Over the years I’ve come to learn that amazing beauty products are not only found in traditional beauty/cosmetics stores, but in out of the way places you wouldn’t normally consider.  My most recent great findis Mitsuwa Marketplace.  This place was recommended to me by Ji Cho, owner of Nami Restaurant in Minneapolis, MN and beauty product guru…seriously the woman is insanely knowledgeable about every and anything beauty related.  Mitsuwa Marketplace is the largest Japanese Supermarket in the U. S. They are mostly located in California with one in New Jersey and the one I visited in Chicago. This place is awesome and carries a wide variety of Japanese groceries, general items, electric appliances and beauty products.  They even have a bookstore as well as a food-court with fantastic Japanese food.

I went to Mitsuwa Marketplace with the intention of getting a deep conditioning treatment and a cream for my ends…I came out with shampoo, conditioner , conditioning hair treatment, cleansing face oil and brow pencil and this was after I decided to put some products back on the shelf!  The selection of cosmetics and beauty products were just amazing.  They had products for your hair that I never even knew existed.  The shampoo and conditioner that I bought were both from Shiseido and they’re absolutely wonderful, very moisturizing and an absolute steal!  I paid just $18.99 for both 550ml bottles (they were on special that day.)  The conditioning treatment is also pretty amazing, the brand is called IchiKami and that is about all I can decipher because everything else is in Japanese.  I love the cleansing face oil, it’s very gentle on my skin but still thoroughly cleans my face without making it feel dry.  I keep the brow pencil that I bought from there in my make-up bag at all times.  It has two sides, one side is your traditional brow pencil with a much finer tip for a really precise application and the other side is more like a liquid liner…but for your brows.  The pencil  fills in my brows, but they never look overdone and I have to wash my face to remove it because I’ve been to the gym a few times after having applied the brow pencil and it stayed put through my entire workout…and my workouts are pretty intense ones that produce buckets of sweat.

I regret not getting some of the other products I had my eyes on, like the liquid liner (my beauty guru Ji said that the Japanese liquid liners have a finer more precise tip than their American counterparts, she also suggested the fake eyelashes which are apparently pretty great.) I did discover that  Mitsuwa Marketplace does have an online store which made me pretty ecstatic, but the selection of beauty products available online is kind of limited compared to the store, lucky for me I will be spending this summer in Minnesota which means I will have plenty of opportunity to try every product  I had my eye on. Have you been there and discovered some great beauty brands yourself?