As a kid, I collected many things: stickers, bouncy balls, pencils, stamps, rocks…I guess I sound like a hoarder, eh? Now that I live in a small apartment in NYC, I can’t do that anymore. But I do still let myself collect one thing: hand lotions, especially ones that are packaged in small, travel-friendly tubes. I justify this habit by telling myself that I’m going to end up using it at some point, so each new item will only temporarily take up a bit of precious real estate in…

Drunk Elephant has to be one of my favorite names for a company, ever. The origin behind the name is interesting, too—apparently, it’s based on a myth that says elephants get drunk off eating the fruit from marula trees. The company includes marula oil as a key ingredient in many of its products (more on that later). Since Sephora’s birthday bonus was a pack of two popular Drunk Elephant products, I decided that it was a good time to try them out.

When a product is as expensive as SkinCeuticals Vitamin C serum, there are always going to be duplicates waiting in the wings, waiting for you to try them. The tricky thing is finding out which dupe is actually worth your money—the last thing you want to do is spend money on a bunch of duplicates that don’t work. You might even end up spending as much as the real thing would have cost in the first place.