COSMIC

It was only a matter of time before Cosmic Corner came to K’Road — this part-​time smoke store, part-​time quirky clothing store set up shop on Wellington sister street Cuba some years ago and fit in really well. The Auckland Cosmic store is a much lighter, brighter affair, and can be pretty bustling a lot of the time. When I go in there to buy concert tickets or quirky socks, there tends to be a lot of teenagers in there — the Hot Topic/​mall goth type who huddle around the Manic Panic hair dye and decide which colour they’re going to be this week. While Cosmic Corner is not for everyone (unless everyone likes synthetic highs and paraphernalia), it fills a gap on K’Road that was previously left empty. I bet this place will be around for a long time yet.

Since moving to Auckland, I’ve found it really difficult to find a store that sells nose rings, flesh tunnels and other pieces of piercing jewellery at a reasonable price (some of the tattoo and piercing parlours along K Road are really expensive for such things). Then I stumbled across this Cosmic Corner on K Road, where I was able to buy a new nose ring for $ 5 and stud for $ 3. Absolute bargain.
The only thing that annoyed me was that they didn’t have one of those wrench-​looking devices that measures jewellery size, which made it really hard to gauge which size ring I needed to buy for my nose. I was also left up to my own devices when deciding as the guy behind the counter went back to reading his book by the till as I was choosing, clearly not bothered about helping me.
I honestly don’t know how they get away with selling all of herbal highs and smoking paraphernalia in here, but they’ve got a massive selection of it… but I guess you’ll have to wait for someone else’s review to find out how good that merchandise is!