3 Charitable Beauty Gifts You Can Give This Holiday Season

If you happen to have any new or unused beauty products laying around that you don’t plan on keeping or using, a good way to get rid of them is to donate them. Organizations like Project Beauty Share distribute beauty and personal hygiene products to nonprofit groups dedicated to helping people who are homeless and/or overcoming other obstacles like addiction, abuse, or poverty.

Other groups like Donate Beauty provide skin- and hair-care products, creams, hand sanitizers, and more to healthcare workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alternatively, if you don’t have any products to give away, you can also donate money to some of these same organizations to support their causes.

While beauty school likely wouldn’t cost a person as much as an undergraduate program would, it’s still pretty expensive and could cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. If someone in your life is planning on pursuing a cosmetology education, a donation to their tuition fund may make the perfect gift for the holidays.

Even if you don’t know someone going beauty school, you could sponsor a portion of a stranger’s beauty education on behalf of the person you’re gifting by donating money to a scholarship organization like Beauty Changes Lives.

Over the summer, dozens of fashion and beauty brands showed their support for ending racial inequality by announcing grants that would help fund Black-owned beauty startups. Glossier set aside $500,000 for grants that were later distributed to 16 different businesses, while SheaMoisture later invested $1 million in supporting women of color entrepreneurs and small businesses.

By buying from companies who have started similar programs, you wouldn’t directly be donating to these grants, but you would be contributing to the bigger picture and helping them make enough money to help more smaller businesses in the future.