Birchbox has changed their points system

I'm guessing they weren't making much money in the shop, because people were only/mostly buying things with points. Here are the changes they've made (from an email sent to subscribers, which I've now read about in multiple places):

• You will no longer get 10 points per sample from your box when you review them. You will get 50 points for the first 5 samples you review, and that's it. Ever. There has been some confusion as to whether this meant 50 points per box, but here is a recent comment that the Birchbox rep made on their own Facebook post: "You’ll receive 10 points for the first 5 reviews you leave on or after July 11th. After you’ve left 5 reviews, you will no longer earn points for your sample reviews throughout your subscription. New subscribers will receive 10 points for the first 5 reviews they leave in their subscription. Please feel free to shoot us a private message and we'd love to chat! xx"
• All points now expire in 6 months, instead of a year.
• But you can now redeem your points in increments of ten, instead of 100.
• You still get 1 point for every $1 spent in the store.

I think this is going to tank Birchbox, which has been showing signs of struggling lately. The generous points system was one of the only things they had going for them during the last year or so, and it sounds like a lot of people aren't going to stick around now. Without it, they are just sending people a bunch of hotel toiletries and running a website that barely loads and a store without competitive pricing where everything is out of stock. I don't see much incentive to buy from Birchbox rather than Sephora or Ulta or Amazon.

Or maybe the store was a failed experiment and they are going to phase it out entirely and stick to the subscription service. [ETA: Apparently not--in fact, they are trying to expand their retail business.]

What do you think?

(Their Twitter is pretty funny now. Just a constant stream of, "Sorry to hear that! Keep in mind you still earn points from purchases!" Ha.)

More Birchbox complaining

Who can get enough of that, right? In case you were wondering if using the beta customization settings they added to my account resulted in a better box, then answer is, emphatically, no. I ranted about it a little on Instagram, and you can read that here, if you want to (even through a web browser).
My year-long subscription ends after June, and I won't be resubscribing. It's frustrating, because the year started out so strong.

Birchbox Revisited

One of the posts that gets the most views on here is my Birchbox vs. Ipsy post from last summer. Most of those hits come from Google. High SEO value there, I guess. I wrote that when I was getting pretty sour on Ipsy and excited to be going back to Birchbox. But lately BB has been kind of lackluster for me, so I thought I figured I write an update. I don't want to mislead anyone when I'm not quite so into it anymore.

Is it just that the honeymoon period is over? I don't think so. When I compare the first few boxes I got from Birchbox, like this one (I ended up really loving the No. 4 hair product) or this one, with what they're sending me now, the more recent boxes really do seem much less interesting. My profile says that I prefer makeup and nail polish over everything else, and that my style is "adventurous" and "trendy." (Maybe that's a lie, but I have enough "natural" and "classic" products in my hoard already. I want to try something new).

See what you think. Here are my boxes from January and February:

In January I took advantage of their new "pick your sample" option to choose a Tocca hand cream, which I was really looking forward to trying. Then my box went missing in the mail, and they sent me this as a replacement. Apparently the sample I had chosen was out of stock. This contains a strongly scented peppermint body lotion which is the kind of thing you'd find in a mid-range hotel. I mean that literally: the brand that makes this (Gilchrist & Soames) is all over hotels, and it's the kind of product you use out of desperation when you realize you didn't remember to bring a better lotion from home. There's an AHA mask, which I guess I will try out. They sent a black eyeliner, which is boring, but useful, I suppose, and at least it's full size. The bottle on the left is aloe face wash, which again is boring but will be used. And the tub at the bottom is some kind of "invisible daily tint" (how is a tint invisible???) with no eeeeeeeevil chemicals like silicone in it. It's absolute shit. It's too dark for me (as most samples of this type are), so it's certainly not invisible. Beside the color making it not invisible, it is streaky and  fucking chunky when you try to spread it on your face. Lovely! Give me all the silicone, please, if this is what natural gets you. In this entire box, there is nothing that interests me in the slightest, much less excites me.

Okay, so that was a replacement box, and maybe they had run out of all the good stuff at that point. But in February I got the box that was supposedly tailored to me, so it should be better, right? Check it out:

This time I chose the Marcelle eye makeup remover as my sample for some reason. I don't usually use eye makeup remover (I just use Cetaphil lotion), but it's a Canadian brand, and I've heard good things about it, so it sucked me in. At the left side of the box are shampoo and conditioner samples. Maybe not thrilling, but I was at least satisfied with the big bottle of shampoo, because I'm running low. This saves me from having to buy more for a week or two. In the middle: more Gilchrist and Soames - body wash this time. So cheap they couldn't even be bothered to put the tube together correctly so that the label would be centered. Then that tiny Benefit lip balm that is twisted all the way up in this photo. That's how muchactual product  is in that huge package. What a waste. It's barely tinted and smells like roses. Yawn. And a perfume sample. I do not like getting perfume samples, and I ticked the box in my profile asking them not to send me more than 6 per year. Unfortunately, I think that means per calendar year, and since I signed up for my year subscription in July, I could technically get one every single month I'm subscribed. So far there's only been one box without perfume. Not cool.

So does this box say makeup + nail polish + trendy + adventurous then? I guess lip balm is sort of like makeup, but is mostly-clear balm trendy or is it adventurous?

Birchbox is supposed to be a service that introduces me to new, exciting products so that I will buy them from their suppliers. They're not sending me exciting things, and they're not sending me things that fit my profile.

I don't know if choosing a sample is the problem. There are apparently limited box combinations, so if you choose a sample, you have to get one of the predetermined combinations that includes it. But I started choosing samples in the first place to ensure that I would get a least ONE thing in my box that I liked, because the previous couple of boxes had also been blah.

If I were paying the full $10 for each box, I would probably be even more frustrated. Luckily I signed up using that really good deal that appeared briefly last summer, so I'm making back most of the cost of each box through points. It's really the points system that still makes BB come out ahead of Ipsy. With a normal $10 a month subscription, you get $5 a month back in credits. And if you shop for things you would be buying anyway in the BB shop, you get more points, which are worth more than points you'd get from other stores, like Sephora, because you can shop with them.

Here's some of the stuff I've got using my credit over the last few months:

These are things that I just never could have afforded to try right now if I had to use real money. (Of all of them, I recommend the tea the most. Yum.) I did have a couple of referrals (thanks!), but the vast majority of the points were earned through the usual monthly reviews of products, and I used promo codes and sales to get good deals. To be honest, even if BB keeps womp-womping me with the boxes, I might stay subscribed after my year runs out, because of the points. But the conspiracy theory part of my brain wonders if they are sending me less interesting things, because I have already paid for a year, and they don't have to worry about enticing me to stay. That's impossible, right? It's all automated, right? And computers can't decide which beauty products are less exciting. Right??

So that is my current view of Birchbox. Boxes = meh. Points = yay! I just wish they would make some sort of effort to send me things that matched my profile. Wouldn't that be in their best interest? I can't remember the last time they sent me a sample of something that I actually wanted to buy from their store after trying it.

If you want to roll the dice and play the points game, here's my referral link. If you do decide to sign up, you should definitely google for a promo code that will get you 100 points when you do. There seem to be new ones every month. Maybe you can crack the secret to the perfect profile setup. Because telling them what you actually want apparently isn't the trick.

Birchbox vs. Ipsy

Disclosure: Affiliate/referral links.
I recently decided to cancel my Ipsy subscription, which I've had since 2012, when it was still called My Glam. Instead, I've decided to start getting Birchbox again. Because I am sure that this is as exciting a development for everyone else as it is for me (ha), I thought I'd write up a little post about why.

I really preferred Ipsy for a long time. When I quit Birchbox in January 2013, it was because I was getting fed up with getting tons of little foil packets of things and perfume vials all the time. It looks like the samples they are sending now are more interesting, and they also have an option to only get a maximum of 6 perfume samples a year. Nice! Another reason I quit Birchbox in favor of Ipsy at the time that I did was that I was really into makeup and not particularly interested in other things like skin or hair care products. Ipsy seemed to be much heavier on the makeup/nail polish, while I kept getting moisturizers I didn't want from BB ("I'm plenty moist already!"). These days, though, Ipsy has been including more non-makeup items, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm finding myself more interested in skin care than I used to be, and my skin has been getting drier, so I am even fine with moisturizer samples.

Ipsy was also great for me when I had a smaller makeup hoard, because it sort of forced me to try out products I might not have considered. Like I probably wouldn't have picked out a bright red lip gloss for myself at that point, but it turned out to work really well (and got me hooked). Plenty of those products were full sized, and so they really made up a useful part of my collection. I think it this point part of the problem is that I own so much shit that most of the makeup they send me is either going to be a duplicate of something I already have or something I am really, really not interested in. I am rarely getting unusual and unique products from Ipsy anymore - or at least that's how it feels. Instead, I'm getting more black eyeliner and mascara or neutral lip glosses from brands I am already familiar with, etc. This month's bag was kind of the last straw for me, because there was absolutely nothing of particular interest to me. The only full size product included was a cheap green apple scented lip balm that I probably would have turned my nose up at in middle school. I think it might have glitter in it. Fuck no. (Snob.)

Here are the other things I got this month in my Ipsy bag:

(GlamGlow YouthMud TingleExfoliate Treatment, Absolute You're the Balm, Urban Decay Pervesion mascara (you can buy this sample for $10 from Sephora), Lord & Berry eyeliner, Manna Kadar Sheer Glo highlighter)