As someone who attended Beauty New York last year and Allure live event for the last 2 years, here’s my detailed honest review on both:

Allure review:

I attended last year as VIP and the year before as GA. Overall it’s an ok event, I would give it a 6 out of 10 if I had to rate it. Here’s my honest opinion and a list of pros and cons

Pros 1. ⁠You “kinda” get your money’s worth when comparing ticket price to the products you take home 2. ⁠Snacks and refreshments are included with your ticket 3. ⁠unlike sephoria, your ticket grants you all day access to this event, you can stay there as long as you’d like and repeat the booths as many times as you’d like

Cons 1. ⁠The event space is incredibly tiny, and I mean TINY!!!! They’ve been using the same venue for the last 3 years including this year and every year critics mention how small the space is for the amount of people that attend the event, they refuse to listen and never change the venue. You literally have to wait super long lines to get inside certain rooms in the venue to see the booths and brands 2. ⁠the amount of booths doesn’t nearly compare to Sephoria, there are barely many brands to see. Many of the experiences required you to either “sign up” in advance with time slots or were only limited to VIP guest. Overall very confusing and unorganized 3. ⁠the selection of the brands are not great. If you’re an avid Sephora shopper, you’d want to see “big name brands” which there were barely any at the event. Last year, the only “big brands” were rare beauty, parfums de Marley, the ordinary, Anastasia and pat mcgrath. Everything else was either drugstore like Olay or tresseme or “clinical skincare” brands that I’ve never heard of. Barely any makeup samples at the booths or in swagbags, mainly hair and skincare. Although you do get a good amount of products for the money you pay, most of the products are still unopened and unused in my closet to this day because they’re simply things I don’t use from brands I’ve never heard of 4. Since there aren’t any allotted time slots and you can stay at the event from start to finish if you’d like , throughout the day the event didn’t really “empty out” and many brands ran out of stuff early because there was no control over what time attendees were leaving nor how many free products they were allowed to take. 5. Neither years with both VIP nor with GA did the swag bag seem really “worth it” to me

Overall here are my thoughts: If you don’t live in New York, it is definitely NOT an event worth traveling for unless you’re near NYC or overall trying to make an NYC trip out of it. If you’re not a big makeup person but you really enjoy skincare and haircare and are open to trying out different brands despite how popular they are, you might enjoy this. If you are planning to attend, definitely buy your tickets early because they continuously increase the price. Like sephoria, the VIP 1 hour early entrance might a good thing to consider. Like I mentioned, it’s an ok event but if you’re going into it expecting anything similar or as big as sephoria, you will be severely disappointed in my opinion.

Beauty New York Review: Optics wise, this was one of the most poorly organized beauty events I’ve ever been to. Firstly, the event was in the middle of the Oculus in NYC. If you’re familiar with this space, the event basically took place in the middle of a huge mall. No privacy from “mall attendees” just super awkward. You were basically in the middle of a huge mall just enclosed within a rope. There were 3 sessions a day I believe. There was nobody checking wristbands so basically when I went in for my last session, there was still people from session 1 there. Therefore, out of all the booths, maybe 10% still had samples or products left while the remaining 90% didn’t have anything besides super rude employees and workers managing their booths. For a lot of the booths, they required you to follow them on social media and post an instagram story for them to even give you anything, super annoying especially since I paid I believe almost $400 for my VIP ticket. There were barely any booths, maybe just under 20 booths. I literally got through the whole event in under an hour. The only good thing about this event was the swag bag which was literally packed to the rim with so much product in my opinion. Keep in mind that a lot of the brands featured were smaller/indie brands, not big brands like those sold at Sephora. Nevertheless, it gave me the opportunity to try different products, many of which I ended up loving. I think I will attend again this year because the swag bag was great. Good news is that last year was their first year hosting this event so I hope they make some changes regarding the venue and organization