Branded Beauty Review: Clearance Prices on High Street Makeup Brands

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Branded Beauty was selling a L'Oréal Color Riche lipstick at £0.99 against a £9.99 comparison price when we read its sale pages on 17 September 2026, and a Maybelline Baby Lips crayon at 49p against £2.99. Delivery is £2.99 by Royal Mail 48, free once a basket passes £25.

The shop is run by Branded Beauty Limited, a company registered at Companies House on 30 April 2013 under number 08509792 and trading from Unit 8 Trafalgar Business Centre on River Road in Barking. It stocks makeup, skincare, haircare, fragrance, nails, sun care and bath and body from names most people already own something by — L'Oréal, Maybelline, MAC, NYX, Revolution, Benefit, Clarins and Essie among them.

The prices come from what the stock is. Branded Beauty's own terms tell buyers that products "may have superficial and cosmetic markings" and that they accept "slight visual defects and/or clearance stickering" when they order. That is a clearance operation, stated plainly by the shop rather than discovered by a reviewer, and it is the whole explanation for a 99p L'Oréal lipstick. A reader expecting the boxed, shrink-wrapped item from a department store counter should know that before they click; a reader who only wants the contents of the tube has just found the cheapest route to it.

What 99p actually buys

Four prices from the sale pages on 17 September 2026 give the range. A L'Oréal Color Riche lipstick at £0.99 against £9.99, marked 90% off. A L'Oréal Infallible Sculpt contouring palette at £0.99 against £7.99, marked 88% off. A Maybelline Baby Lips colour balm crayon at 49p against £2.99, marked 84% off. And, at the shallower end, a L'Oréal Matte Resistance lipstick in shade 665 First Move at £5.99 against £12.99, marked 54% off.

Postage is the number that decides whether those are bargains. Standard delivery is £2.99 on Royal Mail 48 with a 2–4 working day window, so a single 99p lipstick posted on its own costs £3.98 and the delivery is four times the item. Free delivery starts at £25, which at 99p a piece is a basket of twenty-six things. Express delivery is £5.99 on Royal Mail 24, quoted at 1–3 working days, restricted to England, Wales and Scotland and not running at weekends or on bank holidays. The shop says it aims to dispatch by the next working day but will not promise it.

The comparison prices are worth a moment of the reader's own checking. The Chartered Trading Standards Institute's guidance for traders on pricing practices, updated online on 14 August 2025 to take in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, asks that a price comparison run for a period no longer than the higher price was actually charged, that a recommended retail price be labelled as an RRP rather than presented as a price the shop itself charged, and that an RRP "must not be false; it must not be created purely in order to present the appearance of a discount". It also says an "up to" claim should only be made where the top reduction applies to a significant proportion of the promotion. None of that is an accusation against this shop. It is the test any reader can apply in thirty seconds by opening the brand's own site in another tab, and on fast-moving cosmetics with a real recommended price behind them it is an easy test to run.

Clearance is not the same thing as counterfeit, and the difference is checkable

Deep discounts on branded cosmetics carry an obvious question, and there is now a good independent measure of it. Which? bought 34 cosmetic items from Amazon, eBay, TikTok Shop and Vinted in June 2025 and judged 23 of them — 67% — likely to be counterfeit: six out of six bought on Vinted, five of six on TikTok Shop, eight of eleven on eBay and four of eleven on Amazon. Rocio Concha, the group's director of policy and advocacy, called it "alarming that Which? was able to find such high volumes of what appeared to be potentially dangerous counterfeit cosmetics on popular online marketplaces".

That study was of third-party sellers on marketplaces, which is a different proposition from a named limited company selling from its own domain and its own warehouse. The legal position is different too. Under Article 6 of the cosmetics regulation as it applies in Great Britain, a distributor must check before putting a product on sale that the labelling required by Article 19 is present, that the information is in English, and that the date of minimum durability has not passed. If a distributor believes a product does not conform, it must not make it available until it does, and must withdraw or recall stock that has already gone out; where there is a safety risk it must tell the responsible person and the authorities. It must also keep storage and transport conditions such that the product still complies when it reaches the buyer.

Those duties sit on the shop, not the shopper. They are the reason a clearance retailer that has been filing accounts at the same Barking address since 2013 is a different animal from an anonymous listing, and they are also the reason the date on the box matters more here than it does on a full-price counter.

The date on the box is the number to check

Article 19 of the same regulation sets out what must appear on a cosmetic container in indelible, legible, visible lettering: the responsible person's name and address, the country of origin for imported goods, the nominal content by weight or volume except on packs under 5 grams or 5 millilitres, a batch number, the product's function, precautions for use and the full ingredients list in descending order of weight.

The durability rule is the one to apply to clearance stock, and it has a threshold. A product that keeps for more than 30 months carries no expiry date at all — instead it shows the open-jar symbol followed by the period after opening, in months or years, for which it stays safe. A product that keeps for 30 months or less must carry a date of minimum durability in month and year, or day, month and year. So a boxed foundation with no date anywhere on it is not necessarily a problem; it is a product with a shelf life over thirty months whose clock starts when the seal breaks. A mascara or a sunscreen bought at a deep discount is the case worth checking, because the shorter shelf life means a printed date and a distributor duty to have looked at it.

Behind all of it sits the Office for Product Safety and Standards. Its Submit Cosmetic Product Notification service launched in December 2020 after Great Britain left the EU system, and every product placed on the GB market has to be notified through a UK-based responsible person. OPSS published the numbers on 17 July 2026, in response to a parliamentary inquiry: as at 28 May 2026 there had been 861,686 notifications from 24,112 registered responsible persons. OPSS also said it had acted where notified products contained banned chemicals, requiring businesses to correct information or take the products off the market. A shopper can search those notifications themselves at the government's cosmetic product notification search service, which is more than most beauty retailers ever tell anybody.

Who is behind the shop

Branded Beauty Limited was incorporated on 30 April 2013 and is registered under SIC code 47750, retail sale of cosmetic and toilet articles in specialised stores. Its registered office, Unit 8 Trafalgar Business Centre, 77–89 River Road, Barking IG11 0JU, is the same address given on the shop's contact page, so the company an order is placed with and the building it ships from are one and the same — not a holding company in one county and a fulfilment house in another.

The public record is current rather than dusty. Accounts to 30 April 2025 were filed on 30 January 2026 as total exemption full accounts, which is the small-company route and means no turnover figure is published. The most recent confirmation statement was made on 3 April 2026. Michael Edward Wild was appointed a director on 11 March 2021, James Albert Phillips is also on the board, and Matthew John Phillips is recorded as a person with significant control, his details last updated in January 2025. There are no charges registered and no change of name.

One disclosure is missing from the shop itself. Regulation 25 of the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015 requires a company's website to carry the part of the United Kingdom in which it is registered, its registered number and the address of its registered office. The contact page gives the registered name and the address but we could not find the company number anywhere on the site; that is a small administrative gap rather than a warning sign, and it is worth confirming directly, because a shop can add a line to a footer between one visit and the next.

Returns: the policy and the statutory rights are not the same document

Branded Beauty gives buyers 14 days after receiving an item to request a return, by emailing returns@brandedbeauty.co.uk, and says that anything sent back without asking first will not be accepted. The item has to come back unopened, unused and in its original packaging with proof of purchase. The policy then lists what cannot be returned at all: perishable goods, custom items, hazardous materials, flammable liquids and gases, gift cards, personal care goods including beauty products, and sale items.

On a shop where the great majority of the catalogue is discounted, those last two exclusions cover most of what anybody buys, and they are drawn wider than the law draws them. The exception in the distance selling rules is narrower than "beauty products": regulation 28(1)(e) of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 removes the cancellation right for "sealed goods which are not suitable for return due to health protection or hygiene reasons" only if they are unsealed after delivery. A lipstick still in its seal is not inside that exception. And there is no exception anywhere in regulation 28 for goods bought in a sale — a discounted price does not change the right.

A faulty item is a different matter again, and a different clock: the short-term right to reject faulty goods under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 runs for 30 days, and a trader can lengthen that window but cannot shorten it. Worth reading alongside the terms, which state that "superficial or cosmetics markings to products does not make your item eligible for a refund" — consistent with selling clearance stock, and fair enough as far as it goes, but it puts the line between a cosmetic mark and a defect entirely in the seller's hands.

None of this is exotic. It is the same wording used by a great many small online shops running on off-the-shelf store software, and it usually reflects a template rather than an intention. It still means a buyer who needs to send something back is relying on the shop being reasonable rather than on the policy as written.

If something goes wrong, there is no ombudsman to ring

A beauty retailer holds no FCA permission, sits under no ombudsman scheme and belongs to no compulsory alternative dispute resolution body. That is normal for retail and it is not a criticism of this shop, but it does change the route a complaint takes, and the arithmetic of a discount site makes one familiar protection unavailable.

Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 makes a credit card company jointly liable with the seller — but only where the cash price of the item is more than £100 and not more than £30,000. A basket assembled to clear a £25 delivery threshold out of 99p lipsticks does not come close, so section 75 simply does not apply to the typical order here. What remains is the card scheme's own chargeback process, which is a scheme rule rather than a statutory right and carries its own time limits, or a claim against the company itself.

Beyond that the route is Trading Standards, reached through the Citizens Advice consumer service on 0808 223 1133, open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm and closed on bank holidays. Citizens Advice passes reports to Trading Standards, which a consumer cannot do directly. Product safety questions — an unlabelled item, a suspect batch, an ingredient that should not be there — go to OPSS.

The rules themselves may not stay still. The Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee is running an inquiry into the science and regulation of hair and beauty products and treatments, taking oral evidence in January and June 2026 from ministers and industry, and asking among other things how regulators assess safety evidence across different hair and skin types, how consumers can be made aware of potential harms, and what legal changes would protect them better. It is the reason OPSS published its notification figures in July 2026, and anyone buying cosmetics online has a stake in where it lands.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 17 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.