Cult Beauty Review: 287 Brands, Cult Status Points and the Four Brands Its Owner Makes

Affiliate disclosure: we may earn a commission if you take out a product through links on this page. It costs you nothing extra and does not influence how providers are listed.

Cult Beauty’s own A to Z listed 287 brands on 23 October 2026, from 111SKIN and Augustinus Bader to Westman Atelier and Zelens. Spend £100 and the Cult Status scheme hands back £5 of credit; standard delivery is £3.95 and free over £30, next day is £5.95 and the shop will post an unopened item back for £2.99 inside 30 days.

It is a bigger business than the editorial tone suggests. Cult Beauty is one of three online beauty retailers owned by the listed group THG plc, which describes itself in its 2025 annual report as the “Owner and operator of three major online beauty retailers: Lookfantastic, Cult Beauty and Dermstore”. THG bought Cult Beauty on 4 August 2021 for £275m on a cash and debt-free basis, and its THG Beauty division turned over £1,107.9m in the year to 31 December 2025 and £500.2m in the first half of 2026. That means the audited accounts behind the shop are published twice a year, which is more than most beauty retailers can say.

One practical rule is worth knowing before you fill a basket. Nothing goes back once it has been opened: the returns policy wants items “Unopened, with all original product packaging and hygiene seals untouched”, and that is the industry norm rather than a quirk of this shop. The 30-day window on sealed items is longer than the 14 days the law requires, and the £2.99 return label is the one cost a Boots or a Space NK customer would not pay.

What 287 brands adds up to, and the four the owner makes itself

The brand list is the product here. Cult Beauty’s A to Z carried 287 brands on 23 October 2026 — 289 entries if you count the two signposts sitting in the alphabet, “Recently Launched Brands On Cult Beauty!” and “LGBTQIA+ Owned Businesses”. The spread is the point: 111SKIN, 19/99 Beauty, Acqua Di Parma, Act+Acre, Aesop, Allies of Skin, Alpha-H, Amika, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Anua, Armani Beauty and Augustinus Bader are the first dozen, and the tail end runs VOTARY, VT Cosmetics, Vyrao, Weleda, WelleCo, Westman Atelier, WHO IS ELIJAH, Yu Ling Rollers, Youth To The People and Zelens. A good number of those are the kind of small, single-product, founder-run labels a department store will not touch.

Set that against the number THG published when it bought the business. The acquisition announcement of 4 August 2021 described Cult Beauty as stocking “c. 300” prestige third-party brands, with around two thirds of them not then listed on any existing THG Beauty site, serving “1.7m highly engaged customers” and “1.6m Instagram followers”. Five years and two months later the list is 287. That is a flat range, and on a shop whose whole promise is a curated edit it is defensible — an edit that doubles every year is not an edit. It is worth knowing all the same, because the group around it has grown: THG’s 2025 annual report calls THG Beauty a “Critical route to market for over 1,000 brands” and says it launched “over 80 new brands” during the year.

Four of the 287 belong to the company doing the editing. THG’s annual report names its “flagship skincare brands – Perricone MD, Biossance and ESPA”, and records that “Ameliorate completed a full rebrand in 2025”. All four — ESPA Skincare, Perricone MD, Biossance and Ameliorate — sit in Cult Beauty’s own A to Z alongside the third-party labels, and nothing on the brand pages says so. On the page’s own arithmetic that is about 1.4% of the list, which is a long way from a shop stuffed with house brands, and each of the four is a real brand with its own following rather than a white-label filler. The gap is one of disclosure rather than of substance: a reader taking the edit as independent expert selection has no way, from the site, of telling which four entries the editor profits from twice.

One name needs care in the other direction. Grow Gorgeous is on the Cult Beauty list too, and THG’s annual report mentions it only as a non-core brand exited during 2025 — so it is a third-party brand now, not a house one, and counting it would overstate the overlap.

A point a pound, and the 30-day fuse on what you earn

Cult Status is the loyalty scheme and the terms are unusually specific. You “earn 1 point for every £1 you spend on www.cultbeauty.co.uk (excluding shipping costs)”, and “For every 100 Points earned you will be eligible for £5 Credit”. That is 5% back on everything but the postage, paid in credit rather than cash, and it is a better headline rate than most high street cards manage. Enrolment happens once you have spent £100 or earned 100 points, whichever comes first, and writing a product review is worth 10 points, capped at ten reviews a month.

Three clocks run against it. Points “will expire 365 days following issuance if they are not converted into Credit”. Once converted, the credit “received from converting Points will expire after 30 days” and is “valid for a single transaction only”, so a £5 balance has to be spent in a single order inside a month or it is gone, and it cannot be put towards a Cult Beauty gift voucher. And conversion only works in multiples of £5, which means 99 points buy nothing at all.

Then there are the ceilings, which are the part nobody mentions. “The maximum Points available to earn per transaction is capped at 5,000” and “The maximum Points a Member can accumulate over a 12 month period is 10,000”. Those are the shop’s own figures; the sum is this page’s. At a point per pound, the annual cap means the scheme stops paying anything at all above £10,000 of spending in a year, and the most credit anyone can earn in twelve months is £500. For almost every customer that is academic. For the kind of heavy spender a prestige beauty retailer actually depends on, it is a real limit and it is not flagged anywhere a shopper would look.

The review route is the odd one. Ten points a review and ten reviews a month is 100 points a month, which converts to £5 — £60 a year of credit for 120 reviews, on the page’s own arithmetic, without buying anything extra at all. Reviews have to come through the review request email, so they are tied to real purchases, which is the right control to have.

There are tiers above the entry level — Silver and Gold, “previously Level Two” and “previously Level Three” — each lasting a 12-month “Membership Year”, with the level decided by points earned inside that year. Gold is worth having for one concrete reason: next day delivery becomes “FREE for Gold Cult Status Members on orders over £30” instead of over £100, and Silver pays £3.95 for it over £30. The terms point to a separate page for “the Points required for each Level” and that page returned no thresholds to a plain read on 23 October 2026, so how much a shopper has to spend to reach either tier could not be established.

Three company names and one checkout

A shopper who goes looking for the company behind the shop finds three. The footer reads “2026 The Hut.com Ltd t/a CultBeauty.co.uk”. The regulatory line a few pixels away reads “THG Beauty Limited (FRN: 1022963), trading as www.cultbeauty.co.uk”. And the company actually called Cult Beauty Limited is alive and filing: number 06195011, incorporated 30 March 2007, SIC code 47910 for retail sale via mail order houses or via the internet, status active, registered at Icon 1, 7-9 Sunbank Lane, Ringway, Altrincham WA15 0AF, which is THG’s own address.

THG Beauty Limited is company 13400467, incorporated 16 May 2021 — three months before the acquisition completed — and there is a THG Beauty I2 Limited, 16379955, incorporated 10 April 2025, at the same address. None of this is irregular; a group of this size reorganises its trading entities and the brand name survives the company that first carried it. It does mean that the entity a customer contracts with is not stated plainly on the pages a customer reads, and the firm reference number is the only regulatory identifier on offer. The FCA register page for FRN 1022963 would not load on 23 October 2026, so that number is the shop’s own disclosure rather than something confirmed against the register here.

Cult Beauty Limited’s last filed accounts were made up to 31 December 2024. The register shows the next set, to 31 December 2025, as due by 30 September 2026, and the company’s filing history page could not be read on three attempts, so whether they have since gone in could not be confirmed. The statutory accounts of that company are the one place a figure for Cult Beauty as a business would appear, which is what makes them worth asking after.

The terms of sale are the gap that matters more. The returns and delivery pages serve their text plainly and were read in full for this page. The terms and conditions page, the Klarna pages and the payment methods page all returned navigation and promotional banners and no terms at all on 23 October 2026, across both the ordinary and the alternate addresses. So the governing law, the jurisdiction, the point at which the contract is formed, the pricing-error clause and any cap on the shop’s liability could not be read, and none of them are quoted here. A reader who wants them should ask customer services for the document before ordering anything expensive.

The accounts behind the shop, and the one number they never print

Some context on the trade first, because it is a harder year than the marketing suggests. The British Beauty Council’s Value of Beauty 2026 report, compiled by Oxford Economics and announced on 1 July 2026, puts the industry’s contribution to the UK economy in 2025 at £28.3 billion — a “marginal 0.2% cash-terms decrease” on revised 2024 figures — supporting “more than 595,000 jobs”, with total employment down 2.8% and direct employment down 2.1%. Beauty services were the largest direct contributor at £5.7 billion. Millie Kendall OBE, the Council’s chief executive, said that “Successive budgets have made it increasingly difficult for beauty businesses to create and sustain jobs”.

Against that, THG’s preliminary results of 26 March 2026 for the year to 31 December 2025 read steadily enough. Group revenue was £1,717.0m, up 2.3% at constant currency and down 2.0% as reported, with adjusted EBITDA of £76.6m against £83.3m the year before, a 4.5% margin and an adjusted gross margin of 40.7%. Net debt before lease liabilities came down to £233.0m from £304.3m, with cash of £183.1m. THG Beauty, the division Cult Beauty sits in, took £1,107.9m of that — a 5.4% reported decline, growth of 0.2% at constant currency — on adjusted EBITDA of £65.8m, a 5.9% margin and a 39.3% gross margin.

The half-year numbers of 10 September 2026 are better. Group revenue of £828.7m, up 7.2% at constant currency and 5.8% as reported, adjusted EBITDA of £42.8m at a 5.2% margin and up 210 basis points, gross margin of 41.1%, and net debt before leases of £329.7m — £476.8m with lease liabilities in. THG Beauty grew 5.9% at constant currency to £500.2m. Group-wide, active customers were 7.5m in 2025 against 7.9m in 2024, and online revenue split 60% UK, 22% US, 16% Europe and 2% rest of world.

What none of those documents contains is a figure for Cult Beauty. It appears in the FY2025 preliminary results only in the notes to editors, and in the interim results only in the same boilerplate; the growth rates THG chooses to publish belong to Lookfantastic, which grew 16.2% in the UK and Ireland over 2025 and whose skincare was up 17.4% year to date at the half year, with UK TikTok Shop revenue up 26%. Lookfantastic rising 16.2% inside a division that fell 5.4% as reported means something else in the division fell further, and no published number says what. The 2021 acquisition announcement expected Cult Beauty to take “c. £140m” of sales in FY 2022 on adjusted EBITDA of “c. £10m”. Five years on, there is nothing to compare that against.

The number on a sunscreen is the one that gets tested

Most claims on a beauty label are hard to check. Sun protection factor is the exception: it is a laboratory measurement, and when it is wrong a regulator can prove it. The Office for Product Safety and Standards keeps a free, searchable register of alerts, reports and recalls, and a search for the keyword sunscreen returned 3 reports on 23 October 2026. Two of the three concern SPF50+ products sold widely in British beauty halls, which makes this the most useful ten seconds a sun cream buyer can spend.

The serious one is notification 2510-0095, a recall of Ultra Violette Lean Screen SPF50+ in the 50ml size, dated 15 October 2025 and last updated 9 April 2026. OPSS records the risk level as Serious, the country of origin as Australia, and the fault in plain words: the product “failed SPF testing with variable results, placing consumers at risk of sunburn”. Twenty-two batch numbers are listed, from A1399 through to A2550, the product was recalled from end users with refunds through the brand’s own form, and the notice was raised by Local Authority Trading Standards rather than by the brand.

Cult Beauty is named on that notice. So are Ultra Violette itself, Boots, Space NK, Liberty London, Harrods and Sephora — seven sellers of the same product, listed for the same reason, which is how a recall is supposed to work. Being on the list is evidence that the machinery reached the people who had bought the thing, and a shop that stocks hard-to-find imported brands will be on more of these notices than one that stocks six safe names. The second SPF50+ entry, 2512-0024 and 2602-0295 of 18 March 2026, is a recall of Bondi Sands Zinc Mineral Sunscreen SPF50+ body and face lotion.

The third entry shows the other risk in buying imported beauty, and it is about paperwork rather than chemistry. Notification 2607-0138 of 17 August 2026 concerns a Bubble Cosmetics Sunscreen Pack from the United States, graded High risk, where “Multiple mandatory cosmetic labelling requirements have not been met” — the missing items including the sunscreen use instructions and the traceability information — in breach of Regulation (EC) 1223/2009. The import was rejected at the border rather than recalled from shoppers, which is the system catching a problem a step earlier. For a shop whose appeal is American and Australian labels that British chemists do not carry, that is the category of risk to watch: not a dangerous formula, but a bottle that was never labelled for sale here.

Cult Beauty was running an “SPF 20% OFF” promotion on its home page on 23 October 2026. Nothing is wrong with that, and nothing in the register touches the products in it. It is simply the moment to run the two searches yourself: the register lives at gov.uk under product safety alerts, reports and recalls, it takes a keyword, and it prints a total so you can see whether you are looking at three results or three hundred.

Thirty days, an unbroken seal and £2.99

The returns policy is the thing a beauty shopper is most likely to need and it is written clearly. Cult Beauty is “happy to offer a refund/exchange for an unwanted item returned within 30 days of receipt”, and the condition is that items arrive “Unopened, with all original product packaging and hygiene seals untouched”. Anything else is refused outright: “We are unable to offer a refund, replacement or exchange on items that are not re-saleable”. A UK return costs £2.99 for the label; from outside the UK “you will need to cover the cost of return shipping”. If the order qualified for a free gift, the gift has to go back too before the refund is processed.

Measure that against the law and the shop comes out ahead on the window and level on the seal. The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 give an online buyer 14 days to cancel, so 30 is more than double. The hygiene-seal rule is not an extra condition the shop invented — the same regulations lift the cancellation right for sealed goods unsuitable for return on health or hygiene grounds once they have been unsealed. Where the regulations bite harder is on what a trader may dock. Regulation 34(9) lets a trader recover any amount by which “the value of the goods is diminished by any amount as a result of handling of the goods by the consumer”, up to the contract price, and regulation 34(12) sets the test: handling goes too far if “it goes beyond the sort of handling that might reasonably be allowed in a shop”. A tester on a counter is allowed. Two weeks of using a serum is not.

The timings are where a reader should keep an eye on the calendar. Cult Beauty says processing “can take 3-5 working days from the date we receive the return”, after which a card or bank refund “can take up to 10 days to show on your statement from the time of issue”, and a Klarna refund arrives “within 5-10 working days”. Regulation 34(5) gives a trader 14 days from receiving the goods back, or from the day the customer supplies evidence of having sent them, whichever is earlier, and regulation 34(7) requires the same means of payment the customer used. Five working days of processing plus ten days on a statement can run past that 14-day mark, and the policy does not distinguish between the day the money is issued and the day it lands.

Two smaller wrinkles. The policy says 30 days “of receipt” in one sentence and asks for returns to arrive “within 30 days of delivery” in another, which are not the same start date on a parcel that sat in a collection point for a week. And the required condition is described as “saleable”, “re-saleable” and “pristine” in three different places, which are three different standards to be judged against if a refund is ever refused.

Four free-delivery thresholds, and two of them for the same service

The delivery page is one of the better ones in British online beauty, because it prints every option with a price beside it. Standard delivery is £3.95, “Allow 2-3 days for delivery”, and “FREE on orders over £30”. Next Day is £5.95 if you “Order before 1am” and “FREE on all orders over £100”, with the Cult Status variations noted above. Click & Collect is £3.95 over “over 8500 collection points”, and Click & Collect Next Day is £5.95 and “Free for orders over £90”. There is an Eco Delivery at £3.95 whose last mile “is completed on foot, by bike, or by electric vehicle” and which only appears at checkout for eligible postcodes.

A Same Day option sits at £5.95, described as “for a limited time only!” against a previous £9.95, with orders “placed before 1pm” and availability restricted to certain postcodes in the Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Tipton areas. Channel Islands customers pay £9.95 for a 5-7 working day standard service, free over £30, or £15 for a 1-2 business day priority service, free over £150. Orders going anywhere else should be placed through cultbeauty.com, and points earned on the international site do not count on the UK one.

Two of the shop’s own pages disagree about one of those figures, and both were read on 23 October 2026. The home page carries a banner reading “FREE NEXT DAY DELIVERY ON ORDERS OVER £150”. The delivery page, re-read a second time for the exact wording, says “FREE on all orders over £100”. Neither page is dated and neither mentions the other. The delivery page is the one carrying the cut-off times, the tier benefits and the carrier detail, so it is the likelier of the two to be current — but a shopper building a basket to a threshold cannot tell from the site which number applies, and £50 of unnecessary spending is the cost of guessing wrong. Check it in the basket before you add anything to reach a total.

Read as a ladder the thresholds are £30 for standard, £90 for next-day collection, £100 for next-day delivery and £150 on the banner. Collecting the parcel yourself qualifies £10 earlier than having it brought to the door, which is the right way round and not something every retailer gets correct.

Where a beauty complaint goes when nobody is obliged to hear it

There is no ombudsman for shopping. Banks, insurers and energy suppliers all answer to a statutory scheme; a beauty retailer answers to nobody unless it volunteers. The nearest thing is RetailADR, run by Consumer Dispute Resolution Limited, which says it “can be used to resolve disputes between consumers and Participating Member traders” and defines those as “Traders that have agreed to participate in the RetailADR scheme and be bound by our decisions”. Its member list was re-read on 23 October 2026 and carried no entry for Cult Beauty, THG, The Hut Group or Lookfantastic — and no beauty retailer at all, among fashion, homeware and general retail names such as ASOS, Topshop and Homesense.

So a disputed refund has three routes and none of them is an independent adjudicator. The first is the shop’s own service team. The second is a card chargeback through your bank, which is a scheme rule rather than a legal right; the Consumer Credit Act’s section 75 claim against a credit card issuer needs a cash price above £100, which a basket of two serums may or may not reach. The third is a small claim in the county court. Product safety is the one area with a proper destination: OPSS and local authority Trading Standards, which is who raised all three of the sunscreen notices above.

That is the normal state of affairs for online retail rather than a failing specific to this shop, and it is the reason the documents matter. A retailer that publishes its returns policy and its delivery prices in full, as this one does, has given a customer something to hold it to. A retailer whose terms of sale cannot be read has not.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 23 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.