Stealing Beauty

Friday: Prada straw and croc wedges

The best thing about working at a magazine with a beauty department? The beauty sale. Every few months the lovely, generous beauty staffers clean out their stash of samples and sell everything, with the proceeds going to charity. Most things are a buck. That’s right, a buck. Let me tell you, the line starts early and the elbows are sharp.

One of the worst things? I have bags and bags of stuff from sales past — great stuff, mind you, but did I really need that YSL Sun make-up leg mousse? Hey, it was a buck! There are tables and tables of lipsticks, nail polish, hair products, blush, mascara, perfume, eyeliner… The room gets crowded and hot and dizzying. It’s exhausting. But did I mention everything’s like, a buck?

From the very first beauty sale I devised a strategy: (1) Bring a big shopping bag. (2) Head straight for the skincare table. (3) Grab every high-end brand, do not look at what it is, do not pass go, just grab it. Read the fine print later. (4) Don’t ask if you need it or not. It’s a buck! It’s for charity!

So over the past year I’ve snagged the Natura Bisse Diamond Extreme Cream ($250) and (not one but it turns out, two) Ice Lift DNA Cryo-Mask ($140), a Guerlain Meteorites compact ($150), Frederic Fekkai Protein Rx PM Repair Strengthener ($65 and on back order at Neiman’s), as well as countless Nars lipsticks, Laura Mercier eyeshadows, Shiseido concealers, Chanel nail polishes…

My loot ends up in bags in my apartment, simply because I have so much stuff that I’ve forgotten what I have. The bags are now sitting in my foyer, serving as something like the treasure chest at the dentist’s office — all visitors get a parting gift. Or rather gifts, in my mom’s case — that is, gifts for her, for her secretary, for her hairdresser, for her pals… She cleans me out every time. Not that I miss any of it. I can barely remember what I got at yesterday’s sale. Did I need it? No. But did I have to buy that bright coral nailpolish? Hell yeah!

Technorati Tags: cosmetics, shopping, makeup, skincare

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 7:22 am and is filed under Shopping, Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.