Marketing and public relations companies often send free products to social media influencers as part of their strategies to boost brand awareness and encourage curated content that reaches broad audiences.
However, those PR promos can also promote excess consumerism and a lot of waste, which can be disturbing to watch.
One social media user shared photos to r/Anticonsumption of an influencer's massive beauty product collection, which goes far beyond what any one person could ever use.
"I watch her sometimes, but her spending hours and hours trying to sort out the products she gets from PR seems kind of weirdly sad and overwhelming," the original poster wrote. "I can't imagine having to manage this much stuff, and you know more is coming."
The influencer Xuân-Mai Phạm (@maiphammy) posts videos about beauty transformations and doing her hair, nails, lashes, and makeup.
According to her YouTube bio, her lifestyle includes "blowing all my money on glow-up challenges."
Many trending influencers have a way of normalizing overspending and overconsumption in the pursuit of happiness and gaining fans. However, beauty products are notorious for having plastic packaging that isn't recycled and ends up in landfills or polluting our oceans.
A more sustainable approach to looking your best involves rejecting wasteful makeup promos and choosing clean beauty brands that prioritize your skin's natural health and the planet.
With just a bit of mindfulness and caring about more than just getting free stuff, you can ditch single-use beauty products and recycle empty containers as part of your beauty routine. Retailers like Ulta and Sephora even have partnerships with Pact Collective to make recycling easy.
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Members of the r/Anticonsumption community were appalled by photos of the influencer's PR haul and wondered how much of those beauty products she actually used.
One Reddit user wrote in the comment section, "I would get bystander anxiety watching IG haul videos."
"How can you really review something if you only use it once?" another Redditor wondered.
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