You Beauty Advent Calendar

The YOU Beauty Advent Calendar 2026: 26 products from 24 brands behind 24 drawers

The YOU Beauty Advent Calendar 2026 is the magazine’s biggest edition yet: 26 beauty products from 24 brands, hand-picked by the YOU beauty team, tucked behind 24 numbered drawers (two of them double up). The box itself is a keeper this year, a painted card drawer unit in green and rose by illustrator Chiara Perano. The headline names carry weight, Lisa Eldridge, Charlotte Tilbury, Rodial, VIEVE and Sunday Riley among them, and 13 of the 24 brands are new to the calendar.

Skincare leads the mix, but this is a genuine multi-category box: makeup, body, hair, nails and a candle all get a look in. Priced at £115 for the 2026 edition, it sits a rung below the £270-plus multi-brand calendars from Space NK and Cult Beauty, which is where its appeal has always been.

What’s inside the YOU Beauty Advent Calendar 2026?

Twenty-six products, and the split leans skincare, not makeup. By family: roughly 11 skincare, 6 makeup, 5 body and hands, 2 haircare, 1 nails and 1 candle. The most expensive single item is the Avant Hyaluronic Acid Molecular Boost Eye Cream at £97, full size, and it’s joined by a second full-size Avant, the Pro Salicylic blemish treatment.

Format is where the honesty matters. 14 of the 26 products are full size, 11 are travel size and one, the Shiseido Essential Energy cream, is a deluxe miniature. Some of those travel sizes are genuinely small: the UKLASH lash serum is 1ml, the BBB London brow gloss 2ml. The generous end runs the other way, with the Rituals Sakura Body Lotion at 150ml and the This Works Deep Sleep Body Cocoon at 100ml.

Add up the RRPs of all 26 items and you reach roughly £638, which lines up with the brand’s own ‘worth over £635’ claim. Divide the £115 launch price across the 26 products and each one works out at about £4.42, or put another way, you’re getting close to 5.5 times the outlay in stated retail value. Anyone into skincare and multi-brand discovery will find plenty to open here.

=> The full drawer-by-drawer list, with sizes and RRPs, is in the SPOILER tab.

✳️ This 2026 edition compared with the previous one

The step up is real. The previous edition ran to 24 products for £95, with a stated value of over £450. The 2026 box moves to 26 products for £115 and a claimed value over £635, so both the price and the value climb, and the product count edges up by two.

What’s changed in the line-up tells you more than the numbers. Avant, L’Occitane and Rituals return, all familiar from earlier YOU calendars. The genuinely new pull this year is at the desirable end: Lisa Eldridge, Charlotte Tilbury, VIEVE, Jo Loves and Sunday Riley are names that make people click ‘buy’ on a multi-brand box. The formula holds, still multi-brand, still multi-category, still skincare-led, but the roster is stronger.

The catch, in fairness: the £20 price rise is the biggest year-on-year jump the calendar has taken, and two drawers now share, so 24 doors deliver 26 products, with two days doubling up.

✳️ My verdict on the YOU Beauty Advent Calendar 2026

What convinces first is the roster. A magazine-curated box lives or dies on the names it lands, and pulling in Lisa Eldridge, Charlotte Tilbury and two Avant full-sizes at £115 is a strong hand. The £97 Avant eye cream alone covers most of the price, and it arrives full size.

Where it gives me pause is the travel-size count. Eleven of 26 is a lot, and a 1ml lash serum or a 2ml brow gloss is barely a trial. As I’d put it: ‘the value is real, but you’re paying for 14 things you’ll finish and 11 you’ll sample’. That’s still a fair trade at this price, even if some rivals promise all full size for more money.

The £20 rise is the other honest mark against it. The calendar has gone £95 to £105 to £115 across recent editions, and this is the sharpest of those moves.

• Not for you if you want every product full size, or if a candle and a shower gel feel like filler in a beauty box.
• Worth it if you like discovering across skincare, makeup and body at once, and rate real retail value over a product-a-day gimmick.

Versions of this calendar:

• YOU Beauty Advent Calendar 2026 (26 products, 24 drawers, £115)

YOU Beauty discount and delivery:

• Discount codes: no code is available for this calendar at the time of writing.
• Prize draw: every order placed before 18 October 2026 (23:59 BST) is entered into a draw with 27 prizes to win.
• Delivery: free UK mainland delivery; EU delivery is available at a charge, with possible customs duties.

See all beauty advent calendars currently available.

The YOU Beauty story: a magazine’s beauty desk in a box

YOU Beauty isn’t a cosmetics house, it’s the beauty arm of YOU, the Sunday magazine of the Mail on Sunday. The YOU beauty team selects products from other brands and sells the result directly through youbeautyshop.co.uk, with no YOU-branded product in the box. A YOU advent calendar has been running in some form since 2013.

That editorial curation is the whole point of the calendar. The team’s job is picking names people want, which is exactly why the 2026 line-up leans on the likes of Charlotte Tilbury and Lisa Eldridge and adds 13 new brands. The painted Chiara Perano box is the year’s visible flourish on that idea.

Where to buy the YOU Beauty Advent Calendar 2026

The YOU Beauty Advent Calendar 2026 is sold directly by youbeautyshop.co.uk, with free UK mainland delivery. It’s a limited run, and the calendar has waitlisted and sold through in past seasons.

• Release: dispatched from 5 October 2026
• Retailer: youbeautyshop.co.uk (direct)
• Discount code: none at the time of writing