What products I spent money on as a beauty editor (when everything came for free)

Always v grateful for and aware of my immense privilege btw

For the past 15 or so years, I would enter Boots or Sephora or any department store’s beauty section not as a shopper, but as a mere observer. Or where the former is concerned, to bulk buy things like cotton pads and nail polish remover and toothpaste. I would walk around, looking at the new skin and cosmetics launches, knowing I already had it at home, and in every shade or iteration it came in. I haven’t had to buy shampoo in a decade. This, I know, is a position of enormous privilege that I NEVER would have conceived of until the packages started arriving. I was 20, and I had landed my first national newspaper beauty column almost by accident.

I remember the first beauty PR package ever sent to me – I was living in Cork at the time and Max Factor sent me out a selection of their latest bits. I rang my mam and sister with the excitement. Fast forward a few years and Chanel are sending me limited edition bits on the regular and trust me when I say, I never lost that original giddiness and raw appreciation for a second. I think because I never went into writing about beauty or fashion or any of those things with an agenda, like some influencers or writers might do today, it always felt as a very jammy perk of the job, rather than something I was entitled to.

Anyway, story time is for another day. Today is about product. I’ve chosen five that I rebuy and rebuy, and will continue to do for as long as I have a face. I’ve chosen the things that I went and spent my last vestiges of disposable income on, even if an equivalent product lay unused in my ‘stocks’. These are all must-haves, as far as I’m concerned, and anyone who knows me will know I don’t throw that phrase around.

I’ll do another list if this one is of interest, but for now… Here they are. With links to buy them should you so desire (and not an #AF in sight! You’re already paying to be here, I shall NOT be rinsing you a second time pals).