How My Buying Process Has Changed

Growing up I was taught to be a sale shopper. I remember going to double coupon days at Delchamp's, not being allowed to buy something unless it was on sale, and walking straight to the clearance rack to browse. I was taught that buying something at full price was ridiculous when plenty of items could be bought on sale. After all, it was important to get the most bang for you buck, and quantity was preferred over quality. The more things you had the more wealth you had and the more choices you had to choose from.

When I started becoming interested in makeup I was in my mid-twenties and still in this mindset. Pair that with not knowing much about makeup sale trends or makeup products in general and it was a recipe for disaster. For my first year of makeup buying I stuck to the drugstore because the thought of spending more than $10 on something I thought was a fleeting interest seemed unreasonable to me. I would look at the sale ads for CVS and Walgreens each week to see what makeup brands were on sale. Then, if I saw Maybelline (or whatever other brand) was on sale, I would start looking up Maybelline products to see if anything interested me or if any YouTubers were talking about something. (Why hello there Maybelline Color Tattoos! Of course I need eight of you!)

In my mind, I needed to "build my collection" and buying things on sale was the best way to do that. YouTubers I watched back then constantly had a dozen new favorite items each month (or even each week!) and massive collections with lipsticks numbering much closer to fifty than five. It was so normalized on YouTube that I thought massive collections like that were actually common for the average consumer. 

It seemed perfectly reasonable to me to buy four Maybelline eyeshadow quads in one shopping trip because (1) it was Buy One Get One 50%, (2) somebody on social media mentioned liking them or I saw them in someone's collection video, and (3) a color looked pretty in the pan. Nowadays I see so much wrong with that way of purchasing. 

First off, I would never buy four quads at once. Four singles? Maybe. Okay probably. But they would be thoroughly thought-out purchases. Four of the same product type, on a whim especially, just would not happen today. And that sale? What kind of sale is that? BOGOHO sales are one of my most disliked sales now. It requires you to buy things in multiples of two, which meant that instead of picking the item you wanted most you were encouraged to add something else to make the purchase "worth it." Also, a lot of the time the things I liked were not the same price, so what would've been a 25% off sale had I bought two of the same became sometimes a 10% off at best. I was enticed by the BOGOHO sales on drugstore makeup repeatedly until I realized how often they occurred after a few months of seeing the sale cycles repeat. (When I do want to buy a drugstore item now, I usually buy it from Target because they don't have the crazy markup that CVS/Walgreens/Ulta has to compensate for their constant sales.)

I also rarely buy things now based on product recommendations. Instead, I think about what I've been wanting lately, what I've felt a lack of in my collection, and searched for products to fill that void. I seldom watch monthly favorites even though they used to be one of my favorite videos to watch. Just because someone else likes something (or promotes something) doesn't mean I will too. I would rather go test it out for myself and make my own judgment on it rationally. 

This is why I rarely shop at the drugstore now. I want to be able to see how a product swatches before I buy it, and that's not something I could do when I was limiting myself to CVS and Walgreens. (I know that I could return it, but I'm just not that kind of person to return things just because they don't work out.) 

When I got up the courage to check out Sephora for the first time I feel like things changed. I still was not comfortable spending lots of money on makeup, but when I realized I could compare eyeliners on my hand to find my perfect shade of purple. I suddenly became okay with spending $20 on one product because I knew that it was the one I wanted. And because it was so much more than I was used to spending I was more selective in what I bought. 

Quality started to become more important to me than quantity for essentially the first time in my life. But I was still a sale shopper at the core. It is so ingrained in me to wait for something to go on sale if you think it will soon. I try to wait until the Sephora sales to purchase something unless a higher discount appears elsewhere. So since I'm the lowest tier Beauty Insider and only ever receive a 15% discount at best, if a brand site has 20% off or better with free shipping I'll purchase from there instead of waiting for the Sephora sale. 

But I still only buy the one or two items I wanted in the first place. Not the stuff YouTubers told me to get. Not the three more things that will help me reach the free shipping threshold. Just the things that I've sought out for myself and swatched on my own hands. I have gone from finding a sale and searching for a product to searching for a product and waiting for a sale.