My Cozy Room Boutique Spa: Food, Fun, Fashion

If you've ever looked for a cozy, intimate place in a modern setting, My Cozy Room Boutique Spa may just be the place you're looking for. Despite being set in the heart of the Orchard Road area in Singapore, My Cozy Room is exactly what it sounds like - a cozy, homely spa in a bustling environment.

My Cozy Room is run by Celine, together with her business partner. The first thing you notice is the welcome, personal atmosphere. Everything is done up in a very homely, girly fashion, and the attention to detail really stands out here - almost every corner of this place is decorated with something pretty and girly. If you're a girly girl, this would be right up your alley!



My Cozy Room provides face, body, and nail care. They do have a great array of treatments, including the Soothing Hot Stone Massage, the Choco Indulgence Massage, as well as the Enchanting Rose Quartz Massage. The Hot Stone Massage, as the name implies, massages your body with heated stones, and is great for relaxing sore, tired muscles. The Chocolate Massage, using chocolate oil, is very pampering, while the Rose Quartz Massage uses rose quartz crystals to massage your body, which really perk you up.



I got to try the Hot Stone Massage (no photo, sorry, they didn't turn out very nicely in the ambient lighting), and it was really very relaxing. I felt like the use of heated stones really helped to warm up the muscles and prime them for the massage. I did feel very nicely relaxed after the massage, and the masseuse was also friendly and responsive. The really cozy atmosphere of the room really helped, too. Definitely a great place to go to!

While waiting for the massages, we got to look at a selection of dresses from Pearlavish, a bloghop that sells a wide range and style of clothes. Generally, the style tends to be on the girly and feminine side. Their dresses were really a hit with the girls.



Pearlavish sells their dresses through their Livejournal sales blog, but they also have a Pearlavish Facebook Pate. I think there's a good mix of dresses that are sold on the site - there's florally and bohemian, there's understated and work-appropriate, there's feminine, there's flirty, the list goes on.



There were a few which I really liked, but after much vacilliating, I picked a very work appropriate dress in a faded dusty pink colour. The material is thick and of good quality, and I like how it really fits my body shape pretty well, and accentuates all the right places. Very figure-flattering. You can see me wearing the dress below.



And here's another shot of me wearing the dress, this time with fellow blogger Rachie from The Cambelles, a local lifestyle blog. The floral, flowy dress Rachie is wearing is also from Pearlavish. A bit of trivia I learned is that Pearlavish store is run by Pearlyn, who is only in her 20s! It's so inspiring to see how much an entrepreneurial spirit can accomplish!



Lastly, it wouldn't be a party without food, so there were some awesome desserts and finger food, courtesy of Super Desserts Market. Like Pearlavish, this is also another entrepreneurial venture by Fiona and Joanna, two young SMU graduates who obviously have a talent for baking! Super Desserts Market made these really awesome macarons, which is pretty impressive because good macarons are hard to make.



In addition to cupcakes, there were also cookies, fondue and cupcakes. There was also a very nice touch added with the customized cupcakes. Every cupcake had a blogger's name on it, which was pretty cool. I imagine for small-scale intimate parties, these would add a very nice touch to the menu - who doesn't like having a cupcake with their name on it?



If you visit the My Cozy Room Facebook Page, you'll notice that there are event photos posted there (inculding an unglam shot of me stuffing my face, LOL!). These were taken by Yong Xin, the photographer for the day. Yong Xin's Flickr stream contains a sample of his work, and his photos on the Cozy Room Facebook really put my noob photos to shame.



I came away really impressed with My Cozy Room - the atmosphere, products and services are great, and Celine comes across as a very friendly, tireless person who is very passionate about what she does. And I was also impressed with Pearlavish and Super Desserts Market - I can't imagine myself running a successful business, but these young girls totally do! It's always great to know not just what the business does, but also to see the passion and hard work that goes into them.

My Cozy Room Boutique Spa is located at:
56A Cairnhill Road (5 mins from Paragon)
For enquiries;
Tel: +65 67320030
Email: info (at) mycozyroom.com.sg

(Treatment was provided at an event. All opinions are my own. I am not affiliated with/compensated by the company.)

OOTD: Looking Glam on the Cheap (£36 to be Exact)

EDITED TO ADD: Thanks Yi Mei for all the awesome outfit advice! (She's the one who helped me to coordinate my outfit, YAY!)

I don't usually like doing OOTDs (Outfit Of The Day), because I have a pretty much non-existent fashion sense. I mean, I'm still at the top-and-a-jeans stage, so obviously I haven't quite graduated from college casual. But over the weekend, I was invited to my friend's postgrad graduation, and the dress code was formal. I don't know about you, but when my own university had our graduation boat party for us postgraduates, we went as casual as possible, despite the formal dress code listing (some of my friends showed up in jeans, woohoo!). So I hoped that for my friend's event, I could just make do with whatever I had, since I'm kind of on a student's budget now (aka not too far from being flat out broke).

Turns out I had no such luck. Thanks to the awesome stalking power of facebook, I was able to look at photos of people at graduation dinners from previous years and other programmes. Holy moley, some of them were wearing floor-length gowns!

And thus began my (first-ever) unwilling shopping trip. I found out just a few days before the event, so trust me when I say it was all one mad scramble - and on a shoestring budget too! I trawled through the sales racks of high street stores, looking for a knee-length gown-like thing that would carry me through the evening (I didn't want a floor-length gown, as they would probably have been more expensive, and I just KNEW I'd trip up in them). And then I had to shop for accessories. And shoes. It was a stressful couple of days. I think it was the first time I've ever been stressed out by shopping!

So how did I do? Here's what I managed to cobble together, for all of £36:



Such beautiful, lush greenery in the background. Why doesn't MY university have such opulent gardens, darnit! :P

And here's a closer shot of my outfit with my friend:



Obviously it's not the most put-together ensemble you could choose, but I think for only £36, I did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself! The dress was from Mango, and it was 50% off (woohoo!) and it was £25 (it could have been £24.99 or some weird number like that, but my brain remembers it as £25). The clutch was from Claire's, and it was 75% off (double woohoo!) and it was £4. And the necklace was also from Claire's, and unfortunately I paid full price for this (blah), but it was still decent at £7. So that made up £36 altogether!

Okay, I kind of cheated. The £36 didn't include any shoes, because I used the ones I currently had. Ideally I would have liked open-toed strappy heels, or something not close-toed, but there wasn't anything I liked that had a low enough heel (I'm a klutz!) and that was cheap enough, LOL. So I made do. The shoes themselves were the Dexter Auburn Patent Pump from Payless, which I bought a summer ago because it was all the rage among the fashion bloggers then. That, and the fact that they had a buy-1-get-the-2nd-pair-for-50%-off discount when I was in the store. LOL. But a quick google shows that they're still sold online.

Here's a screenshot of the shoes from the Payless website, HERE:



Anyway, here's a shot of my awesome cheap £7 necklace on:



This one is a bit more blingly than I usually wear, but I thought it was perfect since my entire outfit was all black, and I needed something to dress it up. So I thought a some nice bling was perfect. The necklace itself actually consists of four strands, with something different on every strand.

Here's a closer shot of the necklace detailing. It's a bit messy, but I guess with an all-black ensemble it worked:



And here's a photo of the £4 clutch. As you can see it's really cheap, and it kinda looks a little cheap, but I figured from far, and in photos, no one would be able to tell the difference :P



Anyway, that's my Glam-on-a-Budget (and when I say budget, boy, I mean it!) OOTD. I hope you guys have liked it. It's a little different from what I normally do, for sure, but I hope it wasn't too bad! We'll go back to makeup and nail polish in the next post, I promise!