Luvmilk: General Catalogue Review

This time was my first time ordering from Luvmilk! This is a widely raved about brand on r/indiemakeupandmore so I decided to look into the brand.

The whole order! Pictured here is the bath tower and the body sprays at the bottom. 

General information about the brand:

The brand is only run by one person, Milky. The brand itself is inspired by a lot of Milky's personal interests, so a lot of the names of the products are inspired by shows and games I personally love as well. Some recent releases were inspired by Zelda, Splatoon and Spyro, and I was incredibly tempted to get Divine Beast- just because! 

As it is a smaller indie business, it's great to know that you're talking to a real person who's very passionate about their company, and so I was able to email Milky directly regarding some scent recommendations and also some other questions.
Milky was super considerate about my preferences (no spice, vanilla leaning gourmands!) which they mentioned was also their favorite type of scents, and gave me a huge list to choose from. 

The scent list is immense, and I absolutely love the sounds of most of it! I really wish that there were smaller options for me to try the scents, and I hope that the brand might take that into account for international buyers as well. 

Me and my friend made our orders during the 24 hour sale period to commemorate Luvmilk's 4th Anniversary of the shop, and the discount code gave 15% off all orders. While I had hoped for more of a discount to at least make up for the shipping prices, I should mention that the actual prices for the products themselves are extremely affordable, and $4USD for a 1oz body spray is a huge bargain in comparison to a lot of other similar products out there.

General information about the products: 

Luvmilk offers an array of body shampoo, conditioner, a body wash, milk baths, bath salts, and butter crumbles/butter bombs, and a body spray. 

For those who have never heard of these categories, much like I hadn't before my new orders: 

A body spray is typically a scented spray is a light water based mist for your body, much like perfumed spray but intended for body rather than linen, or just around the home. 

Milk baths are generally sort of a bath taken with milk, but from this shop, they offer powdered milk with bath salts. 

Butter Crumbles/Butter bombs are "crumbled up butter bombs (or bath bombs). They fizz like a bath bomb and make your bath super silky and thick with butters and oils to nourish your skin".
Luvmilk butter crumbles are the unshaped version of butter bombs, which are easier to make and also to choose how much you want to use. 

I'm not a huge bath taker (as I try to be very conscious about water use being in Australia, which is prone to droughts), and I tend to stay away from overly extravagant bath and body products. When I do take a bath, I typically either use bath salts (or sometimes just salt) or Japanese onsen powders (typically sulfur, which comes in powders or sometimes a huge chunk of salt), so for this order I've just ordered a simple scent in the bath salt option.

The bath tower - and my solitary Lofty Castle. 

Shipping information:

EDIT: As of March 1st 2019, Milky has decided not to offer international shipping on the site, but if you're willing, you can email Milky directly, and payment will operate on a products first and then shipping cost at time of dispatch payment process thus making it more cost accurate for both parties. 

A few notes for our international buyers (generally anyone not located in North America), it is exceptionally expensive to buy Luvmilk outside of the States, simply because the house ships weight based (much like Sugar and Spite) instead of flat rate shipping (like CocoaPink, Poesie or Luminous Star.) 

Unlike most indie brands, which offers smaller, and lighter items such as perfume drams so you're able to try the scents that are on offer, Luvmilk doesn't offer any sample options in their catalogue for their scents. Personally, I would like to see smaller perfume options, especially lighter options that are more accessible for international buyers - especially in light of the amazing scent list they have on offer! 

I did a joint order with my friend in order to attempt to minimize the shipping costs, some of the estimates which went up to 90USD. I contacted Milky directly regarding some of the shipping estimates and costs, because as far as I know, USPS is primarily weight based (and not price based as far as I'm aware). Unfortunately, Milky wasn't able to answer me very confidently regarding the prices, and told me that it was common that the calculator would miscalculate. Regarding shipping that is over estimated in price, this will get refunded back to you, so that you're directly paying for the amount you've ordered. 

For our joint order, the shipping was about 55USD, and we split between the weight ratios that we ordered. Fortunately, we were both saving a huge amount, as the order itself was only $75USD. 

The TAT for this order was actually incredibly quick considering the amount of orders that were processed. Milky shut the store in order to make sure the TAT was kept low, which I absolutely commend them for doing, and thus our order was packed and shipped in 3 days, which I was pleasantly surprised (and impressed!) by. I've never heard of any store making an active effort to turn away revenue in order to keep everything working efficiently, and I really respect that.

In fact - I honestly wish a lot of stores were more open about TAT being increased during sales periods, as I waited almost two weeks for a Lime Crime order to be packed and shipped, in comparison to the >5 days that orders usually go out it was a little frustrating to see orders that were placed a few days apart to be shipped at the same time, yet not in the same box.

Additionally, after my package got misdirected thanks to USPS, I emailed Milky just in case there was anything wrong or if it would be mailed back, and they were super considerate and reassuring and said if anything were to happen that they would try to help me as much as they could - and thankfully as you can tell, the whole package got here in one piece! 

My order:

I ordered 6 body sprays and one bath salt (which isn't pictured). 

Our whole order was quite lengthy, but I'll leave the other products alone - though I have smelt them! 

I tried only two of their different products, the body spray and the bath salts, and while I wanted to try the milk bath, I wasn't able to justify getting a bit more, as the price of my purchase was almost doubled due to the shipping price. 

I ordered a 9.5oz Bath salt in Lofty Castle, which was $6 USD ($5.1 USD discounted) 

Lofty Castle - Candied lavender, fresh honey, puffs of cotton candy, and raw sugar.

While I originally would have opted for this in a body spray, I wanted to choose a more simplistic scent for a bath salt. I chose this over Golden Aphrodite, mostly because lavender and sweet scents speak to me a little more than fruity notes.

In the jar - this isn't super strong on the lavender, but it smells like a lovely herbal scent with huge dollop of honey and raw sugar. It almost smells ginger like, but after having taken a bath in this, it definitely has the same honey note in Kitsune Royalty, rather than the heavy lavender note that I expected. It reminds me a lot more of the Arizona Green Tea but a touch more sweet. This scent especially was incredibly concentrated, but very strong on the honey.

I also like that you can pick color options with the scents as well which is a really nice personal touch.

The bath itself was really nice! I really enjoyed it, and you can take up to 4 baths with the amount of salt you get. I only used a bit but the scent is really nice and really seeps into your skin the longer you stay in the bath - so there was a nice cold tea honey note on my skin for the rest of the day after the bath. I really liked this, although I think I'd like another scent, something more clean instead of the heavy honey note which isn't my favorite. 

The rest of these were body sprays in 1oz/30mL, which are normally $4 USD, but $3.4USD with the discount. 

The body spray is just a convenient moisturizing spray, the bottle in 1oz is nice and sturdy, so you don't need to worry about breaking these at all, and the spray is nice, not a lot of problems with the nozzle or anything. Regarding the scent notes, despite the blind buy, I'm super happy that most of these notes smell exactly as described. I also love that there's all the note descriptions labelled on the bottle which is super convenient for me.

These are a little bigger than my palm.

Magical Girl - Sweet, toasted marshmallow.

This was one of the most raved about scents of the whole catalogue, and I was weighing this up against Moon Milk which is also a very simple sweet foodie scent. As my friend pointed out, it's more likely that this is a best seller and Moon Milk was formulated for a lip balm, so this might be the better buy. Interestingly enough when compared to Marshmallow Fireside, these have almost nothing in common besides the 'marshmallow' note.
Luvmilk's marshmallow note is much more mellow than the more creamy CocoaPink version, and this 'toasted' has none of the smokey fire notes that CocoaPink has. This smells more like an oven toasted marshmallow, just a hint of that caramelised crunchy shell with a soft gooey inside.

Have you ever been to K11 in Hong Kong? The whole mall smells like vanilla cleaning product, and I've never figured out what product or why that is. I also recently realized, Magical Girl smells exactly like the mall fragrance in K11, and it gives me a huge nostalgia kick.

Compare to Luvmilk's other more elaborate scents, I see this as a very standard type single note layering scent though, but I still like my simple scents from time to time! I find myself reaching for this over every other scent despite not wowing me, because it's just lighter and easier to wear.

Kitsune Royalty - Sparkling green tea and vanilla with a touch of honey and caramel.

This was one of the scents I was a little scared of, mostly because the CocoaPink green tea scent is often described as soap like, and just generally clinical more than 'tea'. I didn't have a great success with Luminous' green tea note either, and I've not tried the more popular green tea scents (e.g Kuiadore from Fantome), so I don't have a great scope of comparison (as green tea as a scent is quite rare as well.) Milky's notes to me were "cold green tea with honey."

For anyone familiar with different types of green tea - Luvmilk's scent rendition is more of a 'herbal' Fuze/TWG type green tea rather than your traditional matcha or sencha - it smells exactly like Arizona Green Tea with honey, but a smidge more sweet from the slight whiffs of vanilla.

A little note - As a matcha fanatic, the Matcha melty lip balm is the epitome of an ideal matcha scent that I would love to see in a perfume, just a light, sweet matcha, much like nama matcha choco, or even just a matcha ice cream. While this isn't the idea match up I wanted in a green tea scent, (I would prefer to see whipped cream, rice notes, anko/red bean paste and maybe even a touch of hojicha, sencha shifts in the scent), general sweetness wouldn't be too bad either.

Achillean -  Fluffy, buttery pancakes, maple syrup, and freshly cut banana.

Having tried Jeffree Star's Pancakes and Syrup lip scrub, I was pretty disappointed by the scent. To my nose, the scrub smells like straight caramel extract mixed in with some sugar, which was nothing like the 'realistic pancakes and buttery syrup' scent that I expected to get- which this delivers in spades.
This opens up with a huge whiff of banana, just lovely sweet banana, and then the banana dries down into butter and maple syrup, and then the butter starts coming through on a fresh off the pan type pancake. To me, this actually reminds me a lot of caramelized popcorn that I get in Tokyo Disneyland from the popcorn carts - it just reminds me of the churro sweetness from food stands and lining up with kids around the popcorn cart. This is amazing and I love it as much as I wanted to - 10/10 highly recommend for banana gourmand lovers. 

King of Hearts - Fresh cinnamon, malted sugar, sugared pistachio, amaretto, and warm buttered cookies.

This was definitely more of a last minute choice for me, I was tossing up between this and a few other scents that Milky recommended I should try, but I feel that I wanted to broaden my horizons a little.
Recently, I realized that I quite like cinnamon as a scent (despite usually staying away from it and migrating more towards gingerbread), and I also quite enjoy coconut notes in perfumes as well. so I tried to branch out with this one. Pistachio and almonds (the main note of amaretto) is a nice reminder of my mom's favorite flavors, so I reached for this one with hope.

Tone is very strong on amaretto, and evenly balanced with pistachio, with a nice heap of buttered cookies that comes out a little more after dry down. 

Seven of Diamonds - Rich Madagascar vanilla bean, creamy french vanilla and hazelnuts, spoonfuls of brown sugar, and delicately sugared orchid petals.

Vanilla bean? French vanilla? Hazelnut? Yes. These are my ideal scents, it's like this catalogue was made for me to waste my money on. Milky noted that the orchid petals are more to add a bit of floral nuance and sweetness to the scent that the vanilla didn't give.

To me: This smells like hazelnuts and sweet vanilla -very creamy and sweet. I can't really detect the orchids at all to be honest, and to my nose this smells a little bit like Ace of Hearts thanks to the nuttiness. I enjoyed this scent, but it isn't one that I gravitate towards wearing. 

Ace of Hearts - A plate of warm, freshly baked chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies beside a rich cup of coffee splashed with caramel and milk chocolate.

While I initially wanted this to smell more like actual freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, this was supposedly more of a 'peanut butter' scent to the cookies. I asked about this one as well, but I felt the notes were interesting enough for me to try it out.
This to my nose- smells exactly like coffee and chocolate milk - like the Australian chocolate milk, Moove - you'll definitely like this. The dry down give it more of a slight peanut butter m&m tinge but it has a great chocolate base note to this.
Amazing. 10/10. Loved this from start to finish. 

The whole body spray line up! 

Conclusion:

I really enjoyed purchasing from Luvmilk, especially when it comes to customer service. I can say with experience that Milky makes sure every inquiry has been catered for, and goes above and beyond to make sure all queries are answered and all packages safe, and will regularly close the shop to make sure all orders are sent out and the TAT is kept down.

The wear time on the body sprays are around 6-7 hours, and stick around on both body and linen well. These also work well as room sprays, although it tends to leave a slightly shiny film if you spray it on non absorbent surfaces.

Personally I really enjoyed the scents, and I think they're definitely worth the prices. The body sprays are well worth the price, and with the huge catalogue on offer there's certainly something for everyone to love, even non gourmand lovers.

I definitely recommend Magical Girl, and Ace of Hearts as personal favorites.