Two months into my clothing (and accessories) shopping ban, I find that my shopping for skin care and makeup has gone up quite a bit.  It might be due to the fact that my skin has been really terrible lately (hello zits) or the fact that right now beauty is something I'm allowing myself to spend money on (and so all my time spent shopping for clothes has gone to shopping for makeup).  But on the bright side of this increased beauty shopping is that I've discovered more natural products and I've found this great new online shopping mecca for high-quality natural beauty products: Bella Cuore.  

I originally stumbled onto the site while looking for Vitner's Daughters Active Botanical Serum (I kept seeing it everywhere and when Lee from Style Bee swore on it's awesome-ness I finally decided I needed to check it out myself).  And this site doesn't charge tax (at least for California, so that's an almost 9% savings right there).  But that magical elixir is 185 buckaroos, and I wasn't sure I wanted to spend that much money on something I wasn't sure my skin can handle (as I've said before I have the most awful sensitive and acne-prone skin).  Enter Bella Cuore: they allow you to pick 5 samples of pretty much anything on their site (of course they have some rules to ensure no one abuses their sample system--no complete freebees here).  But it at least allows me to patch test it to make sure I either love it or if it's foundation if it matches my skin tone.  How great is that?  They also have a point system that allows discounts for future purchases (unlike Sephora rewards where you get more free samples of things you probably won't buy anyway).

So far I've only tried the Suntegrity tinted sunscreen (which has medium to light coverage, hardly any scent and most importantly doesn't break me out) and I think I'm going to order the full product.  I'll do another full report once I've tried everything and let you know what I thought of each product.  In the meantime check them out here and get your own sample kit!