It’s the first week of October and Selfridges has already sold out of a £250 box of 40 beauty products. Christmas is 81 days away. So, are beauty advent calendars worth it? My answer is yes. You get full size products, they work out cheaper than buying everything individually, they make great gifts, and the whole experience is fun if you love beauty and skincare.
I should be honest, though. I’ve never actually bought one. This is the year I’d like to though, which is why I wanted a way of working out which ones earn their price.
Woman & Home counted 78 beauty calendars on the UK market this year (opens in new tab), with prices starting at £35 and climbing past £600. They can’t all be good value. Here’s the method I’m using to sort them, and it works on any calendar in any year. All prices were checked on 5 October 2026.
Why the ‘worth’ figure is the wrong place to start
Every calendar comes with two numbers. One is the price. The other is the ‘worth’, and it’s always much bigger. Cult Beauty’s Special Edition (opens in new tab) costs £245 and says it’s worth over £1,100, giving you a saving of at least £855. Sephora’s Favorites calendar (opens in new tab) is £235 against a claimed value of £1,006, which works out as a 77% saving.
But a saving on what? That ‘worth’ figure is the retailer’s own total of what every product would cost at full price. Nobody was ever going to walk into a shop and buy all 40 of those products. If half of them are not right for your skin or your taste in perfume, then the real saving is only on the half you’ll use. The big number tells you what the box would cost to fill at the till. What it’s worth to you is a different sum, and that’s the beauty advent calendar value I care about. So I start somewhere else.
Step 1: count the advent calendar full size products
Minis are lovely for trying things. They’re also how a calendar gets to 25 doors cheaply. So count. Look for the full-size count, which most retailers now publish. Sephora’s has 27 out of 40. Cult Beauty Advent Calendar 2026 Special Edition has 17 out of 38. Boots’ No7 25 Days of Beauty (opens in new tab), at £65, has 8 out of 24.
Then read the small print on what counts. Charlotte Tilbury’s Hollywood Beauty Wonderland calendar (opens in new tab) (£170) holds 15 items, and the brand’s own page describes four of them as “full-size icons”.
Hello! magazine’s count is six, because it includes the make-up bag and the gua sha tool. Both counts are technically right, and that’s the problem. A make-up bag isn’t a lipstick.
Step 2: divide the price by the number of products
This is the quickest sum of the lot. Price divided by products gives you the cost of each door. Sephora’s £235 across 40 items is £5.88 each, and Cult Beauty’s Special Edition comes to £6.45. Space NK’s £275 one with 35 items is £7.85 each and Charlotte Tilbury’s works out at £11.33. The No7 one? £2.60 a door.
Now ask one question of that number: would you pay it for the smallest thing in the box? £5.88 for a single sheet mask is steep, but £5.88 for a Makeup by Mario eyeshadow palette is a bargain. Both are in the Sephora calendar, so it averages out well. If the cheapest door and the dearest door are both things you’d happily pay the average for, you’re in good shape.
Step 3: do the ‘would I buy it anyway’ sum
This is the step that matters most. Retailers publish the full contents list weeks before December, so there’s no need to buy blind. Go down it. Tick only the products you already use or have wanted to try. Add up what those would cost you at normal prices.
Now compare. Say you tick six products and they’d cost £150 between them. A £245 calendar means you’re paying £95 for everything else in the box. That might be fine. Thirty-odd extras for £95 is a lot of presents sorted! But if your ticked total is £60, you’re buying a very expensive cardboard box.
The four I’d like this year are on my list for exactly this reason. Cult Beauty’s Special Edition, Sephora’s Favorites, Space NK and Charlotte Tilbury’s Hollywood Beauty Wonderland all contain products I already use or have wanted to try.
Sephora Favorites
There are four products in the Sephora calendar that immediately caught my eye:
- Medicube Collagen Jelly Cream 50ml
- Medik8 Niacinamide Peptides 30ml
- MERIT Beauty Flush Balm Cream Blush in Fox, 9g
- RARE BEAUTY Brow Harmony Flexible Lifting Eyebrow Gel, 4.5g
That’s already a pretty good start for me. These aren’t random products I’ve never heard of; they’re things I’d genuinely be interested in using.
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I already own quite a lot of Charlotte Tilbury, but that’s partly the point. They’re daily staples for me and products I regularly run out of, so receiving them in an advent calendar wouldn’t leave me wondering what on earth to do with another bright blue eyeliner.
There are also a couple I’d particularly like to try:
- Unreal Blush Healthy Glow Stick
- Big Lip Plumpgasm in Nudegasm Diamonds
Space NK
Space NK’s calendar is £275 and contains 35 products (opens in new tab), including 26 full-size favourites. It also says there are no repeated products if you bought the calendar last year, which is a useful detail if you’re tempted to buy it again.
The products that caught my eye are:
- Lisa Eldridge Kitten Flick Liquid Eyeliner in Black
- Fenty Beauty Gloss Bomb Lip Gloss in Fu$$y
- Skin Rocks The Cleansing Balm
Cult Beauty Special Edition
Cult Beauty’s Special Edition has four products I’d genuinely be happy to receive:
- PATRICK TA Major Headlines Double-Take Cream + Powder Blush Duo in She’s Giving
- Paula’s Choice Clinical Pro Retinaldehyde Dual-Retinoid Treatment
- By Terry Brightening CC Serum in Sunny Flash
- Maria Nila Soothing Scalp Serum
This is where the calculation starts to become much more useful than the retailer’s headline ‘worth’. I can look at those products and ask myself a much simpler question: would I actually buy these?
For me, the answer to several of them is yes.
Step 4: decide what happens to the rest
No calendar has a perfect hit rate. I haven’t had a drawer of unwanted minis to deal with yet. If I did, I’d gift them. A full-size hand cream or a sealed perfume sample is a perfectly good stocking filler, and it means the ‘everything else’ part of the sum in step 3 isn’t money wasted. Be realistic about it, though. Opened products can’t really be passed on, and a foundation in the wrong shade isn’t a present for anyone. Count those as a loss.
Step 5: check the saving is a saving
Some calendars don’t claim one at all. Woman & Home’s 2026 list has Dior’s Le 30 Montaigne calendar (opens in new tab) at £604 with a stated worth of £604. You’re paying for the box and the brand. That’s fine if it’s what you want, but it isn’t a deal.
Others come with conditions. M&S’s calendar is £75 for 25 products (opens in new tab), ten of them full size, with a claimed worth of £460. It goes on general sale on 13 October, with early access for Sparks members in the first week of the month. In past years you could only buy it alongside a minimum spend in store. If there is one, add it to the price before you compare.
And prices have crept up. Woman & Home’s digital beauty editor Aleesha Badkar found that the Selfridges calendar cost £95 in 2015 and £250 in 2025. The boxes have got bigger too. So has the commitment.
The four calendars I’m tempted by, on paper
Here’s how my shortlist looks once the sums are done.
Sephora Favorites, £235. 40 products, 27 full size, claimed worth £1,025. £5.88 a product. Dispatched by 30 October.
Cult Beauty Special Edition, £245. 38 products, 17 full size by Cult Beauty’s count, claimed worth £1,185. £6.45 a product.
Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Beauty Wonderland, £170. 15 items behind 12 drawers, four full size plus two accessories, claimed worth £325.50. £11.33 an item.
Space NK beauty advent calendar £275. 35 items with 26 full-size favourites with no repeated products if you purchased one last year.
Sephora’s comes out strongest of the four by this method, with the lowest cost per product and the most full sizes. Space NK and Cult Beauty’s Special Edition is close behind. Cult Beauty swaps a couple of full sizes for extra fragrance, so it’ll suit perfume lovers more than the Signature Edition will. Charlotte Tilbury’s is the weakest on paper. Its claimed worth is less than double its price, where the other two claim more than four times theirs. Paper isn’t everything, though. If you wear Pillow Talk every day, a box of it is worth more to you than 40 products from brands you’ve never tried. That’s the reason to do the maths yourself and ignore the sticker.
So, are beauty advent calendars worth it in 2026?
For me, yes. With the sums done first. If you want the best value beauty advent calendar UK shops are selling this year, the cheapest per product among the ones in this article is No7’s £65 calendar, and the most full sizes for the money are at Sephora. Neither of those facts matters if you don’t like what’s inside.
Buying one as a gift? Run step 3 for them, not for you. A calendar full of products they already use beats a bigger number on the box. Don’t hang about, either. Selfridges and Harvey Nichols were both showing as sold out on Woman & Home’s list by 2 October, and the calendars people talk about rarely make it to December. One last sum, and it’s the only one no retailer has put a price on.
There are 24 mornings before Christmas. If opening a small drawer before work makes each of them a bit better, that counts for something too.
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