This is where it all started.
On my first trip to Japan I found these bath tablets as amenities in a Tokyo hotel (Mitsui Garden Ginza), and loved it so much that I even asked the front desk to sell me a couple more. They gave me about 4-5 extra tablets and charged 200 Yen or so. I kept them for years, only using one on special occasions. The lavender one was bluish purple – dark lavender color, and smelled very nice, but I got really crazy about the Sweet Rose tablet shown above. It made this nice, pink, clear water with a perfectly natural scent of rose. My rating: 5/5.
As I got closer to using up the last one, I finally looked at the back of tha pack and figured out the manufacturing info, which helped me find the company’s website. They are G.P.Create (ジーピークリエイツ) from Osaka, and were established in 1980. A little google translate and copy-pasting later somehow I found their products on Amazon – unfortunately though I found no trace of the above tablets. But there was a rose scented collection called Eternal Rose (エターナルローズ), that I had to try.
It came from Japan via Amazon Marketplace, standard shipping, so took about three weeks. I chose the Scarlet Bag, which contains a sample of four products, a bath powder, a bath salt, a bath tablet and a bath essence, and costs $15 here (incl. shipping), or 630 yen in Japan. At that time I bought it from a Tokyo/Akihabara based seller named THE Trust & Ease, who included a nice letter with a little origami. There are many other seller options for the same price, too.
Of couse I tried the Bath Tablet first, secretly hoping it would be the same that I knew, but it is different. It produces clear, pink water, but the color is more on the red side, and had a less natural, less nice rose scent. 3/5. Maybe it was just old? It has some moisturising ingredients: rose water and sodium hyaluronate – the same goes for the bath salt and powder, too.
The next one was the Bath Salt, which is not a powder like those I wrote about before, the sachet contains dark pink crystals. They take some time to dissolve even with impatient stirring, but then the water becomes light pink, more clear than the one above, and it has a very authentic, fresh, perfect rose fragrance. It is what I was expecting, knowing this brand, reminding me of the original bath tablets I’ve tried. My rating is 5/5 just for the scent.
The Bath Essence makes a milky white, rose scented bath, and contains other moisturizing ingredients: olive oil, jojoba oil, job’s tears seed oil. The company seems to sell these bath essence balls under the brand name Patmos too, with other frangrances available. It takes long to dissolve it, and the rose scent is very week, but still the same, nice one as above, and the oils feel good on the skin. 4/5
The Bath Powder is said to make a gorgeous bath with the shining particles in water. It does have some sparkles and a very nice, clear, pink color. The rose scent is the same wonderful fragrance as before, but a little weeker maybe, still it makes a really nice bath. 4.5/5.