Gmarket Korea haul Sept 2012

I do love Gmarket Korea for all those beautiful skincare and beauty products. I've been shopping online for a long time and I realised that most of my splurges online tend to be skincare/beauty items. I'm the sort who cares about the texture of the clothes that I wear and the comfort of my shoes, hence I usually buy my clothes and accessories in person. To assuage my shopping cravings, I placed orders at Gmarket Korea for skincare items.

I placed the order on Thursday 20 Sept and received items on Tuesday 25 Sept 2012. There were no public/bank holidays in Korea. Based on the tracking, items were sent out by Gmarket on Mon 24 Sept and arrived in Singapore on Monday night itself. The 2 different sellers were quick and efficient and must have sent out the items by Friday.

I bought skincare samples from 2 different sellers. The final international shipping was 1 kg, which I had originally overpaid based on the 2 sellers indicating a combined weight of 1.6 kg. The money will sit in my Gcash account until I have enough to pay for products.

Each type of samples was selling at 6,800 kwon, purchases below 30,000 kwon will incur a delivery charge of 2,500 kwon. I made sure I had more than 30,000 kwon worth to avoid paying the delivery charge, which was about 5 different samples types (5*6,800=34,000 kwon).

UPDATE: As of 27 Sept, the price of the samples had gone down to 6,400 kwon (coupon discount of 400 kwon).

After reading blogs on korean skincare, I was keen to try some of the brands and products. So I chose the following:
- The History of Whoo Whitening essence (35 sachet pcs)
- Su:m37 Water full gel lotion (23 pcs of 6ml mini bottles)
 - O Hui Black serum (41 sachet pcs)
- O Hui Cell Power No. 1 (41 sachet pcs)
- O Hui cell Power No. 1 eye cream (42 sachet pcs)

My original picks included the su:m37 water full essence and The History of Whoo Brightening gel, but when I looked through the drop-down box, the corresponding numbers for those samples didn't show. Which I took to mean that they were either out of stock of misclassified. Well, I don't know Korean and memorizing the symbols for the samples seemed too much work given that the seller had easily 500 different types of samples. I can't imagine scrolling through 500 lines to pick out the one that I wanted. The products came as ordered, alongside the freebie I indicated (snail cream mask). The seller also gave me 3 sachet pcs of Biolee purifying cleansing foam which I didn't recognise.


I had already ordered Sulwhasoo sample kits elsewhere so I thought I would try a sister line of Sulwhasoo, also specialising in herbal/ginseng skincare. I ordered the red category of Hanyul, also known as Keuk Jin. I ordered a 5 pc sample kit, which comes with serum, toner, cream, eye cream. However strangely, the box that the kit came in stated the items as Tristage e.g Tristage Toner, Tristage emulsion etc.

This seller had a 2,500 kwon delivery fee for purchases less than 30,000 kwon. I only wanted to try this kit, so I ended up paying the delivery fee on my 10,500 kwon purchase. What I liked about this seller's listings was that it listed only Hanyul Keuk Jin sample pieces in 1 link, hence the drop down box only had 5 items to choose from. The seller wasn't the cheapest for the sample kit, but it was very easy to order and had good ratings. I told myself there is no point trying to get the cheapest price while the wrong products might be ordered. When I opened up the box to look at the products itself, "20120425" was printed on the bottom of 2 bottles. This meant that the products was produced in April 2012, fairly new.

The kit also came with a freebie which I knew about.

Will post reviews on these products once I've tried them out for a while.