If you're looking for a subscription box that sends ipsy-sized items, you're not going to find it here. Birchbox and ipsy seem to have completely different goals: Ipsy seems to focus on building brand loyalty so you go buy more NYX blush/Zoya polish/Yaby eye shadow/Elizabeth Mott whatever. Birchbox wants you to fall in love with a specific sample that you will then go back to their store and buy in a full-sized version. If you're looking for a sub that will build your makeup bag/skincare regimen/etc. by giving you the product, Birchbox is not that sub. It wants to inform your decision-making to help you decide on the right product to go back and buy. But if you want just enough of a certain hair oil/eye cream/exfoliator to decide whether you like it, Birchbox usually delivers, and that's why I canceled ipsy and keep renewing my annual Birchbox sub: I am in fact just looking for samples of sufficient size to try things a few times so I can decide whether I like it or not. I very specifically do *not* want another box full of things I have received, tried a few times, decided I hated, and can't bring myself to throw out because it's a waste of a perfectly good product even though it's not a good product *for me*. And I get much groovier and fancier products from Birchbox than ipsy. There may be some crossover (Coastal Scents), but Birchbox gets a lot of neat indie/niche products that you're not likely to find anywhere else except funky indie boutiques (if you're lucky), like AYRES and Mox Botanicals. They may send out a Chapstick or Larabar once in a while, but they will also send out things you quickly realize you simply cannot live without even though you never knew they existed before, like Beauty Protector leave-in hair treatment. As a side note, that single packet of bath powder? If it's Mox Botanicals, one of the aforementioned indie products, a four-pack sells for $22, and a two-pack sells for $12, so that's a $5.50-$6 value right there. The clothing deodorizer pad (and it *is* reusable, but I forget how many uses) is $18 for six, so there's $3. So between just those two items, that's a $9 value, and if I recall correctly, the eye cream is 0.1 oz, which is a fifth of the full size, so add another $6 (rounding down), so without the hair oil and the polish, the box value is now $15. They might not be full-sized products, but the value is there. They're not charging you ten bucks and sending out a box worth five dollars when you calculate the retail value, and that's ignoring the hair oil (which would have lasted me four days on my thick, fine, shoulder-length hair if I hadn't decided to try it as a pre-shampoo treatment tonight. Verdict: OMG HAIR SO SOFT!) and nail polish (it might be tiny, but, again, their goal is to make you want to go back and *buy the full size*. It might do nothing for you color-wise, but that's the point of sampling: To see if it works for you. Now you know, and now you can walk on by that display in Ulta when it shows up this spring. But a tiny nail polish? I rarely use the same color twice in one month, so tiny nail polishes don't bother me one bit aside from my hands sometimes hating the caps). Now the cost: The box costs $10, but if you go in and give feedback on those items, you get ten points -- or the equivalent of a dollar -- back. So five feedback reviews (not the same as regular reviews, which you do *not* get points on) would equal five dollars (although you can only cash them out in hundred-point/ten-dollar increments), which would mean the box actually cost five dollars, or a buck a sample, since they basically refunded you half the cost of the box via those points. Points expire after a year, which means you can usually save six hundred points (or more, especially if you buy something or your monthly box gets screwed up) over the course of a year and get sixty dollars' worth of whatever you want in their store for free. Birchbox probably requires a rejiggering of how you perceive it as a subscription, and if you look at it as another ipsy, you're not going to be happy just like I wasn't happy with ipsy because I was looking for more of a Birchbox experience, and they kept sending me the same damned things (black liquid eyeliner, mascara, and red lipstick. I don't wear the first two, and I already had half a dozen of the last one that I rarely used even before I started getting a flood of them from ipsy) month after month. If you look at it as five bucks a month for five samples, you're going to be much, much happier. If you get an annual subscription, the per-box cost comes down to something ridiculous like under $3 a box after accounting for points because you get one month for free *and* 110 points, which makes it even easier to shrug and dismiss a bad month.
/emoticons/
