BEAUTY PIE ORDER AND UPDATE

I put in a Beauty Pie order last week, I used up the goodwill spending allowance they awarded me because I complained about a faulty product, namely the ultra-sticky eye patches I talked about here.  I still had to pay for everything, I was just able to buy more of everything – hang on, that doesn’t seem right.

Anyway, this is what I ordered and it arrived within 3 days.

SUPERACTIVE CAPSULES PURE DOUBLE VITAMIN C & VITAMIN E SERUM £10.81 x 60 Capsules

Our super-targeted ‘one-shot’ face serum capsules hold high doses of stable actives. A double dose of pure Vitamin C is boosted with Vitamin E acetate for moisture and antioxidation. They also help to firm, smooth and brighten, minimize the appearance of lines and wrinkles, and help even out skin tone.

Presented in capsule form because Vitamin C breaks down when exposed to air, combined with Vitamin E and priced fairly, this is the product I’m most excited about. I bought two bottles.

Vitamin C aids in your skin’s natural regeneration process, which helps your body repair damaged skin cells. Adding Vitamin E into the mix is like a one-two punch of skin-saving goodness. Vitamin C serums are more effective than creams or toners.

– Dermatologist Patricia Wexler

Each capsule is just enough to cover the face. The serum is milky and silky. I’m using it at night to start with, but I’m not sure how it would feel under makeup, it feels very slippery.

PLANTASTIC™ MICROPEELING SUPER DROPS £9.34

Plantastic Micropeeling Super Drops are an easy, everyday addition to your skincare routine. Use once or twice a week for maintenance, or daily if you’re battling breakouts. With fruit-acids, micro-purifying biosurfactants, natural brighteners. It’s a 24/7 glow-giving one-serum wonder.

A rich and dizzy floral tuberose on violets and jasmine and ylang-ylang with hints of sweet cedarwood.

This was a horrible mistake. I made a decision early on in lockdown to get through it by using the very best of everything I had and that included burning through of all of my Jo Malone Red Roses candles and now I have none left. Based on all the positive reviews, I bought this one.

Fragrance is a very personal thing and I admit I’m in the ‘love it or loathe it’ camp. I feel the balance of jasmine and ylang-ylang notes turned this product from luxurious into cloying. The scent is incredibly strong, ignore the reviews complaining that this is a subtle fragrance or they can’t detect any scent, they must’ve had a dud one. This heavy fragrance, after only 2 hours of burn time, fills the house with its scent. You can even catch a whiff of it from another floor. In fact, I put the box out for recycling and I can still smell it every time I open the bin.

In fairness, this is a good quality candle. The wax burned cleanly and evenly and solidified into a hard flat surface, but the fragrance is too heavy and heady for me.

SUPER HEALTHY SKIN™ SHEER TINTED OIL-FREE SPF20 £6.71 50ml 

Imported from Italy, this delivers beautifully natural, sheer coverage, sun protection and a radiant, all-day gorgeous, soft-focus glow. Oil-free, fragrance-free, with a velvety skin finish, it’s probably the best multi-action BB cream you can buy.

I’ve not tried this yet. I’m finding it a chore to put on makeup, I seem to have lost the knack. it always looks cakey and unnatural. I’m hoping that mixing this shade with the light one (which is too light) will give me perfect sheer coverage. Oh, and yes, I’m still crying over the demise of Liz Earle’s old formulation Sheer Skin Tint foundation.

WONDERCOLOUR LONGWEAR CREAM SHADOW STICK £4.63 – £5.39

In a single stick you get smudgeproof, crease-free, perfect colour that’s so good you won’t believe your eyeshadow.
A glide-on, roll-up stick so creamy, so easy to use, so blendable, budge-resistant, and brilliant, you might be converted forever from all other eyeshadows.

I bought Fauna, A Matt Cool Toned Brown and Goldie – A Rich Shimmery Gold.

There is no doubt that these shadow sticks are excellent value for money. Are they comparable to Bobbi Brown’s famous Long-Wear Cream Shadow Sticks? Sort of, IF you choose the right shade. But, at a quarter of the price, you have the luxury of experimenting with a few of them.

The sticks seem to be chunkier than Bobbi’s ones. They glide on smoothly, although blending is a little tricky as they dry and set fast. But, longevity is good and they don’t crease either.

Unfortunately, I chose the wrong shades. The swatches for both these shades are too light on the website.

Goldie, which I was expecting to be pale gold, leans more to a cool-toned, dark bronze shade. It’s a shame because the shimmer is there and if it was lighter it would just what I wanted.

The description of Fauna is accurate, it IS a matt cool-toned brown. It blends out more easily than Goldie as the crayon for this shade is very soft and creamy, but it’s a boring flat grey/brown. Why did I buy such a dull colour? Contrary to some reviews it doesn’t morph into an orange hue. But beware if you have oily lids, as I can understand why some people say it slides off.

Judging by the swatches on various skin tones – which I’ve only just found on the website (tricky to find and the images are too small by the way). I think I would have been better off with Beige Bombshell, Little Star, and Huntress. Three for my next order in a few months.

BEAUTY PIE AND THE DARK FOUNDATION UPDATE

Now, this is an interesting one. On Saturday 6th June, I wrote a review of Beauty Pie Youth Dew masks and mentioned some other products. I noted that the darkest-toned foundation in the Super Healthy Skin Sheer Tinted Oil-Free BB Cream range, called Deep, was considerably more expensive than the fairest shade.

Strangely, as the shades deepen the price rises, ie £6.86 for the Fairest shade, up to £10.79 for the darkest Deep shade. It’s still extremely reasonable for a BB cream, but I’ve never heard of an increase because of darker pigment. Odd, yes?

Four days later I received an email from Beauty Pie (sent to all members) with the following:

Last Saturday, it was pointed out that one of our products (a dark-toned oil-free Tinted SPF Moisturizer) was much more expensive in the darkest shade than the other four.

We hadn’t noticed this because our prices, as always, fed in from the factory invoice from the latest delivery we received. But it was quite a bit higher, and we understand how that might make someone buying that shade feel. It wasn’t something that was done intentionally. (Across all other products with shade ranges, prices go up and down, and often the lighter shades are higher because we sometimes place top-up orders last minute, again, based on the rate of sale.)

I’m not going to be so arrogant as to assume Beauty Pie read my post because other people noticed it too:

Now, we’ve had comments from some people on our social pages that “all shades should be the same price”.  And because of the way our software works (and anyone who works in tech programming will know that Rome is not changed in a day), it would take some reprogramming or manual adjusting for us to offer this. *

So PIE members, for now, we have changed the price of the item in question to be in line with the other Tinted SPF Moisturizer prices (and Beauty Pie will pick up the difference) which may go up or down as new batches come in.

*Yet they adjusted the price twice in one week and brought the darkest shade down to £8.51 – still £1.65 more than the shade I bought.

The rest of the email is long and waffly and apologetic, but I think what they’re suggesting is that they raise the price of all of those particular foundations and they and (us, as the consumer) will donate the difference to a charity

We thought: If we manually adjust the prices of all our foundations so that they are equal (instead of having dynamic pricing flowing through), each would have a members’ price of £11*. When a foundation is sold, each of us donates the difference between the real members’ price (lower than £11) and the new £11 price (about a £3 increase, depending on the size of the batch that we buy), to a charity that supports justice, opportunity and unified action towards change, equality and anti-racism

There was a vote on it. I voted ‘love it’ because I thought it was a good idea, a way (albeit passively) to raise money causes I hope we all believe it in.

But then I thought it’s a £4.14 increase. Members are paying £5.00 a month subscription fee and now an additional amount? Have they thought this through?

Instead, why doesn’t Beauty Pie add 5p to EVERY product, and donate that amount to charity and every month share a running total of how much has gone to these charities? It would also raise a lot more money because this particular foundation isn’t on the bestseller’s list. Alternatively, they could include an opt-in donation box during checkout to give people a choice or even better, donate some of their own profits.

UPDATE 18th June 2020

Beauty Pie is messing with my post because the foundation prices have changed yet again. This time though, Deep is only 10p more expensive than Fair, which is now the second most expensive. Still with me?

It appears to be all good now, but I can’t help feeling Beauty Pie went into a blind panic, scared they would be accused of not treating all skin tones equally. But the plain fact is I’ve never seen brands charge more for darker foundations, this was something that should have been picked up a long time ago.

Just keep calm Beauty Pie, it’s a learning curve we’re all on, we’ll get there.