Planning a Free Mini Beauty Treatments Day Out

On my birthday this year I planned ahead for a free day (downloading all the food apps 2 months in advance to make sure I qualified for my free Greggs donut free Starbucks coffee etc) which I read a lot of people do.

But then I picked a big shopping mall near me found a list of the stores there and looked up each of their beauty outlets on their websites to see if I could book ahead for their free mini treatments and took my 14 year old son with me (now heavily into a skincare routine courtesy of TikTok) and we had a great day. We thought L’Occitane’s arm and hand massage was the best - we had an Origins mini facial each and we both got a neat little bag each of Clarins mini samples with our Clarins eye treatments to take away as well including a 30ml size of beauty flash balm which I love so this is now my travel version.

I had to work out which available treatments from which brands would work together in one day (not to double up on hands neck face eyes) and space the appointments appropriately and in between we ate/drank the freebies I will definitely be doing it again next year and we came away with lots of minis that are now in our gym wash bags.

Has anyone else done this and got more recommendations for mini treatments? I will find some of the links for the ones we did and post them below.

I think next year I will do Oxford Street - I know La Mer does mini treatments so I’m sure a trip to Selfridges and John Lewis would be worth the train fare though I doubt there will be any samples!!! I was absolutely broke so apart from the train fare we spent nothing and had a really fun day.

I did have to brief my scientifically minded son not to contradict or question the sales schpiel but we ended up enjoying some of the more outlandish sales stories too ( Tom Ford I’m looking at you ) and actually learnt a few things as well (under 25s should NOT be using retinol)