Like most thirteen year olds, Miss Frugal is a huge fan of Youtube.
So obviously, when one of her favourite Youtubers suggested that everyone write to beauty companies to try and get free samples of make up, she was all over it and had a list as long as her arm of companies who she wanted to email.
I agreed to help her but only if she narrowed the list down to ten (which took a lot of deliberating) and was OK with me sending the emails rather than the coming from her.
She readily agreed so we set about emailing her 10 chosen companies with a very polite (and honest) email explaining that Miss Frugal was starting to experiment a little with make up and would like to try each particular brand to see if it was suitable for her before we went out and bought anything. To be honest, I was quite pleased with our little email and I had my fingers crossed for her sake that even just a couple of the companies would send her something.
After we sent our emails we sat back and waited for the freebies to start rolling in (or at least Miss Frugal did).
We waited.
And we waited.
And then we waited some more.
We did get a few lovely emails back with some suggestions to visit local makeup counters but on the whole we were pretty much ignored and not one parcel arrived for her.
I’ve left it about six weeks now before writing this post to give any stragglers time to arrive but I think we have to accept that the myth that beauty companies will send out free samples just because you email them is factually incorrect.
Oh well!
** Just to be clear, we were completely honest and I explained that my teenage daughter was make-up mad and was wanting to try out some new brands. I explained that we’d be very grateful if they would send us some samples so we could try out their particular brand before we bought anything. Some websites I read beforehand suggested lying and making up a silly complaint in the hope that vouchers or samples would be sent as an apology but that’s completely wrong in my eyes – fair enough, send a cheeky email to see what you can get but don’t lie to get it! Oh, and the emails I sent weren’t from my blog email address as I thought that might influence the decision if they thought I was offering to do a review for them. **
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Image credit: Shutterstock,Dmitry Zimin
