Sephora: 500 Point Beauty Reward from Nars with More Packaging than Product

The four mini products are in the bottom left of the picture, the rest is all packaging.

If one shops at Sephora regularly, one might become a member of their Beauty Insider Program. Like any rewards program, this has different tiers. If one spends $350.00 a year, one moves up to Very Important Beauty Insider (VIB) or if one spends $1,000.00 a year at Sephora, one moves into the top tier, VIB Rouge. As one spends money at Sephora, one earns points. Usually it is a dollar spent that produces one point. However, there are also bonus points events, so this is not always the case.

In any event, if one accumulates enough points (100 for the lowest rewards), one can redeem them for beauty rewards from Sephora. These change each month and in the past couple of years they have been rolling out different rewards (generally for higher reward amounts) during the week and in very limited quantities. Many of these higher point rewards go quickly, so there must be a lot of people redeeming their points regularly.

I had only ever redeemed for the 100 point rewards, however, this December, I decided to redeem some of my points for a 500 point reward or “set” as they called it. It was the Nars 500 point reward. It had a mini version of one of their bronzers, blushes, primers, and lip glosses (so four minis in this set). I was expecting a pretty small package, but a large one appeared a few days later.

I was staggered by the amount of packaging that housed these tiny products. It was a beautiful polka dot black and white box, housed in a colourful sheath, but definitely unnecessary. Inside, there was a bunch of black paper confetti to pad the products, as well as an explanation of how "sought after" and “coveted” the products in the 500 point sets from Sephora are.

There was a sheath that had to be pulled off to reveal the box that had the mini products in it.

Lots of cardboard.

Inside there were the four little products in a bunch confetti.

The inside of the box stated how sought after and coveted the 500 point reward products are.

Actually, I was just trying to use up points and I needed some blush.

The box was really overly large.

Each product, except for one, was in its own packaging.

After digging through the confetti, there were the four little products. They were cute and beautiful, but they mostly had packaging around them too. Once I had taken off the packaging around the products, I was left with a sheath, a box, confetti, and a bunch of cardboard product boxes (and this doesn’t count the packaging that I will be left with after the products are done, which would be much harder to recycle as it is made of mixed materials of plastic, metal, foam, and glass). What amazed me was how the little blush and bronzer each had a complete compact with a mirror, just like the full sized products. I have put pictures below that show them open and on a full sized product.

The bronzer and blush compacts were just like the full sized ones in that they had mirrors, but they were about half the size.

Full sized on the left, mini product on the right.

Mini size over a full size.

Lip gloss in a box.

Primer in a box.

The four minis now without their packaging.

The products are really nice and I can try some different products from Nars for “free” (I had to spend money to accumulate the points though so they’re not really free), but wow there’s a lot of packaging wasted on this reward. I managed to reuse part of the box (I cut out the polka dot parts) and confetti at Christmas doing crafts, but really, most of the packaging had to go in the recycling and this is a great waste of resources (safety seals with less boxes would be better).  I have blogged before about products and bonuses from Sephora and how much unnecessary packaging they seem to have, including all the free cosmetics bags and how I have reused them for other purposes (you can find some of my blog posts here and here and here and here and here and here). 

Products at the bottom left and everything else in the picture is packaging.

All of this is packaging that I had to recycle (or reuse in the case of a small part of it).

 It does not seem like the overpackaging situation at Sephora is improving at all. While the packaging may be “pretty” and may make us feel special like we’re receiving a gift for ourselves not on our birthday, perhaps we’d all enjoy the products just as much if the packaging were reduced and we could feel good that we were not burning up limited resources unnecessarily. I know some people complain on Sephora in the reviews when packaging is not “pretty” enough, but surely the majority of people would survive with less packaging. The world certainly won’t look pretty if we keep using superfluous amounts of packaging. If large beauty retailers like Sephora could lead the way by reducing packaging and making product packaging easier to recycle, the world would be a more beautiful place.