This is the beauty hack you weren’t expecting.
A former Sephora employee revealed the things she would not do as a customer of the beauty store — and some are more disgusting than you’d think.
In a now-viral TikTok clip with over 727,000 views, beauty guru Sarah Palmyra shared her valuable insight as an ex-employee.
“I will never use any of the makeup remover or the makeup removing cotton rounds on my actual face when I’m in the store,” the influencer, who boasts over 858,000 TikTok followers, said in the video. “My job was to refill the makeup remover and add more cotton rounds when we would close and never once did we actually clean the container the cotton rounds went in or sanitize the container the makeup remover went in.”
Citing there was “no time” for disinfecting the stations found in the store’s sprawling aisles, she advised her viewers to “think of the bacteria” growing and maybe rethink using the remover on their faces.
“I will no longer buy a foundation as soon as I’ve been color matched in-store without going outside first and checking that the match actually works in natural light,” she continued, blaming the fluorescent lighting.
She also said she wouldn’t buy any of the “minis” — sample-sized products found by the cash registers.
“These are really cute for the aesthetic but they’re terrible value and usually not worth the money,” she added.
Palmyra’s viewers didn’t seem shocked by her revelations, and some even disagreed, saying they swear by the mini products.
“The mini mascaras usually last almost as long as the normal sized ones…you waste so much dried mascara in the big ones!” wrote one Sephora regular.
“I buy the minis that I can easily refill for travel, and then I just refill them with my full-size products,” another said, dishing her easy travel tip.
“Yea the foundation one I realized the first time I purchased a foundation. Always ask for 3 samples. One u think matches, one lighter, one darker,” one person commented.
“Do people use that on their face??” another asked of the makeup remover. “I have used it on my hands after swatching but that’s it.”
Meanwhile, another former employee else chimed in, saying they’d never use the “testers” on their face after seeing “the things people did.”
Viewers were so eager to hear more from Palmyra that she created a follow-up video with 1.9 million views, dishing more of the store’s best-kept hacks for a better shopping experience.
She always asks for pre-made samples from behind the counter, in-store product demos and won’t “snub” the in-house Sephora Collection, which has affordable dupes for high-end products.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
