Makeup

Your local charity shop, homeless shelter or women’s refuges

Your local charity shops may accept various beauty donations. If your products are sealed and unused, charity shops often gladly welcome these donations. It’s always best to call ahead to check they will accept them.

However, if your donations have been lightly used, homeless shelters or women’s refuges will likely take these donations with open arms. This is a simple and easy option for donating your beauty products – not to mention, also helpful to the local community and those in desperate need.

Toiletries Amnesty

Toiletries Amnesty are a nationwide movement with a total of 75 donation drop off points across the whole of the UK, with additional locations in Africa and Trinidad. This company further donates the products they attain to those in need, including refugees, food banks and mental health services. Your donations truly do make a difference! To find your nearest drop-off point, visit their website here.

The Hygiene Bank

The Hygiene Bank are an incredible company, set up by a group of people who are also currently tackling the poverty and hygiene accessibility crisis across the UK. All every day necessities are welcomed, from gifted deodorants, to unused makeup items, to hair care products. You can find your local donation point by visiting their website here.

Recycling Makeup Items

TerraCycle® and Maybelline have partnered to create a free recycling programme for all brands of empty makeup packaging. Simply pay a visit to one of the 1,000 Tesco, Superdrug, Boots or Sainsbury's stores participating in the scheme to drop off your make-up from any brand. To find your nearest drop off point click here.

What You Can Recycle:

- Compacts and palettes, such as eyeshadows, powders & blushers.
- Mascaras including the plastic tube and wand.
- Eyeliners such as retractable plastic liners or liquid eye liners.
- Lip products such as plastic lip gloss tubes or bullet lipstick tubes.
- Plastic tubes and bottles such as foundation or concealer tubes.
- Other make-up packaging such as caps, pumps or trigger sprays.

Unfortunately, they can’t accept make-up brushes or nail polish at this time.

Boots

Launching their genius new Scan2Recycle app, Boots are encouraging customers to track not only how many products they've recycled, but also discover what their empties are transformed into once they're finished with them.

Simply pop down to your local Boots with your finished health, beauty and wellness products (whether they're stocked in Boots or not), and drop them off at the recycle stations in store.

What You Can't Recycle:

For health and safety reasons, Boots cannot accept the following items: aerosol cans, perfume bottles, nail polish bottles, hair dyes, brow and eyelash tints, safety razors and razor blades, disposable razors and razor heads, used PPE (disposable masks, gloves and visors), medicine, vitamins and supplements blister packs and foils; any electrical items such as hairdryers and straighteners and any medical devices, electrical or not.

Cloud Nine

The first ever hair straightener recycling scheme is Cloud Nine. Committed to saving 1.5 million straighteners from going to landfill by 2022 (they've already recycled 50,000), Cloud Nine's Iron Recycling Service is free and seriously easy to use. Simply visit Cloud Nine Hair to download a free pre-paid postage label, then place your old straighteners in a secure package and drop it off at your nearest post office.

The Body Shop

The Body Shop has a Return, Recycle, Repeat scheme, which is now available in all UK stores with an aim to be in 800 stores across 14 countries by the end of 2022.

Make sure your beauty packaging, bottles, pipettes, pumps, mascaras and lip glosses are as empty as possible, clean and dry. Bring them into store and pop them into one of their Return, Recycle, Repeat bins. They also accept packaging from other brands. They will make sure the items are recycled or repurposed and given another life through their UK partners Scan2Recycle, MYGroup and ReWorked.

M·A·C

M·A·C accepts returns of its primary packaging through the Back to M·A·C Program. By returning six M·A·C primary packaging containers to a M·A·C counter, you will receive a free M·A·C lipstick of your choice (excludes Viva Glam Lipstick and Limited Edition Lipstick) as a thank you. To find your nearest store click here.

Louella Belle

Louella Belle is a distributor of professional hand, nail and foot care products, has launched RecycLeBelle, a recycling scheme for old product bottles. Not only can you return their brand, but you can return polish bottles from any brand and can include gel bottles, nail polish bottles and cuticle oil bottles.

Nail product packaging is often composed of a variety of types of material, this makes recycling them incredibly difficult. Most public local recycling programmes will not accept varnish/gel bottles at present.

Send your recycling items back to the company using their returns labels for any empty bottles (a small amount of residue is acceptable). The bottles will be collected by a recycling company and sorted into different materials which can then be recycled and reused in the best possible way.

You can request a returns label from their Customer Care Team by contacting them over the phone 0333 000 2100 or by email at info@louellabelle.co.uk.

You will need to provide their own packaging, attach the return label, and pop in the post at your local DPD drop off.