The Truth About Those Expiration Dates On Your Sephora Points

Update: Good news! The amended terms and conditions to Sephora's Beauty Insider point system has a major clarification most customers misunderstood. Here's the deal: If you are an avid shopper of Sephora (which most members are), your points are safe and sound in your point bank. For members with inactive accounts (basically, anyone who has not stepped foot in a Sephora in over a year), your points will be wiped clean. And it makes sense — you snooze, you lose.

Sephora tells us that the misunderstanding is a lot less severe than Twitter made it seem. A rep for the brand tells us, "To best serve our current and future Sephora Beauty Insider clients, we’ve recently updated our Terms and Conditions regarding inactive accounts. We regret any confusion caused, this change only affects Beauty Insider accounts that are completely inactive for 18 months [as of December 30th 2017], at which time points will be marked expired."

"Any Beauty Insider can keep their account active in a few easy ways, such as redeeming a Beauty Insider reward of any value, claiming your free Birthday Gift annually, or making a purchase with your Beauty Insider account profile. At Sephora, our goal is to provide the most compelling prestige beauty reward program, ensuring all program perks continue to surprise and delight. For more information, and to ensure your account information is accurate and up to date, please visit client.service@sephora.com or call 1-877-SEPHORA."

There you have it, folks. Just another reason to keep your Sephora shopping game strong.

It's not a zombie apocalypse by any means, but if you're a Sephora Beauty Insider, something major just happened. According to Business Insider, Sephora will be adding an expiration date to your rewards bank — regardless of your member status. Now, we're not going to say this is the worst thing that's ever happened to us... but we can't speak for the people on Twitter.

For years, Sephora Beauty Insiders could rack up points without worry of them one day disappearing. But, the terms and conditions on the brand's site now states otherwise: "It’s our hope that you redeem your points on a regular basis. All unredeemed points shall expire when a program member has not engaged in point activity associated with that membership account (through purchase or redemption) for 18 months or more."

The average person might think that the time limit is reasonable — I mean, a whole year (and then some) is a long time. But some people who have been waiting for the perfect sample or rewards gift (and hoarding those points like they'll never see a Sephora store again) are not thrilled about the cut off.

Sephora fandom is the kind that could rival that of One Direction and Beyoncé, so dropping this kind of news might be earth-shattering to some. But it looks like we'll just have to take our love for the store to the next level by actually using our points — before they're gone for good.