Review: YumeTwins – Japanese Kawaii December 2017 Unboxing

Konnichiwa!

(If you don’t want to look it up, that means ‘HELLO!’ in Japanese.)

This is the third box produced by the NEW and IMPROVED YumeTwins!

YumeTwins has just had a big shakeup! They’ve increased the amount of items from five to between six and eight. With this comes a larger variety of items from your favourite kawaii characters, and include more practical items too (hurrah!).

They’ve also got a cool new box design (and shiny new website), which you’ll see in a moment.

With this extra awesomeness comes a slight price increase.

Their one-, three-, six-, and 12-month subscriptions are now $35.00, $33.50, $32.00, and $31.50 per month respectively. At current exchange rates this is £25.77, £24.66, £23.56, and £23.19. Shipping is still free.

You can see their previous prices here, but the difference is not very large, especially in UK pounds, so you’d hardly notice it.

Here’s the box! (You can see a picture of the old one here.)

The box includes a flyer which has information and links to see the full description of the box contents. 

This box felt incredibly full, and this is why! It’s a rather sizable Rascal Dog Plushie. 

I didn’t recognize the brand label, but he’s beautifully soft and huggable, and took up almost the entire box!

There are four different options. Two dogs, a Frenchie and a Pug, and two cats. This guy is, of course, a Pug. 

These Fluffy Room Shoes were a spoiler on Instagram.

Mine are light pink in Sumikko Gurashi design, but there were also blue Sumikko Gurashi and dark pink and yellow in a similar Rilakkuma design.

They are seriously fleecy and cosy. They also have those little nonslip dots on the bottom, which is very useful on smooth floors!

This is described on the YumeTwins website as a Multi-Use Case.

It came in either this Rilakkuma design or My Melody.

It’s opens up like this.

It’s hard plastic, and pretty thin but seems quite sturdy.

Here we have a Realistic Fluffy Cake Squishie. 

It’s very small, but it does look really quite delicious! It has a keychain/bag charm attachment so you can hang it off anything you like.

There were five different possibilities for this cake, which all look yummy. This one also says Happy Anniversary!

Finally we have a Marumofubiyori Mechanical Pencil and Eraser.

Marumfubiyori is a new character range from Sanrio, which is a little polar bear (Moppu) and his friends, a fish and a crab. 

So that’s December’s box of kawaii.

I think this one is a bit of a mixed bag.

The pug plushie is soft and pretty large, but I don’t recognize the brand so I can’t say if it’s premium. According to the YumeTwins website these are popular in Japan, but I can’t find them online from the description or name. Of course that may well be because they are exclusive to Japan, so UK/US Google doesn’t list them easily.

The fluffy room shoes are lovely. As you probably know, people don’t wear shoes in the house in Japan, and always have slippers available. We don’t wear shoes in the house either, and as winter is coming and I’m very stingy with the heating, this is a great way to keep my feet warm!

My reservation with these is that they are quite small. I know that it’s very difficult to have one-size items, because of course people don’t come in one size! They fit me beautifully, and my feet are around size 4.5 – 5. There’s a bit of room to spare, but not that much. I reckon anyone with feet over size 6 would be out of luck.

They are a terrific practical item as long as they fit!

I’m seriously puzzled by the multi-use case. It’s too thin for a pencil case, too narrow for CDs, and while you could fit baby wipes in there, it’s not really sufficiently sealed to stop them drying out.

Then I took a closer look at the label.

It’s actually a surgical mask case! You may have noticed people wearing surgical masks in London. When I lived in London I saw a lot of Japanese people in these masks, and I always wondered why. Well, apparently this is very common in Japan. I did a bit of Google searching, and found a bunch of articles about their popularity. This is one example, but there are plenty out there.

When you read the articles, it actually makes a lot of sense, though it looks odd in the UK. I’m not going to be wearing a surgical mask any time soon, but perhaps I’ll be able to find another use for this case. Or, when we finally take our trip to Japan, I’ll take it with us!

As for the pencil and eraser, they’re cute, and the mechanical pencil works well, but they’re just not exciting. On the plus side, these are definitely Japan-exclusive items, because there are available nowhere online that I can find. I’m not even sure if this range has been released yet in the West.

But realistically, they are tiny, tiny things, and feel like something of an afterthought to make up numbers.

Now, I totally understand that the plushie took up an awful lot of space in the box, so they couldn’t fit in that much more. If the large plushie was a highly-recognizable brand such as Sanrio or Disney or Amuse, that would be great. OK, they put an smaller Amuse plushie in last month’s box, so maybe they weren’t going to use the same brand again right away. But the absence of any brand namecheck in the menu makes me slightly suspicious. 

The mask case is interesting, but unless you’re a dedicated mask-wearer it’s going to be tricky to find a use for it because it’s so thin. 

I must confess that, despite loving the room slippers, I’m a little disappointed. This box hasn’t wowed me like previous boxes. This new YumeTwins promises 6 – 8 items, and I think if the contents are going to be the low side then two of them can’t be a pencil and eraser. That’s just too small. Also (and this is my last whinge, promise) I was really hoping for a little seasonal/Christmas something. Yes, room slippers are great for winter, but December contains Christmas, and while Christmas isn’t a Japanese holiday in the religious sense, it’s certainly celebrated in its own unique way!

Value-wise, YumeTwins items always come from Japan, so while it is sometimes possible to source them in the UK or Europe it can be tricky. I’ve done an awful lot of Googling, and can say that none of these things seem to be available in the UK or even in the West right now. So this is a really Japan-exclusive box, which certainly ups the value. I also know, having seen a couple of shops that sell kawaii items from Japan, that there is a serious premium on these kinds of items; they are pretty expensive in the UK. 

So I expect that in monetary terms this is great value. I just don’t quite love this one.

Oh, and if you want to check out my YouTube unboxing, here it is!

A different version of this review was first published on allsubscriptionboxes.co.uk.