Ring bombs — bath bombs that dissolve to reveal hidden jewelry — are popping up all over Facebook and Instagram in promoted posts and video ads. Which ones are worth your money? Find out by following along as I try out and review ring bombs from all over the Internet! Find all Ring Bomb Bonanza posts here. 

The Company: Bubbly Belle Bath Bombs

Florida-based Bubbly Belle, founded in 2017 according to its Facebook page, promotes its products promising a $1 ring bath bomb.

You can, in fact, buy a $1 ring bomb from Bubbly Belle, but as we know from the demise of Dollar Bath Bombs, that’s not a sustainable business model. Click through on one of Bubbly Belle’s $1 offers and after you select your bargain bomb you’ll be guided through a series of additional offers: Add a second bomb for $13.97. Add a third for $13.97 and you’ll get free shipping.

To be honest, the experience of buying from Bubbly Belle feels a little bit… scammy. To be crystal clear: The site is not a scam. I placed two orders and received, in a timely fashion exactly what I had purchased. There is a bit of a bait-and-switch to the $1 promotion, although honestly that’s to be expected (nobody can make money selling $1 ring bombs, and if you click on that kind of offer, you should expect an upsell). It’s just that shopping through the $1 promotion, particularly on mobile, feels like an unrelenting, used-car-lot-style, hard sell. And the discounts in the promotion appear to be misleading. In the second and third screen, you’re told the bombs you’re buying are “up to 35% off,” with $19.95 prices crossed out and marked down to $13.97. But if you go to the full website, you’ll find that most of those bombs are already priced at $13.97 anyway.

Ultimately I ended up ordering five Bubbly Belle bath bombs, going through the $1 promotion process twice to find out if I could actually place an order without buying all three bombs. (I could.)

One note if you do decide to take advantage of the $1 promotion: The order windows don’t offer you the option to learn more about the bombs you’re buying. I shopped blind my first time, picking without any clue as to what fragrances I’d actually be getting from bombs called Mellow, Massage, and Zen. Before you take Bubbly Belle up on that $1 offer, I’d suggest going to the full site and checking out the fragrance notes, since you won’t have that option in the promotion order process.

I feel like I’ve said enough about the company, so I won’t even get started on Bubbly Belle’s excessive and borderline deceptive email marketing.

No, actually I will.

Remember when I thought Fragrant Jewels sent too many emails? In the 60 days since I joined Bubbly Belle’s email list, I have received more than 100 marketing emails — nearly two a day for two months. Some of the excess is clearly computer error (I ordered three bath bombs in one order and got three individual automated thank-you emails in addition to my order confirmation), but there’s also an element of overkill.

What bothers me more than the frequency, though, is the content. There’s a lot of repetition (I’ve gotten that one about other uses for bath bombs at least three times), and even some gentle deception. Once a week or more, I get an email with a subject line asking for my ring size, sometimes designed to look like a reply, to entice me to open an email that’s not really asking for my ring size — it’s encouraging me to place an order so I can get an extra ring for free.

Free bonus rings are a common theme in Bubbly Belle’s emails, as they are with most of the ring bomb companies, but several times Bubbly Belle has sent emails urging me to take advantage of the free ring offer because, according to the CEO who signs the messages, “we only have 17 free rings left in stock.” Weirdly specific, right? Order now because we have this odd, specific number of free rings available?

After the second time I received that 17-rings-left email, I wrote to the company and asked if they truly only had 17 rings in stock — and suggested that if it weren’t true, they might be in violation of FTC guidelines related to misleading advertising claims. At first I received a rote response explaining that I needed to buy a bath bomb to get the free ring. Once I clarified that I understood how the promotion worked, but that I was asking about the specific claim of only 17 free rings in stock, I received this reply:

Apologies. We send out emails when rings are near to be out of stock for us to restock new ones. Not necessarily that only17people would be eligible for the free rings once they have purchased. Once it exceeds 17, then the others would be counted in the new stock of rings.

I’m not sure what that collection of words was intended to convey, but my takeaway was that I was correct in my suspicion that the 17 rings were a total fabrication. That was reinforced a week later when I received a new version of the same marketing email.

Once I hit “publish” on this post, I will happily click “unsubscribe” at the bottom of my most recent email and remove myself from the Bubbly Belle email firehose.

The Bombs

I feel like I’ve been pretty hard on Bubbly Belle so far, and I feel badly about that because I’m sure the company is made up of nice people who are all doing their best. I wish I could make up for it in this section about the bombs themselves. But my job is to review products honestly so you can decide whether to spend your hard-earned money on them, so here we go.

On unboxing my first Bubbly Belle order, my initial impression was that the bombs looked small and all kind of smelled like soap. I tried the Zen bomb first, and it was profoundly underwhelming — zero scent and not particularly moisturizing.

Mellow had a strong lavender soap smell and very little in the way of pyrotechnics. It basically dissolved like a dense lump of bath salts. I finally crushed it to put it out of its misery, and the pieces sank to the bottom of the tub, letting off a little halfhearted fizz as they went.

Massage smelled like mint and chlorine. More fizzy and foamy than the other bombs in my first order, it fought the urge to sink. The fragrance wasn’t particularly strong, but otherwise it was a far better bomb than Zen or Mellow. It was also wrapped in different packaging than the other two. This bomb was especially hard and reminded me of an old bath bomb that had been sitting around for a long time.

The bombs in my second order were slightly less disappointing. Star had a slightly minty fragrance and was more fizzy, foamy and scented than any of the bombs in my first order. My skin felt a little slippery after the bath, but not moisturized.

DeStress had a light fragrance that was a little bit fruity, a little bit floral, and a little bit herbal — very pleasant but not particularly strong. Like the Star bomb, DeStress was a little foamy and fizzy, and it had a longish dissolve time.

The Rings

Honestly, at this point, if I wrote too much about the rings from my Bubbly Belle bombs, it’d feel like piling on. They were perfectly fine. My perception of the rings is probably colored by my experience with the website, the company and the bombs, but in truth, the rings themselves aren’t bad.

One was very cheap-looking with a loose stone, but the others are pretty enough rings, and while several of them are similar in style, I appreciated that they came in a range of colors (not clear stone after clear stone like some ring bomb makers I could name).

The Gimmick

Like most of the other ring bomb companies, Bubbly Belle packages its rings with a code you can enter to see if you’ve won a ring valued at $100, $1,000, or $10,000. All five of my rings were valued at $20.

Bubbly Belle doesn’t offer a loyalty program, but if you have more than 1,000 Instagram followers, they have a form you can fill out if you’re interested in collaboration.

The Bottom Line

If you want to try a ring bomb on the cheap, Bubbly Belle is the best price you’re going to get. You’ll pay $7.95 shipping for that $1 bomb, but $8.95 is still a better price than I’ve seen anywhere else, and you’ll get the full ring bomb experience.

Personally, I won’t be ordering from Bubbly Belle again, and I’m looking forward to getting off their email list and easing the congestion in my inbox. In my opinion, from the shopping experience to the bombs to the rings to the communication, every single aspect of Bubbly Belle has room for improvement. I wish them the best and hope they are finding a fan base. For the time being, it doesn’t include me.

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