The Ridiculous Way I Got Almost 80% off Fancy Skincare
Way back in simpler times (November 2019) I bought a boatload of the Target Dermstore Hoilday Gift Sets. They had this cleansing balm that was truly life changing, and it was economical to just… keep getting them. There were other things in the set, some of which I still haven’t even tried, but apart from the cleansing balm, the one other standout was a tiny little moisturizer from SkinMedica.
The HA5 Rejuvenating Hydrator was like something out of a fairy tale, or a hyperbolic magazine article. I would apply it and my skin actually looked different. Different in a good way! It was plumper and smoother and just.. better. I found a very roundabout way to purchase the full size Naturapathica Cleansing Balm, so I figured I could just do the same with this SkinMedica lotion. OH how SWEET and NAIVE I was! A 2oz bottle of SkinMedica HA5 Rejuvenating Hydrator is $178. There’s no way to weasel a discount there, at least not one that will rationalize a $178 moisturizer. OR IS THERE??
WHUT.
I did some searching for dupes, and could not find any. The whole deal with the SkinMedica HA5 moistuizer is that it has five kinds of hyaluraonic acid in it. Normally your more affordable hyaluronic acid products have one, maybe two. So the price makes a bit more sense. Also, this stuff is concocted by fancy dermatologists so that it continually provides hydration to your skin, and actually helps your skin retain and produce it’s own moisture. So no one else is making a cheaper knockoff of this stuff. BUT, Overstock, the strange website that sells almost everything and has some great deals if you’re willing to do some digging, offered HA5 at a pretty decent discount.
Overstock has multiple discounts on SkinMedica HA5. You can get a 2oz bottle for around $100. The 1oz bottle is just over $70. These are great deals, despite still being a little steep for me. I also wasn’t super confident about buying beauty from Overstock. The reviews were good and I had ordered from them before, but nothing that I was going to be putting on my face. But there was one more offer that I was willing to try. Overstock sells six 0.30oz bottles of HA5 for $32. If you do the math, that’s a total of 1.8oz of product. Just shy of the 2oz bottle that sells (again, wtf) for $178. I’d managed to make four tiny samples of this hydrator last me a couple of months, so I figured I could get a lot of use out of these slightly larger bottles. Plus, it would be a more affordable way to see if Overstock was selling the real deal. So I got my army of tiny bottles of fancy moisturizer, and they’re GREAT.
Not only is this the same product at an affordable price, the comedic value of buying a cadre of tiny bottles is worth $32 right there. I had NO idea what this would be like when I opened the box, and when I saw it was a box of deluxe samples, clearly meant to be given out at a derm’s office, I laughed out loud long and hard enough to get the dog to come scampering in to see what was up. “Hero,” I said to the dog, who did not care, “I really do get up to some wacky shit.”
