Why We Built the Glou Beauty Resale Pricing Guide
- Karen L.
- 21 hours ago
- 2 min read
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“This” being the growing collection of beauty products I’d bought with good intentions, used with varying enthusiasm, and then… sort of emotionally ghosted.
Some were unopened. Some were swatched once and then betrayed by something better. Some were perfectly fine, just no longer relevant to my face, my hair, my life, or my mood. And every time I tried to declutter, I go through the same questions:
Is this wasteful to throw away?
Is this weird to give someone?
Would someone even want this?
The industry is very good at helping you acquire beauty. It is not very good at helping you exit it.
The real problem isn’t waste. It’s uncertainty.
Beauty resale is different.
It’s personal. It’s intimate. It expires. It goes on your face. It’s expensive. It’s emotional. It’s aspirational. It’s occasionally a bad decision made during a sale.
And none of that fits neatly into the systems we have for other categories. Clothes have resale norms. Electronics have depreciation curves. Furniture has Facebook Marketplace.
Beauty has… vibes.
So instead of pretending this is simple, we built tools that acknowledge that it isn’t.
People don’t hoard beauty products because they love clutter. They hoard because they don’t know what’s safe to pass on or how to price items to actually get rehomed. And maybe, you’ll get around to using it… next week. So the default becomes: do nothing.
Which is how perfectly usable products quietly expire in drawers until they cross the invisible line from “still fine” to “definitely trash.”
Our solution: A beauty resale pricing tool
The pricing tool is here to give you a starting point:
“If this product is still brand new and unopened, what is a reasonable upper limit for what it could be rehomed for?”
The calculator gives guidance for brand new, unopened, sealed products because that’s the one scenario where condition is consistent enough to standardize.
Once a product is opened, swatched, pumped, or used, things get messy (literally and figuratively):
Hygiene matters
Storage matters
Time matters
Context matters
And no formula can responsibly account for all of that, so include additional room for discounts for the factors that affect the efficacy of a product.
For used or swatched products, you will also need a touch of human judgment rather than just relying on an algorithm.
How this fits with Glou’s other tools
The order matters.
First: is it safe?
Second: is it appropriate to pass on?
Third: what’s a fair price?
Fourth: if it's expired, broken, or unshareable, dispose responsibly
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