Beauty Pie

Back when subscription beauty boxes began about a decade ago, I tried Birchbox. It was a nice idea; $10 a month and you got some little samples, like your roommate visited a posh hotel. It was a simpler time, before joy was banished from the world and the idea of someone sending you a box of small bottles to further clutter your bathroom counter could be considered fun. I found one or two things I really liked via Birchbox (namely a Malin+Goetz candle and this eyeshadow), but eventually I had seventeen tiny blowout balms even though I’d told them from day one that I had curly hair, so I quit. And then last January I read about Beauty Pie, another subscription beauty service but with a twist: you got to choose what you bought, not rely on an algorithm or buyer. You pay $10 a month to become a member, and then you have a monthly allowance of $100 (or $20/$200, etc) to spend on any of their products at very low wholesale prices – like $4 for a lipstick, $8 for a serum, $9 for a palette. If you don’t spend your monthly allowance, it rolls over to the next month. Their whole thing is that almost all luxury beauty brands make their products at the same factories from the same materials, and they all cost waaaaay less than they’re sold for. When you buy schmancy makeup or skincare, you’re paying an inflated price for the advertising or packaging or famous person modeling. With Beauty Pie, you’re paying basically drugstore prices for fancy products.

Does that mean it’s all amazing? No, just like anything, there are hits and misses, but I’ve had way more hits than misses, and several things I’ve rebought, which is the real test for me. They have a pretty wide range of skincare, makeup, hair products, body products, perfume, brushes, and candles. The candles really seal it for me – I own several and also give a bunch as gifts. People rave about their skincare lines. They’re also constantly adding new products and give you a heads-up on what’s coming and when so you can plan your allowance accordingly. When I started I thought I’d give it a whirl for a few months but I’ve been doing it for a year now and every time I think “eh, maybe I’ll stop” they roll out something new I want to try. It’s fun. “Fun.” What does fun mean in 2020. Etc.

To give you an overview, my personal Beauty Pie pros and cons:

Pros:

Eye cream. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of eye cream. It feels like a real long con. You don’t know if it was worth it unless you never used it?! (I almost made a Schrödinger’s cat analogy here but I re-read about Schrödinger’s cat first just to be safe and boy did I save us all some time and dignity.) Also, so many eye creams claim to eliminate dark circles, which is a very expensive lie. But I’ve bought the Beauty Pie QI Energy twice now, like used the whole jar up, and can actually see its benefits on days when my eyes are puffy. It feels nice. It’s $8. Who knows, really? Ask me again when I’m 80 and we’re sitting around a post-apocalyptic tin can fire chewing shoe leather, talking about our favorite brands.

Eyeshadow sticks. If you’ve tried the Bobbi Brown Cream Shadow Stick or Laura Mercier Caviar Stick for $30 each, these are that, but for $4. I actually prefer my Beauty Pie ones to the Laura Mercier ones. I’m not a big eye makeup person, so I love that these are very easy and foolproof: you just draw it on and smudge it out and you’re done. I have Brazillionaire, Wild Violet, and Huntress – I prefer the ones with a bit of shimmer more than the matte because they’re much more forgiving when you blindly smudge them on with your paw from the dim light of your cave. I assume other people have a specific, clean, well-lit place where they apply their makeup, but I tend to do mine balanced on one leg, peering into the full-length mirror attached to the back of our bathroom door, pushing aside a towel on a hook and pausing every few seconds to shout “I’M RIGHT BEHIND THE DOOR” to my family members who are overcome with the need to open the bathroom door the very second I close it. It’s a situation that smacks with glamour and I can’t wait for my own Into the Gloss Top Shelf to show you more.

Very good customer service and shipping costs/speed. I’ve left reviews on their site that a product wasn’t really to my liking (for instance a face wash that claimed to be suitable for all skin types but made me break out), and they’ve reached out immediately to refund me so I could try a different product instead. My order always arrives very quickly, within the same week, and in a pretty pink box that I have to admit feels like a treat to open. If you follow them on social media, they seem to genuinely want customer feedback on what products you’d like them to roll out next and even the colors and names they give them.

Candles. This is really what does it for me, surprise surprise. I’d keep my Beauty Pie subscription even if I didn’t like any of their skincare or makeup just to continue buying their candles. They currently carry ten, and I’ve tried six of them. I only disliked one. They’re about $15 each. For the sake of time, here are my three favorites:

Clean House: Usually when something claims to smell “clean” it really just smells like Davidoff Cool Water. This candle honestly smells like you cleaned your house, or maybe paid someone with better taste to clean your house for you. Maybe whoever cleans Oprah’s houses got lost one bright spring day and cleaned your house instead, using whatever secret rich person cleaning products they don’t tell us about, and then lit a candle and put on soft music on their way out. This is why eventually we’re going to have to actually eat the rich instead of just tweeting about it. Strangely, I prefer this just sitting next to me unlit? I mean, I also light it, but I think its unlit throw is somehow even nicer.

Pomegranate & Baies Rose: This smells like a rich girl whose dad bought her really good tickets to a music festival. It smells like a sexy, rich hippie. I can feel your resistance, but listen: I don’t want to be or do that person, but I don’t mind my house smelling like them sometimes, you dig? Life is a complex tapestry of attraction and repulsion and maybe you need a hatefuck candle. I read somewhere that it’s supposed to be a dupe for Jo Malone’s Pomegranate Noir, which I also own, and I like this one much better.

Bitter Orange & Blackcurrant: This is a sophisticated citrus, with cloves and nutmeg and chili. It’s the rare Christmas candle that doesn’t smell like pine or peppermint or cookies or any of that basic bullshit, but can also moonlight as a rest-of-the-year candle too. It’s not just a Christmas candle; it’s a candle for an entire season. This candle knows that you are an adult and that maybe you just want to sit and sip a drink and stare at a fire and ruminate on your mistakes and shortcomings for a minute every once in a while, but in a luxurious way. A real Shiv Roy of a candle.

Anyway, I like a lot of other Beauty Pie products but this post is getting really long so I’ll jump to the cons.

Cons:

Their lighting is wack. Their aesthetic is perfect and their stuff is quality and they have that trendy A L L C A P S spaced-out black and white sans serif lettering that every single brand does now, but I find the colors on their site are not quite what they are in real life. Their photos have a weird dull flash to them that sort of brightens and flattens and feels very… 1980s ice-skating movie. I do have several lipsticks from Beauty Pie that I like, but it was a real guessing game to get them, and I gave many away to friends in the process. They were $4 so it was okay, but still, a con.

(Seriously why does every single product look like this now?)

One incredibly specific bone to pick: I know I said they have great customer service, and they do, but: I bought their super retinol eye cream. After using it for just a few days, I noticed that my eyes were very sore and incredibly light-sensitive. I actually had to stop working early one day because looking at my laptop was too difficult. It was pretty clearly a reaction to the eye cream, and as soon as I stopped using it, my eyes were fine again. I’ve used other retinol products before and never experienced this. So I left a review saying just this, and they flagged it and asked me to please try again – apparently, I couldn’t use the word “reaction” in a review. So I tried again, describing a reaction without saying the word reaction, in very neutral tones, and it got flagged a second time. I got a little annoyed and wrote back to ask what was wrong this time, and a very polite person replied:

“The system is very sophisticated so it does rule out suggestions of a medical reaction, such as the phrasing you have used of ‘my eyes were very sore and any light was too much‘. Unfortunately it does not identify the exact word that has prevented the review from being published but I would imagine that it is the combination of very sore that has prevented this. As I said I completely appreciate your frustration surrounding this and I will feed this back to our team and our external review provider BazaarVoice.”

This felt like some bullshit to me. It was a turn-off. I didn’t cancel my membership or riot in the streets or knit a defiant hat about it, but I don’t know, it’s a con. I have two cons. Sarah can have two cons, as a treat.

So that’s Beauty Pie. I like it, I’ll keep using it, I’ll definitely mention their products in future posts, and now you know what I’m talking about when I do. If you want to try it for yourself, you can use this link and you get your first month free and I get $50 added to my allowance, but trust me when I say this is definitely not the point of this post. If you have any product-specific questions, I’m happy to answer any of them. But promise me you’ll get a candle.