During the last Boxing Day, while I was home and gratefully avoiding the crazy crowds at shopping centres, my fingers were doing a bit of Boxing Day shopping on their own on the computer. Oh yeah, why torture myself and try to squeeze myself through the feral crowd when I can shop online in the comfort of my own home, eh? Anyway, one of the many websites I checked out during the sales was Beautylish. As I’m part of their mailing list, they sent me an email on the release of their highly popular and limited edition Fukubukuro.
Erm, say what?
Fukubukuro is a Japanese New Year custom in which merchants and retailers make grab bags filled with unknown random contents and sell them on a substantial discount. They’re called “lucky bags” or “mystery bags”.
I’ve seen a lot of Fukubukuro when I was living in Japan years ago and to be honest, these bags could be a hit or a miss. If the lucky bags came from a reputable retailer (usually higher-end shopping centres/shops), the bags tend to be really good but if they came from a small shop around the corner, they’re usually a gamble. But they weren’t kidding when they said that the total value of the items will far exceed what you paid for, regardless of junk in the bag or not.
Since Beautylish was jumping on the Fukuburo bandwagon, I thought why not give it a go? At US$85 a box, it’s an expensive purchase for not knowing what’s inside the box but I figured, given the brands that Beautylish stocks, it would be hard for them to go wrong.
And I was right. They didn’t go wrong at all. In fact, what I got was a pretty damn good Fukubukuro.
