This Product Breaks All My Skincare Rules... And I Love It
Each year around the holidays, Target carries a little gift set filled with prestige beauty sold on Dermstore. Sidenote: I only TODAY found out that Dermstore is owned by Target. This gift set makes much more sense now. Anyway, Dermstore puts together a collection of some of their best products, in miniature form, pops them in a little cosmetics case, and sells it at Target for $20. It always sells out in a FLASH. If you see it, BUY IT. Usually it has a mini of Good Genes in it, which I think is why it sells out, and this year they’ve replaced Good Genes with a Sunday Riley eye cream (wonder why!). I saw one in the store and grabbed it, not even really looking at what was in it, because I have thought, “Oh I’ll get it later” and then had it sell out… multiple years in a row. Weirdly this year I have been able to get TWO, and it’s still on the shelves in my store. Could they have made sure to have a huge stock, because they knew it would sell out? Could it be that people were only getting it for Good Genes, and without it no one cares? I don’t know, but because of this gift set I have changed my own beauty rules, found a new skincare love, and have gone back to get a THREE MORE of these little gift sets, just because of one product.
I had never heard of Naturopathica, but I do adore a cleansing balm, so I knew I’d at least be interested in trying out the Manuka Honey Cleansing Balm included in the gift set. I used it and, you know, it was fine. It smelled really good, and it was a different consistency from my usual Clinique Take the Day Off Cleansing Balm, so that was a nice change. But then, after awhile, my skin started to look… amazing. My skin was smooth, clear, dare I say… supple. And the only thing I changed was my cleansing balm.
Now for a quick interlude about my skin care philosophy. I do not believe in spending a lot of money on something you immediately wash off. I don’t even buy name brand Cetaphil - I get the Target brand. It’s literally going right down the drain, so get it for cheap. So that’s issue one with the Naturopathica Cleansing Balm. It goes against my core beliefs to buy a (hold on your butts) $62 cleanser. SIXTY-TWO DOLLARS. As someone who refuses to buy name brand Cetaphil, this shakes me to my core. BUT my skin! It looks so good! And so the next time I was at Target, I bought another Dermstore gift set.
Naturopathica sells the Manuka Honey Cleansing Balm in two sizes, the smaller of which is in the gift set, and alone retails for $20. So the Target gift set, essentially, is a Naturopathica cleansing balm PLUS a little collection of mini, prestige brand freebies. I was at Target again, this past weekend, and the gift sets were buy one, get one free, and if you spent $30 you got a $10 gift card. So I got two more. ALSO they each rang up as $10. I have… so many tiny products now.
This is after two weeks of daily use. A little goes a long way, which is good because this stuff ain’t cheap.
So I kept buying these gift sets, and wondering how I could change my lifestyle and become a person who buys $62 cleanser (CLEANSER!) because I was addicted now, I needed to find a way to keep this thing going. My face looks SO GOOD, I just dab a lil’ concealer under my eyes and around my perpetually red nose and I’m CAMERA READY. I CANNOT OVERSTATE HOW GOOD THIS STUFF IS. I tried searching for dupes, I tried finding it on sale, I exhausted my resources. It was $62, I had lost my mind, fundamentally changed my worldview (at least about skincare) and now I was addicted to The Good Stuff.
But then I remembered Anthropologie always has 30% off for Black Friday, and there are NO exclusions. I learned this tip a few years ago, from Internet People who are obsessed with Good Genes (or maybe they just pretend to be!) If your pricey skincare is sold at Anthropologie, you cannot beat that Black Friday deal. This took a full-size cleansing balm from $62 to $43. I bought two.
