How I Got £300 Worth of Christmas Perfume under £150….

I’ve already started my Christmas shopping this year and have been picking up little bits here and there for a while now, but this week I ticked off one of Miss Frugal’s bigger presents. And somehow, what started with me trying to remember the name of a perfume I liked ended with £300 worth of perfume costing me just £156.60. – even less when you take into account the extra Boots Advantage points and the cashback I got from Top Cash Back.

It was one of those times where every little offer seemed to stack together perfectly, and it reminded me why I always take a few extra minutes before buying something expensive to see what other savings I can find.

It started with a perfume I couldn’t remember the name of

When we were on holiday recently, I smelled a perfume in Duty Free that I absolutely loved and made a mental note that I might ask for it for Christmas.

Unfortunately, the mental note didn’t stretch as far as remembering what the perfume was actually called. 😂

So when Miss Frugal and I were out shopping at the weekend, I decided to see if I could find it again. All I could give the lovely lady on the perfume counter was the incredibly helpful description of an orange bottle and a fruity smell.

It definitely had her thinking for a minute, but somehow she managed to work out that I meant Lancôme Idôle Peach ’N Roses.

While I was showing Miss Frugal the one I’d been talking about, she spotted Lancôme La Vie Est Belle Very Cherry. She’d seen it all over TikTok and asked if she could smell it while we were there.

She loved it, and as she’s been wanting a new perfume for Christmas, I immediately thought that I’d found one of her bigger presents. Even better, both perfumes were already on offer with 20% off.

Then the offers started stacking up

I asked the lady how long the 20% offer was running for because perfume isn’t cheap and, when you’re buying something that costs that much anyway, 20% is a decent saving.

That’s when she pointed out that because both perfumes were Lancôme, they were also included in a 3-for-2 offer. That made it even better because I could get Miss Frugal’s perfume and two bottles of the Peach ’N Roses for me.

At that point I was definitely buying them. The only problem was that I’d managed to leave my purse at home.

As it turned out, forgetting my purse actually did me a favour because when I got home I went onto the Boots website to order them instead, and that’s when I started finding even more ways to save.

The first thing that popped up was an offer for 10% off if I signed up to Boots emails, which I did. I then checked the offers on my Boots Advantage Card and found an extra points offer for spending over £25, so I activated that too.

Just before I ordered, my TopCashback reminder popped up to tell me that I could get 6% cashback at Boots, so I went through TopCashback to place the order.

By the time I actually checked out, the original value of my order was £300 and I paid £156.60. I also got a free little Lancôme gift with my order and ended up with around £8 worth of Boots Advantage Card points, with the TopCashback still to come if it tracks as expected.

I’d gone into the shop thinking that 20% off was a great deal and I’d have happily bought the perfumes there if I’d remembered my purse. Going home and ordering online meant I had the chance to check everything properly and squeeze even more value out of the money I was already planning to spend.

None of the extra checks took more than a few minutes, but on a bigger purchase like this they really can make a difference.

Christmas has always been something I save for

I know that the amount I spend on Christmas presents might seem excessive to some people, but Christmas has always been something I’ve saved for throughout the year so I could make it as special as possible for the kids.

We didn’t have a big family when they were growing up, so there weren’t extra piles of presents coming from grandparents or lots of aunts and uncles. What they woke up to on Christmas morning was pretty much all from me and, if I’m completely honest, I always felt a bit bad that they didn’t have the big extended family that lots of their friends had.

I know they would never have minded having fewer presents than their friends and they certainly never made me feel like they expected loads, but I think buying lots at Christmas was one of the ways I overcompensated for that. I couldn’t give them the big family, but I could save throughout the year wherever I could and make sure that when they came downstairs on Christmas morning there were lots of presents waiting for them.

That’s definitely stayed with me now they’re grown up, although the way I shop for them has changed. I don’t feel like I need to buy loads of little filler presents just to make the pile under the tree look bigger anymore. We can be honest about the budget I have for their presents and they can tell me what they’d genuinely like, which means the money goes on things I know they’ll love rather than things they’ll have forgotten about by the end of Boxing Day.

Having grown-up children makes Christmas shopping much easier

Miss Frugal’s Very Cherry is obviously going away for Christmas, so that’s a good chunk of her present budget sorted with something I know she really wants.

Then there’s my Peach ’N Roses.

I’ve actually ‘sold’ one of the bottles back to the kids. They’ve paid me £25 each for it and they’ve put it away to give me for Christmas. They get to give me something they know I genuinely want, I get the perfume I fell in love with on holiday and nobody has to wander around the shops in December trying to work out what on earth to buy me.

Which leaves the third bottle, the one that was effectively free thanks to the 3-for-2 deal.

I think I’m going to be a bit cheeky and just use that one myself now. 😁

So once I take the £50 the kids have paid me, the £8-ish of Boots Advantage Card points that I know I’ll use on other Christmas shopping and the roughly £9.40 I’m expecting from TopCashback into account, my actual cost comes down to around £89.20.

And this is the bit that makes me ridiculously happy with the deal. For that £89.20, I’ve got Miss Frugal’s Very Cherry, which is £108 at full price, and I’ve got my Peach ’N Roses to start using now, which is £96 at full price. Even when I first spotted it in Duty Free it was £90, so I’ve effectively paid less for both bottles together than I would have paid for my bottle alone at the airport.

The kids have also got another bottle of Peach ’N Roses tucked away to give me for Christmas, which they’ve paid me £50 for, and there was the free Lancôme gift on top.

That’s the kind of saving I love because I haven’t bought things just because they were cheap. They’re perfumes we genuinely wanted and would have been buying anyway — I just managed to make the money stretch considerably further.

Saving all year means I can buy Christmas presents when I see them

We save for Christmas throughout the year using Plum, so I didn’t need to find an unexpected £156.60 from this month’s budget to take advantage of the offer.

The money was already sitting there in our Christmas savings, so when I got home and realised just how good the deal was, it was simply a case of transferring the money out of Plum and paying for the order.

For me, that’s one of the biggest advantages of saving for Christmas throughout the year. It’s obviously lovely having a pot of money ready for Christmas, but it’s just as useful before December because it means I can buy things when I see them at a genuinely good price.

If something one of the kids really wants is on a brilliant offer in September, I can buy it in September rather than hoping the same deal comes around again when Christmas is closer.

I don’t buy things just because they’re on offer

I think this is an important part of the story because £156.60 is still a lot of money to spend on perfume and I wouldn’t have spent that just because Boots happened to have some brilliant offers running.

These were things we genuinely wanted. Miss Frugal had already been wanting a new perfume for Christmas, I’d already decided I wanted Peach ’N Roses after smelling it on holiday and the kids would have been buying me a Christmas present anyway.

The offers just meant that the money we were already planning to spend went much further.

That’s pretty much how I try to approach spending these days. I’m happy to spend money on the things that matter to us, but I also want to get as much as I possibly can for that money. Sometimes that’s buying something pre-loved, sometimes it’s waiting for a sale and sometimes, like this time, it’s spending an extra few minutes checking discount codes, loyalty offers and cashback before I pay.

And considering this whole thing started with me walking up to a perfume counter and basically saying “It was orange and smelled fruity”, I think it worked out rather well. 😁

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