Beauty,  Makeup,  Subscription Boxes,  Target Beauty Box

Analysis of a Beauty Box: Target

After getting a bunch of really kind and supportive responses for my last Beauty Box Analysis post, I’m super excited to write a second one!! This time I’m going to be covering the Target Beauty Box 🙂

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First off, of course, if you haven’t already checked out my Target Beauty Box reviews, you can do so here!

In my Sephora post, I had been subscribed to the box for a year, so I had 12 boxes’ worth of products to analyze and compare. I only started getting Target boxes in October of 2016 (and missed a month back in February for my no buy) but it evens out thanks to Target releasing multiple boxes every so often…so I also have 12 boxes’ worth of things to compare in this post!!

Product Type

Just like with Sephora, I’ll start out by looking at the types of products received in Target boxes. While Sephora had a very large number of makeup products in their boxes, I was inclined to think that Target has way less makeup and more of other things.

Over the course of 12 boxes, I received a total of 84 items:

  • 14 makeup products
  • 13 hair products
  • 26 skincare products
  • 4 body products
  • 17 shower products
  • and 10 “other” – these include a small makeup bag, 2 toothpastes, 2 nail polishes, 2 facial sunscreens, a razor, a fragrance, and a deodorant

You’ll notice that the categories are slightly different for Target than they were for Sephora – for Target, I took away the “Fragrance” category and added in “Body” and “Shower”. Since Target very rarely sends out fragrances it didn’t make sense to keep that one, and they tend to send out a lot more lotions, shampoos, and other assorted bath products so I changed it up a bit. For the purposes of categorizing, I defined “Shower” products as any shampoo, conditioner, or body products used IN the shower or bath… so a lotion would be a “body” product but an in-shower lotion would be “shower”. Similarly, while a shampoo is technically a hair product, because it’s meant to be used in the shower, I counted it as a “shower” product.

Here’s the chart of all the product types:

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It’s very clear here that there’s not nearly as many makeup products in this box as Sephora – but I expected that. There’s nearly double the number of skincare items at 26 as there are makeup products, but looking at the graph I think it actually looks pretty evenly split up. Even the biggest category of skincare is only at 31%, which isn’t even a third of the items received. I also like the large number of things in the “other” category – it’s always fun to receive those different things.

I also wanted to break it down a bit further so I took a look at each of the makeup categories. It was a pretty nice split here – out of 14 makeup items, I had 6 lip products and 4 each for eyes and face:

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Since we saw that the majority of items in this box are skincare, I decided to take a look at those as well. From the 26 skincare items, I had:

  • 5 cleansers
  • 6 masks
  • 10 moisturizers
  • 4 removers – these were all makeup removing wipes
  • and 1 “other”, which was the Missha Time Revolution Essence

Here’s a chart showing all that:

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As you can see, the biggest number of items is definitely moisturizers. This came as no surprise to me, since I can clearly remember that box from January that contained three moisturizers in the same box lol. I think they do this because it’s very easy to throw a facial lotion in a box – it’s a good “works for everyone” item (even though in truth there is definitely a difference in moisturizers for dry vs. oily skin…!!). Regardless, I wasn’t surprised at this result.

Number of Products

Something unique to Target that I wanted to track was the number of products included in each box. While Sephora consistently promised 6 items in each box, Target varies each month (and I actually think the one for this month that I haven’t received yet includes 6…interesting). Here’s what I’ve gotten over the course of 12 boxes:

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As you can see, the number of items in each box is always 7-9. For some reason I was surprised by this – I thought I had remembered boxes where I got more or fewer items than that, but I guess I was just misremembering. Looking at the items received it could also be because sometimes I got more items that were single-use things, which can feel like you’re getting less than a product that might last a while. Regardless, I thought it was interesting!

Average Value

I was also curious to see what the average value of each Target box I received was. Obviously, since the items are coming from a store offering much lower priced items than Sephora does, the average value of these boxes are going to be much lower overall than Sephora boxes. But it’s no different than Sephora in that the values varied wildly over time:

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The average value across 12 boxes was $22.44. Each box ranges from $5-10, so that average is right around 3x the amount paid for the box – which is pretty good. One of the things I found interesting was that some of the lowest valued boxes from Sephora actually ended up being worth LESS than the higher valued Target boxes…!! Target’s highest value box was November 2016 at $37.29, and I received 3 Sephora boxes that had lower value than that. Pretty crazy if you consider that Sephora boxes are full of high-end, brand name products and Target is considered drugstore for makeup brands. Just something I found interesting 🙂

Like I also mentioned in the Sephora post, the monetary value of each box doesn’t necessarily affect its personal value. The April “Naturals” box was one of the lowest overall valued boxes at $13.68, but I loved pretty much every item in that box. Meanwhile, the May box was another one of my favorites, and it was valued at $30.24…the second highest overall. In my reviews now I’ve tried to look at the products inside on their own and in terms of their personal use to me before calculating the dollar amount – just because an item is of high value doesn’t mean it’s going to be something I actually like!

Other Interesting Tidbits

And that’s pretty much all of my findings from my Target box research! I probably won’t be able to do any more analysis posts like this for a while, since Target and Sephora were the only two boxes I received consistently enough to analyze, but we’ll see…maybe I’ll just have to go subscribe to a new one to collect some more data haha. I have been eyeing Boxycharm lately…

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post!! 🙂

until next time, <3 Kaela

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