Beauty Pie is a brand that’s been on my radar for a while, but a combination of “I don’t need anything new right now”, “I’d rather buy something exciting while travelling”, and “can I be arsed to bother with a monthly fee?” meant I put it off for well over a year before finally taking the leap.

If you haven’t heard of Beauty Pie, they define themselves as: the luxury beauty buyers club that’s terrifying the mainstream luxury brands. It works by leveraging the collective buying power of the members the way big brands do to access cosmetics and skincare with “luxury quality”, but without paying for the middleman, celebrity marketing or retailer costs.

I work in marketing for my day job and have worked with enough global brands on enough major activations to have a good understanding of just what these costs can be – so I didn’t doubt the business model for a minute.

What encouraged me to finally go for it was a perfect series of events: several products began to run low at the same time when a friend sent me a link to the blog post by beauty goddess Caroline Hirons all about BEAUTY PIE asking if I tried it, and if I did what did I think.

Next I did a Very Katie Thing: I set up a small spreadsheet to see if it was actually worth it for me, looking at the products I was interested in buying and the costs associated vs what I’d normally spend. Then I looked at the actuals:

• subscription fee + (money spent + shipping fee) = total monthly costs
• monthly allowance – pre-membership cost = how much I would actually be able to purchase

Spoiler: it’d be a decent savings for me! And if I stopped buying everything at once and only when something needed replacing, then I could make the monthly allowance work.

At the beginning of March I registered and placed my first order for a cleanser, eye cream, and foundation sampler to shade match before buying full size later. Short version of this blog post: I really like what I bought!

These days my skin is combination, struggles with dehydration (seemingly no relation to how much water I drink!), is sensitive, prone to hyperpigmentation, and every now and again I’m treated (sarcasm) to cystic acne. However, daily blemishes have been at bay for a few years with a good cleansing routine.

Double Phase Cleanser: this smells simply divine and reminds me of a very expensive product I was once gifted. I’m happy with how well it removes make-up as part of a double cleanse at night, though it’s a tad too much for my skin in the morning. It has an expiry of 12 months from opening, so hoping this 125ml tube lasts a good long while so I can try plenty of other products in the meantime!

Super Retinol Anti-Wrinkle Eye Cream: over the past 6-8 weeks I’ve gone without eye cream (it ran out, I was too lazy to replace…) and during that time I’ve noticed a couple lines that weren’t there before. Maybe it’s aging, maybe it’s dehydration or poor sleep, maybe it was because this step had been missing in my routine, but whatever it is I wanted a dedicated product to address it. After two weeks these lines haven’t disappeared, but my makeup is no longer settling into them as prominently as before. I’m happy with that.

Everyday Great Skin Foundation: my skin is pale with olive undertones, making it really tricky to colour match – sometimes pink undertones work better than warm in make-up products, sometimes it’s the other way around and the yellow undertones work better. So I was delighted to be able to order a sample set to figure out which will work best for me. I’m going with 100 Ivory for autumn / winter / early spring because the colour is light enough, though a tad on the pink side.

I’m happy to add that Beauty Pie don’t do any animal testing on the products or the ingredients, and neither do their suppliers; all the ingredients comply with the European Ban on Animal Testing. Also, many of their products are vegan (everything in this post is vegan!) – just contact them for the latest vegan product if you’re curious.

As you know, sustainability is becoming even more important to me, and I was really impressed with Beauty Pie’s credentials:

• Earthinks®, among the most environmentally-friendly inks on the planet, are used for all of the printing on send-out packaging.
• While the packaging is plastic, they don’t do over-the-top packaging so it’s more lightweight (i.e. uses less) than other luxury brand packaging – and even some of the non-luxury beauty products I’ve tried. They also keep the components simple so they’re more easily broken down for recycling.
• Plant-based inks and recyclable and recycled board are used in the cartons.
• Metallics and foil, which aren’t the kindest to the environment, are avoided.

Yes, there’s still more that could be done, and they’re working towards that, but this is already more impressive than what other brands are doing.

I’ve already started to bookmark the products I’ve got my eye on for next month, and will report back once I’ve decided, ordered and tried!

If you want to sign up and try it out, you can get the first month free if you sign up via this link, and I will get topped up spend next month. Win-win. Enjoy!

Much love, Katie xo