received in the July box:

*Sweet Libertine mineral makeup eye samples (2small plastic bagged samples, shades Filigree and Neptune).
*Moi Minerals blush sample (shade Berry)
*Wonder Curl Hair Jel (2oz size)
*NYX eye shadow (Cherry)
*Derma Pro skincare packets (2x cleanser,1x scrub,2x Gel Tox).
*Jesse's Girl Liquid Glass lip gloss (Coy, a nice shimmery shade).

I hope to have some reviews of these products up soon.
But one can only sample so many items in a day.....

The August box is out now,can't wait to see what will be in it!

Deep Steep @ Skinbotanica! lovely soaps and all natural!

I recently saw this brand online and since I like natural products was hoping this would be nice!
Well, Ihave to say the products I tried were very gentle and extremely nice smelling!
I tried the DEEP STEEP line in HONEYDEW SPEARMINT.
The scent is very light and goes away after 30 second so it is not an "in your face" kind of artificial scent.

But I really like that. I bought the sampler set and the shower gel is very gentle too. The body lotion is quite thin and pretty light, but nice for summer and does not leave hands greassy.
The body butter stick is kind of like a giant lip balm and good for any dry spots.
I am definitely getting more of this line and have ordered the other scents to see if they are just as nice.

I have not seen this line in Canada yet, but even with shipping the price is very resonable.
There is also a special right now where if you spend $100 you get the free BEAUTY CACHE when you enter that code and add the cache to your shopping cart!
That is a $30 value!




Skinbotanica and Skincarerx use the same shopping cart,so the special offers will work when buying items on both sites.
I really like how this company they actually ship bonus items to Canadians and others when many companies do not do this!

Beauty Cache! get it, also ships to Canada!

I've been telling everyone I know about this Skincarerx.com Beauty Cache.
Thrilled that they actually ship the bonus items to Canada (unlike that other American beauty store).
Service at Skincarerx has been great too!
Customer service is always so friendly and helpful.
I especially like their return garantee and that all the ingredients for everything is listed online.
They are also very generous with adding extra samples to every order.


Spend $100 at SkinCareRx and add a Beauty Cache For Free. use Code BEAUTYCACHE at checkout.

I'm going to eventually review all the items I like from this store.
But will start by saying the Deep Steep body care line in Honeydew Spearmint smells sooo nice and is all natural.

My Pretty Pink Box! April 2010 review.

Guess I'm kind of late in reviewing the April 2010 My Pretty Pink Box.

But better late than naver.

MPBB is a company that has a monthly pink box with cosmetic items from smaller, new companies and some established brands.

You can not subscribe to this at the moment and it is only by going to the MPBB site every month that you can get this limited supply box.

There are not tons of these available as the company running this program is fairly new and quite small still!

Here is what I got in the April 2010 My Pretty Pink Box:

Surgeon's Skin Secret beeswax moisturizer, Honey & Almond scent (1 oz jar/28ml)

Exuviance Performance Peel AP25 (2 use sample kit)

NYX liquid eyeliner in Ocean

Mark calm & composed moisutizer packet (1.5ml)

Mark Rio perfume scratch card (like a postcard with a perfume peel off sticker)

Yagolicious Bonita lipstick in Matador Red

Body by Brigitte wax strip sample (a small packet with 4 strips in the eyebrow of facial size).

Overall I'm quite satisfied with the contents of the My Pretty Pink Box.

I've had the chance to try a few products in it and so far one of my favorite items is the Body by Brigitte wax strips.

They actually work and are extremely easy to use.

The strips do not stick to your skin and somehow magically just remove the hair!

A longer review is to follow on this item soon.

One item that did somewhat annoy me was the Yagolicious lipstick.

There is no ingredient listing on the item (which is fine as it could be on a separate paper even), and when I went to the Yagolicious website- there was no ingredient listing either.

Usually I like to know the ingredients in what I am using and some people they might have allergies or for other reasons want to avoid a certain ingredient.

I have not tried the Yagolicious lipstick yet for the above reasons.

If you want to get one of the My Pretty Pink Box their website can be found at: www.myprettypinkbox.com

Also wanted to add that this program is run by a small company so sometimes they are a bit slow to respond to emails.

Shipping to Canada also takes a month. But at least they ship to Canada!