The Case for Buying Someone (or Yourself) a Beauty Bundle
Holiday beauty gifting has its own logic, and Ulta has built an entire ecosystem around it. This season, the retailer’s gift set lineup pulls from brands like MAC, Sol de Janeiro, Rare Beauty, Anua, Noyz, and Lancôme – covering makeup, skincare, fragrance, and hair at a range of price points wide enough that nobody has an excuse to show up empty-handed. These aren’t filler gifts padded with forgettable products. The sets are curated with enough range that they work whether you’re shopping for someone who has everything or someone just building out their first real beauty routine.
Gift sets occupy a strange, specific space in beauty culture – they’re both a shortcut and a statement.
What Ulta has done with its 2024 holiday collection is lean into that contradiction rather than flatten it. There are mini fragrance hauls designed for the indecisive, lip gloss trios built for portability, and K-beauty advent calendars aimed at the skincare obsessive who tracks their routine like a spreadsheet. The range is wide enough to feel chaotic on paper, but the selections themselves are deliberate. Refinery29’s editorial team independently curated and selected the products in this roundup, and all pricing and availability reflects information at the time of publication.
The Standouts Worth Talking About
Sol de Janeiro’s Cheirosa All the Way Mini Perfume Mist Gift Set is one of the more clever entries in the lineup. The six-piece set collects the brand’s Cheirosa mist range – spanning fruity florals through dessert-heavy gourmands – in one box. The appeal is obvious: Sol de Janeiro’s individual Cheirosa mists have developed the kind of devoted following where people genuinely agonize over which one to wear. A sampler set sidesteps that entirely, and for fragrance lovers who haven’t committed to a signature scent, that flexibility matters more than any single bottle would. It’s available at Ulta Beauty.
Lancôme’s Juicy Tubes have been a beauty staple long enough that calling them iconic doesn’t overstate it. The holiday offering is a three-piece gift set of the Original Lip Gloss in mini format – small enough to stash anywhere, specific enough to feel considered. They wear well solo, layer over lipstick without fuss, and the range of shades in the set covers everything from sheer shimmer to color-forward gloss. Available at Ulta Beauty.
Then there’s the Anua 7-Days of Glass Skin Advent Calendar, which speaks directly to the K-beauty obsessive in everyone’s life. Anua has been one of the breakout darlings of the K-beauty wave that’s reshaped how American consumers think about skincare – prioritizing hydration, barrier health, and a finish that looks like you’ve been sleeping eight hours and drinking two liters of water daily. An advent calendar format lets someone work through a structured routine across seven days, which is less gimmick and more genuine introduction to the brand’s approach. Also available at Ulta Beauty.
Why the Gift Set Format Still Works
There’s a version of gift set culture that’s purely transactional – buy the bundle because it’s easy, receive the bundle because it was easy. Ulta’s holiday lineup resists that framing, at least partially, because the brands anchoring it aren’t brands that rely on holiday sales to stay relevant. MAC lipsticks move year-round. Rare Beauty has built a loyal customer base that doesn’t need seasonal packaging to stay engaged. Sol de Janeiro’s body care and fragrance line has maintained momentum well past its initial viral moment. Putting these brands into a gift set context doesn’t cheapen them – it recontextualizes them for a gifting occasion without pretending they needed the occasion to justify the purchase.
The price point range also matters here. Gift sets tend to collapse into two categories: the kind that feel like a splurge and the kind that feel like an afterthought. Ulta’s collection spans both ends, which means someone spending carefully can still find something that looks and feels considered, while someone willing to spend more has options that don’t feel like they were assembled as a grab for holiday margin. That’s harder to pull off than it looks, and most retailers don’t manage it.
Noyz also appears in the lineup, rounding out the fragrance offerings alongside Sol de Janeiro. The brand’s inclusion signals something about where Ulta sees its customer base going – younger, more adventurous with scent, less wedded to the department store fragrance counter as the default place to discover something new. Ulta has been quietly positioning itself as a discovery platform as much as a beauty retailer, and the holiday gift set lineup reflects that positioning in practical terms: you’re not just buying something familiar, you’re potentially encountering a brand you hadn’t tracked before.
What This Actually Means for Your Shopping List
If you’re working through a gift list that includes anyone with a real interest in beauty – or anyone you suspect has been eyeing something from one of these brands without pulling the trigger – Ulta’s holiday sets clear the bar. The Sol de Janeiro six-piece mist collection handles the fragrance shopper. The Lancôme Juicy Tubes three-piece set handles the makeup minimalist. The Anua advent calendar handles the skincare deep-diver. Rare Beauty and MAC round out the list for anyone who prefers their gifts to come from names they already trust. The entire collection is available at Ulta Beauty, and given how gift sets at this level tend to sell through before December actually arrives, the window for treating this as a low-urgency decision is probably shorter than it feels right now.
