I have a friend that visits all the the beauty counters in her area with the intention of collecting all the samples she can. Then she uses those samples as free beauty products for a while until she stocks again. It's her weird way of saving money on beauty products. Personally, I find this unsustainable and considering the time it takes to collect all the samples I'd rather pay for the beauty products I need and be done with. Someone else doing this, opinions?
I do know a friend who will sometimes go get a couple of samples to hold her over if she doesn't quite yet have enough money to shell out for the full bottle. I actually never even thought to do this myself, or get samples from the counter. I recently went to the mall and she had me pick up a sample for her. lol
I'll be honest. I haven't paid for name brand (department store) make up for a long time. I typically get free samples of foundation once a year and mix them with lotion to create tinted moisturizer, and you would be amazed how long that lasts me. Then, I try to only buy make up when there is a good "free gift" with purchase. I spend the minimum (on mascara or something that I have to replace most often) and get the free makeup. Again, it does tend to last a while, so yeah, I'm kind of with your friend. I can make samples go far. I still have a huge stock pile of perfume samples that I will probably never get through because I just don't ever think about using them.
I think that's very time consuming and that I would just rather buy what I need myself. Also I would be a bit embarrassed to keep going into stores and taking samples and never buying anything. I mean you don't get a huge amount so I would imagine you would have to visit quite a few or be going quite often as well.
I like getting samples of products I products that I am genuinely interested in trying out so I can purchase them later. Although I'm not going to judge people whose entire beauty regime consists of samples, I do hope that abusing the system that way isn't going to ruin it for everyone else in the long run. I really appreciate that Sephora will give me a generous sample of a foundation or something so I can test it on my skin first, because color matches can look so different depending on the lighting and my skin is pretty sensitive so I can't be sure if something is going to break me out. It's one of the big perks of Sephora and department stores over the drugstore, where you have to just purchase and hope for the best. I also love getting free samples with purchase to try out products that I might not have paid attention to otherwise, but I admit that I'm often happy to have them but then kind of forget that they're there. I have a whole hoard of foil packet samples that I've just never gotten around to trying out...
