HOLIDAY SHOPPING: A Gold Star For SPACE NK ★

As the Holiday season winds down, we all have a few people we still need to pick up gifts for, and sometimes that means setting aside some time to shop around looking for inspiration. A couple of days ago, while gift hunting on Columbus Avenue on a busy weekend afternoon, The Shophound wandered into SPACE.NK.apothecary thinking, "Lets give this one a shot," and boy did they ever deliver.

It may not surprise you that, as a non-lady, The Shophound is not extraordinarily well-versed in the beauty products that keep so many women happily obsessed. We were certainly familiar with Space.NK, having posted about it several times and occasionally been asked to cover the U.K.-based retailer's openings and events. We knew enough about the place to expect special items and brands that won't be found at every Sephora, but as with many beauty and cosmetics stores, we were walking in there essentially clueless. That didn't remotely matter to the razor sharp sales associate who did everything short of take us by the hand to find just the right gifts we needed at the price we were hoping to pay all beautifully wrapped in less than 20 minutes. What a refreshing change from the all too common experience of arriving at the register holding an item or two and being faced with the usual question, "Did anyone help you with this?", which, if you need to ask it, almost always guarantees a response in the negative. By contrast, earlier in the day we visited the similarly themed Bluemercury on upper Broadway with the same goal in mind, and left the store without so much as a second glance from the staff.

Our only disappointment with Space.NK was that the best service The Shophound has received since we don't know when was in a store that at best we will probably only shop in every now and then at most. It almost makes us sorry we don't wear makeup, but perhaps we can make up for it by sending them some of our readers who do. It's been a while since we have left a store with such satisfaction at having paid full retail, so we can happily add Space.NK to the list of store we wholeheartedly recommend.

★ SPACE.NK.apothecary 217 Columbus Avenue between 69th and 70th Streets, Upper West Side
also in SoHo, the Upper East Side and in both Manhattan Bloomingdale's locations