all the budget skincare dupes i found this month

i'm in my cheap bitch era/never paying Sephora prices again

My day job as beauty editor is a teenage (and, honestly, middle-aged) girl’s dream. I receive an obnoxious amount of free skincare products, which I test and write about several times a week. Despite the evil inherent in any promotion of capitalism, this is a fairly amazing way to make a living. If you’ve read my book, you know it is certainly a better way to make a living that nearly all ways I’ve earned money in all my almost 52 years. I love this job.

I test about 20 items a week, from legacy luxury brands to boutique lines that cost more than my first car, along with any new “seems great!” bullshit getting pushed on Instagram and TikTok. Most of it frankly sucks, which makes me happy — when I come across a $200 serum that actually does what it says it will, my heart sinks. I know I can’t in good conscience recommend anyone lay down cash for something so frivolous (get thee extra funds to a Roth IRA, my dudes!), and I equally can’t justify an ongoing expenditure like this for myself. It’s good to know what works and what doesn’t for my job, but otherwise it’s just rich people shit, a $600 cream the equivalent of Succession’s deep-fried songbird. Even if it’s great, it’s kind of shameful and just makes me feel gross.

me, testing La Mer.

To remedy this, I’ve been diving deep into skincare dupes, trawling hundreds of Reddit threads, trying to uncover the secret, in-the-know stuff that’s, in some cases, identical to the pricey versions just with less posh-packaging and without a slick marketing campaign. From a $15 vitamin C serum that rivals Skinceuticals’ to an almost exact replica of Fresh’s iconic Body Polish, here’s what I’ve come up with so far.