Most beauty subscription boxes are heavy on samples, and designed to expose you to as many brands as possible. Beauty Heroes takes a very different approach, and the company picks one brand to highlight each month. You’ll receive a selection of full-size and deluxe samples, so you can try the best products each line has to offer. If you’re already familiar with the most popular clean beauty brands, this box will introduce you to up-and-coming brands you might not know about.
In the January Beauty Heroes box, I received a Night Essence serum, a Night Lip Serum, and a Vita Rich Créme moisturizer. My favorite item is the Night Lip Serum, because you can see the results right away, and you can use it as an intensive repair for your lips whenever they need a pick-me-up. This month’s FitGlow box includes a selection of products that have a place in an already solid skincare routine.
What We Like About Beauty Heroes
Each Discovery box from Beauty Heroes comes in a white cardboard box with the company logo as a sticker.
Each box comes with some informational cards about the products and about Beauty Heroes. They also sent a pocket guide explaining the Beauty Heroes standards for clean beauty, and all the ingredients they suggest avoiding. The company has a list of almost 2,000 ingredients to avoid, based on the ingredients banned in the US, the European Union, China, and Japan.
This box comes with three FitGlow products: one Hero item and two Sidekicks. One of the Sidekicks is a full-sized product and the other is a deluxe sample size.
Beauty Heroes chooses one Hero product each month, and all other products are called Sidekicks, even if they’re full-sized. All the products are chosen with care, and they often fit together into a routine. Other subscription boxes might include products that don’t necessarily work together. All Beauty Heroes products are designed to be used together, since they’re from the same brand.
Beauty Heroes uses recyclable packaging for all their online orders, which is a plus. They also strive to offset the waste generated by their store. They work with rePurpose Global to remove a pound of plastic from the environment for every online order. The company also plants a tree through One Tree Planted for every order.
If you sign up for a longer subscription for Beauty Heroes, you get significant discounts on each box. Most other subscription boxes offer small discounts of a dollar or two per month, with maybe $20 or so of savings over a full year. With Beauty Heroes, you can save $13 per box if you sign up for a 3 month subscription. If you commit to an annual subscription, your boxes will be $19 cheaper per month than the usual price. They give you a real incentive to sign up for a longer period of time.
Beauty Heroes doesn’t offer customization, but they do let you create a kind of profile with their customer service department. You can email letting them know about any allergies you have or any product types you hate, and they’ll notify you ahead of time when there’s a box coming up that you should skip. That’s a unique kind of personalized customer service.
What We Don’t Like About Beauty Heroes
Beauty Heroes’ central concept might turn some potential customers off: they only highlight one brand per month. If you’re drawn to subscription boxes because of the variety, this isn’t the box for you.
On a similar note, you won’t get tons of products in your Discovery box. The ones you do get will be carefully chosen and worth over $100, but you won’t have as many items to try out as you might get from other boxes.
This subscription box is one of the more expensive options out there, with a maximum price of $58.99 per box. This isn’t the best monthly box if you’re looking for something on a budget.
Beauty Heroes doesn’t offer the option to skip a shipment, unlike a lot of other subscription boxes. Instead, you’ll have to email their customer service department and let them know about your sensitivities and preferences. That means you can’t just skip a box whenever you want without unsubscribing, though.
Featured Brand: FitGlow Beauty
FitGlow Beauty is a plant-based beauty brand developed by a fitness expert with sensitive skin. She wanted to develop products without harsh ingredients that would irritate her skin. The brand’s products all exclude wax, silicone, and heavy oils. Because of that, they feel very light on your skin.
Many FitGlow products, including Night Essence and Vita Rich Créme, contain the ingredient bakuchiol, which is a legume. Bakuchiol is gaining popularity in clean beauty skincare products as an alternative to retinol. Retinol is a hugely popular skincare ingredient too, but it can have some harsh side effects like skin peeling and irritation. It can also pose a problem for vegans, because some retinol products use animal-derived retinol.
Bakuchiol is a natural ingredient that’s gentler on the skin but has some of the same benefits as retinol. It increases collagen production, which reduces fine lines and wrinkles.
Fitglow Beauty Night Essence
This is the Hero product for the month. It’s a night serum designed to restore your skin overnight as you sleep. It hydrates your skin while it provides nourishing ingredients. Hydrated skin will absorb the active ingredients more easily.
According to FitGlow, this is designed for use with another serum and facial oil to complete your routine.
Organic aloe vera and hyaluronic acid moisturize the skin, then niacinamide and kojic acid sink in to lighten hyperpigmentation and dark spots on your face. These ingredients lighten age spots and acne scars to even out your complexion. Bakuchiol keeps the skin producing collagen, so you can wake up looking refreshed.
The nozzle on this product makes it easy to get an even coat on your face, and the instructions recommend patting it to help it absorb into your skin. The spray feels very light on your skin, but it’s still refreshing.
There’s a Day Essence counterpart to this, and it also contains kojic acid and aloe.
The packaging for this product is kind of odd. The outer layer is reusable, and you can recycle the inner bottle layer. When you order a refill bottle, you’ll save $10 on the product. It’s a nice idea, but the outer layer is pretty bulky, and I wonder if it really saves that much plastic.
Fitglow Beauty Vita Rich Créme
This face cream is intended for day use, unlike the other two products in this box, and it has a light-colored box instead of a brown one. This is a deluxe sample size, and it’s designed to keep skin hydrated for longer.
According to the product copy, it “hydrates the deepest dermal layers to protect skin from trans epidermal water loss.” The cream uses imperata cylindrica root extract and multi-size hyaluronic acids to keep moisture in your skin. It also has acerola cherry extract, to brighten the skin, and bakuchiol, to promote collagen production.
This product is a great way to try out bakuchiol, because it’s full of other ingredients to maximize the positive effects on your skin.
It’s a very lightweight cream, and it doesn’t feel greasy on my skin at all. It works well as a light day moisturizer, but if your skin tends to be very dry, this might not be hydrating enough. I used this twice throughout the day instead of once, and it worked out for my slightly dry skin.
This moisturizer has a nice fruity scent that’s almost candy-like. It might be the raspberry and cherry extract, but either way, I loved the scent.
Fitglow Beauty Night Lip Serum
This lip serum is designed for overnight use, so you wake up with moisturized lips ready to face the day. It’s also 98% organic!
There are lots of hydrating, nourishing ingredients here. Shea butter and sunflower seed oil keep your lips hydrated. Plant collagen, organic plump (made from lecithin and yeast extract) and beet extract all promote fullness.
This is a pretty heavy lip serum, thanks to all the moisturizing oils. I love the idea of an overnight lip serum. I didn’t notice a huge difference the first night I tried it, but after using it a few nights in a row, my lips looked and felt much better. It’s easy to start neglecting your lips when they’re usually covered by a mask, so I loved getting to pamper them with this serum.
I noticed some reviews on the Beauty Heroes website that mentioned using this during the day to deal with chronically dry lips. This is a really nourishing formula, so I can imagine it being useful for that purpose.
FitGlow also makes a version of this with pigment added, known as Lip Color Serum. I love that FitGlow has such straightforward names.
Final Thoughts
Beauty Heroes is a subscription service devoted to clean beauty and sustainability. Each month, they feature a different beauty brand with clean, natural ingredients. This month’s brand is focused on simple, plant-based beauty with ingredients that really work.
This subscription box has a different approach from a lot of other beauty boxes. I think it’s the perfect solution if you want to try new beauty items but hate getting lots of little samples. Beauty Heroes will send you only a few, carefully curated items, and the samples are all deluxe sized. With this subscription, you’ll get the chance to really learn about brands and try their best products.
