Donate and Do Good!

So you have this perfume. You don’t want it anymore, and since you are a wonderful and highly attractive person, you’d like to find something charitable to do with it. Unfortunately, you used it once or twice (or fifty times), and most women’s shelters don’t accept used perfumes. What can you do? Scents of Self to the rescue! I’d like to host a perfume sale fundraiser for Refuge, a Captain Picard-approved UK charity that provides safe houses to women and children escaping domestic violence. I have quite a few items to donate, but to make this a really kickass fundraiser, we’ll need other donations, too! Please help me make this a perfumista’s dream event: a way to buy perfume and do good at the same time.

Now, let’s get down to the brass tacks:

How will this work? If you would like to donate an item(s) (yaaaaay!), please email me at scentsofself@gmail.com with pictures of these items. You will not be sending the items themselves to me. I will then post pictures of everyone’s items here on Scents of Self. The seller will mail their items directly to the buyer, not to me. I will compensate everyone’s shipping costs. I will be setting up a separate Paypal account specifically for this fundraiser. I will provide screenshots of the account every day or two to keep everyone informed of how much we have raised. When the fundraiser is over, I will donate every cent from that account to Refuge, and will post a screenshot of the receipt.

What kind of items can I donate? Pretty much anything is completely welcome. This is, of course, primarily a perfume sale (and both used and unused perfumes are 100% acceptable), but if you have a non-perfume item that you think others might be interested, please let me know! Some welcome non-perfume items might be books, teas, DVDs, other beauty items, cat toys, etc. I, for one, am definitely planning to sell a few books.

What is the deadline for donating items? Two weeks from now, let’s say?

Isn’t there already a beauty blogger’s auction? Indeed there is! Beauty Bloggers for Charity is a wonderful organization that benefits Doctors Without Borders. I felt that another fundraiser would not be superfluous for two reasons: the Beauty Bloggers for Charity auction mostly contains cosmetics and not perfume, and I wanted to support a cause that specifically helps women.

Will this be a sale or an auction? A sale, not an auction. Auctions stress me out.

Will you be claiming this fundraiser as a tax deduction? No, because I don’t know how to do that.

How do I know you won’t steal the money? I post on this website every day under my real name, Arielle Weinberg. I have, as they say on Law and Order: SVU, “extensive ties to the community”. I would never compromise my integrity as a perfume blogger (or as a human being!) by acting dishonestly with this money.