Love & Toast Happiness Kit

After months of admiring it from afar, I finally purchased the Love & Toast Happiness Kit ($16.99) at Target. The kit contains a shower creme, body scrub, body lotion, shampoo, conditioner, lip scrub, lip butter, and perfume sample. The lip scrub is exclusive to the Happiness Kit; everything else you can buy full size. I think the Happiness Kit does a good job at representing the breadth of Love & Toast's product line. I also like that the kit comes bundled in a handy re-usable plastic pouch.

The goods.

The shower creme, body scrub, and body lotion are all 0.85oz (enough for several applications) and come in the Clementine Crush scent. Love & Toast claims that the scent includes notes of mandarin, ripened mango, vanilla sugar, and guava, but to me it smells exactly like these:

Sweet and orange-y without any tartness. I love citrus scents but I do prefer them a bit tart, so this was just OK for me. As far as performance goes, the shower creme and body lotion did go a good job softening my skin, but nothing extraordinary. I might purchase full sizes of these if I found another scent I really liked (Salt n' Sea and Honey Nectar sound interesting!).

The shampoo and conditioner are also 0.85oz and are formulated for all hair types. The formulas contain white tea, sage, grapefruit and mint. I can definitely smell the mint, as well as a little rosemary, maybe? The shampoo lathered well (with no sulfates!) and did a good job cleaning my hair. The conditioner is really thick so I assumed it would adequately moisturize my hair, but my hair ended up feeling drier than usual. I tend to use moisturizing/hydrating formulas, so I think I was missing the extra moisture those formulas deliver. Love & Toast does offer a "Rich" shampoo and conditioner - I wonder if that would work better for me.

A random aside about the body and hair care products - they are really difficult to squeeze out of their little bottles! The square shape is attractive, but just doesn't seem to be well-designed for getting product out.

The lip butter is a normal-size tube in the Strawberry Fields flavor. I do get a strawberry note in the scent, but I also get an anise or ammonium note that just seems misplaced to me. The flavor bothers me so much that I won't use the product, which is too bad, since the texture is great (virtually the same as the lip balm). I think this lip butter will be finding a new home with a friend, but I'm hoping to try other flavors of these lip butters and be more successful with them.

The lip scrub is nothing special. It seems to be petroleum jelly with some silica in it. There doesn't seem to be enough silica/exfoliators to effectively scrub lips, but the jelly is fairly moisturizing. The lip scrub is supposed to have a Green Tea mint scent (maybe the same as the Green Tea Mint lip butter)? To me it smells like sweet peppermint.

The perfume sample I received was Sugar Grapefruit, which is supposed to have notes of Pink grapefruit, Orange citrus, Warm musk, Lily. It does smell citrusy, but I don't get a clear grapefruit or orange note. It smells more like a mix of lemon and lime to me with a tart edge. I don't pick up the lily or musk either, but I do detect a clean, soapy note somewhere in there. The scent is too tart for me, so I wouldn't purchase a full size, but it has reignited my love for the Gin Blossom perfume! Gin Blossom seems to have the same citrus notes but is a bit sweeter and less tart.

So I think that covered everything...Overall I wasn't super impressed with the products in this kit but I was happy to become more familiar with the Love & Toast product line. And I'm happy that testing these new products reignited my love for the Love & Toast products I already have! I probably wouldn't purchase full sizes of any of the specific products contained in this kit, but I have been persuaded to think about purchasing full size products in other scents. I'm still interested...that's good, right? ;)

Green Beauty Blog Rating : *****