We Sell ‘Imperfect’ Makeup at a Discount. The Beauty Industry Thinks We’re Insane.
What happens to the lip balm that poured slightly too full? In most beauty brands, it goes straight in the bin. Here’s what we do instead.
The Dirty Secret Behind Perfect Packaging
The beauty industry has a waste problem that it almost never talks about. Not the packaging waste (though that’s also a crisis, and one we’ve tackled). We’re talking about the production waste: the products that get made perfectly but don’t look perfect enough to sell.
A lip balm that poured a millimetre too high. A blush stick with a slight smudge on the paper tube. A highlighter with an uneven surface from the mould. In most cosmetics brands, clean, conventional, indie, mass-market, all of them, these products get thrown away. The formula is identical. The ingredients are identical. They work exactly the same. They’re just not photogenic enough for an Instagram flat lay.
So they go in the bin. Thousands of them, every year, across the industry. Good product, made from good ingredients, with real environmental cost, landfilled because the top wasn’t flush.
We think that’s insane. So we don’t do it.
Introducing: The Imperfects
A few years ago, we started doing something that apparently makes us radical in this industry: we sell our cosmetically imperfect products at a discount instead of throwing them away.
Our Imperfects are full-size products. Same formula. Same certified organic ingredients. Same cocoa butter, mango butter, candelilla wax, organic oils. Same vegan, cruelty-free, plastic-free production. The only difference is a minor aesthetic flaw, a slight over-pour, a smudge on the label, an uneven top. Things that make zero difference to how the product performs on your lips, cheeks, or lids.
They go into our Imperfects collection at a reduced price. Customers love them. We love them. The planet loves them. The only people who seem confused by this are people who have spent too long in an industry where how something looks on a shelf matters more than whether anything useful came out of making it.
Why Does the Rest of the Industry Not Do This?
Honestly? A few reasons, and none of them are particularly flattering to the industry.
First: brand image. The beauty industry is obsessed with perfection, aesthetically, visually, aspirationally. Selling an ‘imperfect’ product feels, to many brands, like admitting fallibility. And fallibility is not exactly the vibe when you’re charging £45 for a blush.
Second: the economics of waste are often invisible. When a product gets thrown away in a factory, that cost gets absorbed into overheads and passed on to the consumer in pricing. Nobody has to account for it publicly. Nobody has to justify it. It just… disappears.
Third: most brands simply don’t have the infrastructure for it. Running a separate imperfects category requires a different kind of quality control system, a different kind of packaging workflow, and a willingness to be publicly transparent about the fact that manufacturing is not, and has never been, a perfectly precise art.
We’re a small batch brand made by a small team. That means we actually know every product that leaves this operation. And we’re not willing to throw any of them away.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t just about us, and it’s not just about lip balms.
The fashion industry has been grappling with deadstock for years, the mountains of perfectly good fabric and finished product that gets destroyed to protect brand value and maintain artificial scarcity. Beauty has the same problem, it just has fewer people shouting about it.
We are a 10-year-old brand built on a philosophy that waste is not acceptable, and that ‘imperfect’ is not a dirty word. Our packaging is compostable. Our shipping is plastic-free. We work with a zero-waste manufacturer. And when something comes out of production with a smudge on the tube, we sell it to someone who will actually use it rather than bury it in a landfill.
We know we’re a small brand. We know our Imperfects collection is not going to single-handedly fix the beauty industry’s relationship with waste. But we also believe that businesses, especially small ones, demonstrate values through the unglamorous decisions. Not just the branding. Not just the about page. The actual operational choices that nobody ever sees unless you go looking.
How to Shop the Imperfects
Head to the Imperfects section of our website. You’ll find tinted lip balms, blush sticks, highlighters and more, all at a reduced price, all with the same formulas you know and love, all with the only flaw being that they didn’t emerge from production looking like a product photograph.
Which, if you think about it, makes them the most honest products we sell.