I Tried 60 Samples of Expensive Beauty Products in 30 Days—Here's What I'd Buy

I should probably start by clarifying: Even pre-COVID, 50% of my job entailed unboxing, testing, reviewing, and retesting beauty products. This is not a luxury I take lightly, and while it might seem like a mundane task, my fellow beauty editors and I take a lot of pride in our ability to test and provide thoughtful feedback. (We quite literally receive hundreds of packages each month, so you can understand how this makes up a big part of our job!) Some of this feedback is just between the three of us on Slack, some of it goes to a brand's PR team or even its CEO, and a lot of the time, it comes directly to you!

With so many swipes and swatches under my belt, it takes a lot to impress me, and I've admitted on more than one occasion that I've become a bit jaded to the beauty industry's deluge of smoke-and-mirror product launches. Therefore, when a product truly knocks my socks off, it feels like a really big deal, and I can't wait to share every detail. 

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Pre-pandemic, my normal day-to-day routine was studded with meetings, events, writing, catching up on emails, and everything else being a beauty editor entails. (In addition to, you know, having a life outside of work!) Because of that, it became nearly impossible to try every single product I received, and I had amassed quite a large collection of expensive, sparkly items at home (and in my car, TBH) just waiting to be broken into for testing.

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(Image credit: @erin_jahns)

Since I'm still working from home, and since all of those products are in close proximity and awaiting their potential moment of glory, I've gone full ham, working my way through as many samples as possible. (Some are travel-size samples I've been gifted with in boxes, at events, etc., and some are full-size samples I haven't had a chance to work through yet.) It's been a fast-and-furious round of beauty-product speed dating, and now, I'm here to report which of these very expensive beauty products I would pay full price for. (In fact, I've already had put in my online orders to replenish some of my favourites!)

Curious to see which expensive beauty products are truly worth the investment? I'm sharing all of my recent favourites below—keep scrolling. 

The Best Expensive Skincare

The Best Expensive Haircare

The Best Expensive Bodycare

Next up, I'm a beauty editor—these are the seven things I'm spending my money on this year.

This post was originally published at an earlier date and has since been updated.

Beauty Director

Erin has been writing a mix of beauty and wellness content forBest Knockoff Luxury Clothing for over four years. Prior to that, she spent two and half years writing for Byrdie. She now calls Santa Monica home but grew up in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and studied writing, rhetoric, and communication at University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. She studied abroad in Galway, Ireland, and spent a summer in L.A. interning with the Byrdie andBest Knockoff Luxury Clothing family. After graduating from UW, she spent one year in San Francisco, where she worked as a writer for Pottery Barn Kids and PBteen before moving down to L.A. to begin her career as a beauty editor. She considers her day-to-day beauty aesthetic very low-maintenance and relies on staples like clear brow serum (from Kimiko!), Lawless's Lip Plumping Mask in Cherry Vanilla, and an eyelash curler. For special occasions or days when she's taking more meetings or has an event, she'll wear anything and everything from Charlotte Tilbury (the foundations are game-changing), some shimmer on her lids (Stila and Róen do it best), and a few coats of the best mascara-type product on earth, Surratt's Noir Lash Tint.