e.l.f. Cosmetics and Skincare

Review by eFreeware

Buying makeup online has always carried a risk that a store visit removes: the shade you order may not be the shade that arrives. Drugstore and mass-market beauty brands have spent years trying to close that gap, and one of the more interesting attempts comes from e.l.f. Cosmetics, whose app puts a virtual try-on tool, a loyalty scheme and a shopping catalog in the same place.

The e.l.f. Cosmetics and Skincare app is published by e.l.f. Cosmetics itself. It sits in the Beauty category, is free to download, and has been on Google Play since the end of 2019.

What interests me most is that the app is not only a storefront. The developer has built several distinct jobs into it: finding a shade, earning points on purchases made elsewhere, browsing short product stories, and talking to other customers. That is a lot of surface area for one app, and the sections below take each of those jobs in turn.

Built for the regular e.l.f. shopper

The clearest fit here is someone who already buys e.l.f. products with some regularity and wants something back for it. The Beauty Squad program is free to join, and the app is the place where it lives. If you pick up e.l.f. items in a store rather than online, the receipt upload feature is the part that matters, because it lets you collect points on purchases made anywhere rather than only through the app.

A second audience is anyone who struggles with base shades. Concealer and foundation are the two products where a wrong guess is most annoying, and the app's shade match and virtual try-on tools exist precisely for that decision. Someone who has never been confident choosing a foundation online would get more out of that feature than a shopper who already knows their shade by heart.

The third group is the browser. Between Shoppable Stories, the Swipe to Like wishlist and the community feed, there is a fair amount of material to look through before you buy anything. That suits people who enjoy browsing beauty content as a pastime rather than treating shopping as a quick errand.

It is worth being plain about the scope: this is a single-brand app. Everything inside it relates to e.l.f. products, so the rewards, the try-on tool and the stories all point back to one catalog. Readers who spread their beauty spending across many brands will find the loyalty side less useful than someone who buys e.l.f. consistently.

Shade matching without a store visit

The feature I would reach for first is the virtual try-on, which the developer describes as an upgraded shade finder available only inside the app. Alongside it sits a shade match tool for concealer and foundation. Together they address the single most common reason people avoid buying base makeup online.

The practical value depends on how you shop. If you normally swatch in a store and then order online, the try-on tool gives you a way to check a shade without making the trip. If you are replacing a product you already use, the tool is less important, but it still helps when a formula is reformulated or a shade is discontinued and you need a substitute.

I would treat any virtual try-on as a guide rather than a guarantee, since lighting and screens vary. The developer bills this as a way to meet your match, and for a first pass at narrowing a range of shades that is a reasonable use. It is the kind of feature that saves you from ordering three candidates and returning two.

Beauty Squad rewards, including points earned elsewhere

The loyalty program is the backbone of the app. Joining is free, and the developer lists several ways to accumulate points. The one that stands out is receipt upload: you can earn points on e.l.f. purchases regardless of where you made them, which means a drugstore run counts the same as an order placed in the app.

Rewards can be cashed in for products, discounts on later orders or gift cards. Gift card partners include Chipotle, Target, Ulta, Amazon and Walmart, so the rewards reach beyond beauty. For someone who buys e.l.f. products anyway, that is a straightforward return on purchases they were going to make.

Membership also brings early access to new drops and sales, a birthday-month perk, and tier levels that add perks as you climb. Icon members get free shipping. The tier structure gives the program a longer arc than a simple points-per-dollar scheme, though it also means the best perks sit at the top.

Games are another route to points: the developer has added beauty squad-exclusive games inside the app as a way to earn. That is an unusual addition for a retail app, and it gives members a way to add to their balance without spending anything. How much those games contribute is something the developer does not quantify.

Shopping, stories, scanning and the community feed

The shopping side covers the expected ground. You can browse the catalog, read product pages, keep a wishlist and share products you like. Shoppable Stories are the more distinctive part: short, browsable pieces that highlight new arrivals and let you move from the story to the product itself, which is a format that suits the way beauty trends spread.

Swipe to Like works as a discovery mechanism. You swipe right on products that appeal to you, and the app builds a wishlist from those choices. It is a low-effort way to collect candidates before deciding, and it pairs naturally with the try-on tool if you want to narrow a shortlist of shades.

The in-store tools are the part I find most practical. A barcode scanner lets you scan a product at a retailer and pull up tutorials and ingredient information on the spot, which is useful when you are standing in an aisle trying to work out what a formula actually contains. A store locator gives directions to the nearest stockist, and order history with delivery tracking covers purchases made through the app.

Then there is the community. Beauty Squad members can share looks, follow trends and swap tips with one another, and the developer also offers push and in-app notifications so members hear about offers and arrivals first. The community feed is the piece most likely to divide people: some will enjoy seeing how others use the products, while others will only want the rewards and the shade tools.

What the app costs

The app is free to download. It carries no ads, and there are no in-app purchases, so nothing inside the app is gated behind a payment to the developer.

The loyalty program is free to join. Points and tier perks are earned through purchases and through activities like games and receipt uploads rather than bought.

The trade-off is the one that comes with any single-brand app: the rewards are only worth something if you buy that brand. The gift card options widen the redemption side, but the earning side is tied to e.l.f. purchases, so the value scales with how much of your routine comes from that catalog.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious comparison is with a general retailer's app. A large drugstore or marketplace app covers many brands and often layers its own rewards on top, which suits shoppers who spread their spending around. What it usually lacks is the depth of product-specific help that a single-brand app can offer, such as a try-on tool tuned to one brand's shade range.

A dedicated beauty retailer's app sits somewhere in between: broader than e.l.f. alone, but still focused on cosmetics. If your routine mixes several brands and you want one place to manage it, that model is likely to fit better. If e.l.f. is the brand you buy most, a single-brand app can go deeper on the things that matter, like shade matching and brand-specific rewards.

There are also standalone shade-matching and try-on tools, and general loyalty or receipt-scanning apps that collect points across retailers. Those can be useful in their own right, but they are separate from the catalog, so the discovery, the wishlist and the rewards do not feed into one another. The appeal of the e.l.f. app is that the try-on, the stories, the wishlist and the points all sit in the same place.

A worthwhile companion for e.l.f. regulars

I would recommend this app to people who buy e.l.f. products often enough that a loyalty balance is worth tracking, and to anyone who wants help choosing a foundation or concealer shade without a store visit. The receipt upload option makes the rewards side work even if you mostly shop in person, which is the detail that gives the program real reach.

The app has a 4.5 average from more than 4,300 ratings and over a million installs, which suggests a settled, widely used product rather than a new experiment. The most recent update is described simply as bug fixes and improvements, so there is nothing new to weigh in this version.

The main thing to accept before installing is the brand focus. Everything here orbits one catalog, so the rewards and the discovery features are only as useful as your interest in that catalog. For a regular e.l.f. shopper who wants shade help, points on purchases made anywhere, and a place to browse and share looks, the app covers all of it at no cost.

What's new in version 2025.SS-0.0.22

Bug fixes and improvements.