Fashion

Marian Keyes: ‘I swank in like the Saudis after they'd discovered their oil’

For 10 British pounds a month you enter a dazzling wonderland of top-quality make-up

Beauty Pie has moved into skincare and oh my good Christ! Serums, lads, serums!

Marian Keyes
Sat Jan 6 2018 - 06:00

Do you know about Beauty Pie? If you do, you’ll understand my giant love for it. And if you don’t, then oh my God, hold on to your hats.

Right. It’s a membership thing, where you pay 10 British pounds a month (I’ll come back to the British thing later) and suddenly you get access to a dazzling wonderland of top-quality own-brand make-up and skincare at thrillingly low prices.

To clarify, this isn't one of those clubs where you get a box of surprises every month where very often the surprise is how crap some of the products are. With Beauty Pie you get a monthly spending allowance and you get to choose.

They started with a small, carefully curated range of their own excellent make-up but now they’ve moved into skincare and oh my good Christ! Serums, lads, serums! Amazing ones. Six of them, including a pigment banisher, a stem-cell version and now – new and exciting – a Retinol one. And all costing about a tenner.

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However, most products cost far less than that; my current passion is their Matte Lip Crayon, which gives the most beautiful, long-lasting, nondrying colour and weighs in at a nonhefty £3.48. To make things extra lovely you see the hugely inflated price you’d have paid in a shop. Every month I swank in with my allowance, feeling like how the Saudis must have felt after they’d discovered their oil and were coming to Harrods to buy up the place.

There are high-quality brushes, they’ve just introduced nail polish and coming soon is a range of foncy candles (£13 quid to you, missus).

Other good things: they don’t test on animals and their packaging and casings are eco-friendly.

I’ve examined this every single way, looking for the catch, and the only issue is that you can’t really tell the colour of a foundation or lipstick until you see it in the flesh, but because of healthy-safety* issues, only unopened items can be returned. Also, at the moment they only ship to the UK or the US, so we’ve to use ParcelMotel or similar. But shur lookit!

*I know that’s not the phrase. Humour me, please.

Beauty Pie