One of the most frequently asked questions on BBB is what happens to all the products I get sent. It’s more than obvious that I couldn’t possibly use them all myself and while I’ve said plenty of times that they’re given away, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. So, here we go:
- Make up that has been swatched or used goes to friends and family.
- With high value products that have not been used or opened, friends are asked to make a nominal payment which then goes to a charity.
- Lower value products are collected by a teacher for a local school and a friend for a local youth group; they’re either bundled into small collections for gifts at the Christmas Fair, or in the case of the youth group, sold at quite literally pence which all goes back into the funds for the youth group.
- I’m often asked to donate for raffle prizes so create at least two or three beauty hampers per year.
- Occasionally, I do ‘spot gifting’, so if I have some very active and supportive commenters, I will send them a little something.
- If products contain highly active ingredients and I cannot persuade them to friends or family, these are the only the things that sometimes get thrown away. It seems like the wrong thing to do to send the local primary school fair products that are complex and could result in skin reactions.
- I have an annual Christmas ritual that somewhere mid-December, all the nominal payments I’ve taken in the last few months are put together and go in the first charity pot I see at Charing X station. Last year I forgot to do it at the station so managed to greatly surprise a cab driver who was dressing his cab up to take part in a London Cab fund raising drive.
- It’s not unusual for me to pass products on to other bloggers – less so now than in the past, but blogs need constant content so I’m really happy if I am seeing blog friends to share it out. I think lots of bloggers do this.
- Unsurprisingly, I do gift my own family but less so for Christmas and birthdays for obvious reasons: they all know what lands in my house so I try not to do beauty gifting as a main gift unless it’s specifically requested.
- I don’t do Instagram giveaways – they’re just too hard to keep track of or to assess fairly – and I got my fingers burned because after choosing five winners, six people emailed me saying it was them! It was almost impossible to go back and weed out the rogue one so I ended up having to supply an extra gift. Cheeky!
I think one of the key things to consider when re-cycling beauty products as a blogger is whether or not the brand would be happy with the landing point. I think most brands would be very happy to think that unused product goes to a good home or contributes to the wider community in some way. One of the reasons I don’t fund raise via boot fairs or similar is because I really don’t think it’s fair to the brands to hawk out their products from the back of my car in a field. It’s not where any brand really wants to see their products, no matter how good the intention is. I’ve also been approached several times by Ebay sellers looking to sell my products on for me (claiming that they already sell for several well-known blogs) but again, I really don’t think Ebay is where the brands themselves would like to end up.
I’m going to do a bit of spot gifting on Periscope going forward (I’ve already done a few) but need to keep these UK only. If you want to follow my Periscope channel you can do so HERE either via the app or on your laptop.
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