Influenster’s Kat Von D Studded Kiss Lipstick Sample: Beautiful Boxes are Still Boxes

A little box in a big box. Wasting cardboard is not beautiful.

Influenster is an online product review platform where certain members (apparently social media analytics are used to choose testers) are given products to test. Reviews are then posted by members based on their experiences.

Recently, I was given a Kat Von D lipstick to test (Kat Von D Beauty Studded Kiss VoxBox) for free. The packaging on this was out of this world wasteful. Firstly, the lipstick was in a cardboard box (a safety seal would have done). Secondly, the regular sized lipstick in a box came in a much bigger box filled with tissue paper with a paper insert. This is a big waste of paper and cardboard (at least it is recyclable though) and definite overpackaging.

This box came in the mail (the mailing label is on the bottom).

This is how the box looked when opened.

When the tissue paper was removed it was just empty, empty space and this little lipstick.

The lipstick, the lipstick's box, the paper insert on top of the Influenster box (the tissue paper is not even in this picture).

In case you're wondering, the colour of the lipstick is "OG Lolita."

To their credit though, Influenster has an article on their site where they suggest ways in which members can reuse and repurpose the boxes that their sample products come in. The Kat Von D box was very colourful and I ended up cutting the top off of it and using it as an open box to store lipsticks on my makeup table. But reducing is better than reusing, so it would have been better if it had just come in a much smaller package like a small bubble mailer.

I reused the box to store my lipsticks.