2010 In Review

Posted on Sunday, at • 293 views

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2010 In Review

Once upon a time, when I was a wee zygote and dinosaurs had only recently gone extinct, the first Christmas decorations would timidly poke their noses out of hiding over Thanksgiving weekend, and the whole aisles of paper, bows, decorations and toys would show up December 1st. Then when I was a pre-teen, everything showed up on Thanksgiving weekend. Then when I was driving, the line of introduction was pushed to mid-November. Now, you can catch the first bits of plastic holly coming out of hiding in late October (and in some places, they'll start coyly hinting at Christmas decorations after Labor Day.) So the first weekend of November is not too soon to do a year-in-review post, is it? No. Onward.

This obviously doesn't cover everything that happened this year. This only covers what made it onto my radar - and while I'm a beauty blogger, I'm not the hardcore omnivore or niche specialist….so I expect that this will be a very rapid skimming of events.

On the GBC front, Tales of Corporate Fuckwittery

OPIdiocy In March 2010, nail polish creator / retailer OPI sued TransDesign and several other etailers for selling their products without proper agreements...or something. The exact charge was "copyright infringement": they were concerned that some of these etailers were selling diverted product. Since the etailers were selling OPI polishes at half retail cost, and that was the only way many folks would buy OPI polishes, folks began rethinking their decision to support the company. In May, OPI began sending legal takedown notices to bloggers for showing promo photos who had, for years, showcased the upcoming OPI collections and whipped beauty bloggers into an anticipatory frenzy. No explanation was offered. No apology was offered. One of their excuses was that other companies would steal their ideas...grimly amusing, when you looked at the OPI Swiss collection versus the China Glaze Vintage Vixen collection. There were five dupes between the two collections, China Glaze had promoted their collections (and sent PR samples) out months before OPI's Swiss collection was more than a list of polish names on a few forums...and OPI is claiming that blogs are a huge leak? Then later in the year, OPI goes up for sale. So all of their bullshit was gussying themselves up for a corporate suitor. "No, look, we're not cheap, really we're not!! All the publicity? All the mentions on blogs? You won't find any company that makes polishes that are as admired as ours!!" Except Zoya, who has more colors than OPI and whose polishes cost less and last longer; or China Glaze, whose polishes can also be used as nail stamping polishes and regular nail colors; or - even more weirdly - Sally Hansen, a dark-horse candidate in the nail polish race that for years was known for their drugstore polishes...and who suddenly redesigned their bottles and brushes, reformulated their polish, and released several collections and colors including the instant blogger favorite Hidden Treasure. So no, OPI, you're not cheap. You're just arrogant, entitled, and also perhaps hoping that your prospective buyer is so stupid as to not be able to do a bit of research and find what -=other=- baggage they'll be getting...and maybe not buy, after all, even after you spent all this time tarting yourself up.

I stick by my conviction not to buy any more OPI products, not even the polishes made exlusively for places like Sephora...but now it's for so many more reasons. (For those of you who think OPI pulled a stupid but aren't going so far as to forswear their products entirely, some etailers' pipelines appear to still be open and the newer collections are showing up, even after the initial "we are phasing out all of our OPI products" notices that went up this summer. The per-bottle prices have gone up...but you're still paying less than retail.) Addendum: I guess OPI will be suing Target some time soon, because this summer when I was in Target and looking at their OPI display, I noticed that all of the bottles (well, all 2 dozen or so that I specifically looked at)...had rough patches on the backs of the bottles. Right about where the serial numbers would be. Aherm. Or maybe they don't care because Target is not selling them below retail?

From the Polish Police blog comes this wicked snippet:

In the meantime, people on Makeup Alley are brandishing their wit and coming up with hilarious new polish names for OPI. My favorites include Blue My Chances, Payback Black, Here Today… Jail Tomorrow, Have You Seen My Lawyer?, I’ll See Hue In Court, OPI Wish You All Paid Retail, Pink Another Brand Now, Orange You Going To Like Paying Retail? and Suzi Says Subpoena.

I am not registered on MUA, and from what I've overheard from others, it's as full of drama as...well, as any large popular internet forum is. So I will continue to stay away. But these polish names gave me a chuckle.

Not all publicity is good publicity M*A*C released another collaboration-collection with fashion house Rodarte. The collection and individual items were named after the maquiladora border-town of Juarez, Mexico, where women and girls are forced to labor ridiculously long hours in factories for an absurdly tiny sum of money...and if they object or try to improve their lives or the lives of their friends and family, they're beaten, raped and killed. The local law enforcement doesn't do much to help these women and may notify the gangs of "troublemakers", because the factories are too profitable for the local economy and the thugs that run it. Apparently during the months-long buildup to this campaign, no one at M*A*C thought to actually check on what or where Juarez was or what it might be (in)famous for...or they knew full well, and were just going to ride the wave of controversy all the way to the bank. I have no words. However, thousands of other beauty-bloggers did. The collection was eventually pulled, and a donation made to help the girls and women of Juarez.

SOLD!! Bare Escentuals was bought by Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido last January - around the same time that The SheSpace announced its closing. The deal caused some concern among the BE diehard fans, but also brought a bit of hope that with new owners might come new colors, some new products, and perhaps better fill levels. Annoyingly enough, more of the kits released last year contained mini-size eyeshadows (.28 grams / .01 ounces), there were quite a few repeats and uses of readily-available colors, and the fill levels on the larger colors did not reliably improve. However, the Buxom line at Sephora continues to expand (which I love, because I've become a total buxom-lip-aholic), and several older colors were brought back - either in kits or as individuals. I picked up Ell-If-I-Know, which is a gorgeous very pigmented blue sparkle, Trophy Wife, a lovely yellow-gold shimmer, and Dakota, a deep purple-black shimmer that looks amazing with my eyecolor. I even managed to snag Heaven blush (which is nice, but not as much of a personal favorite as Posh...which -=still=- isn't available individually. Get on that, Shiseido/BE!!) As happens with any changing product line, some of the items that debuted were kind of "meh" - for example, the much-ballyhooed Buxom Stay There shadows have a wider range of colors than MAC or Benefit's cream shadows, but they cost more per ounce and don't perform as well. People also seem divided about the new High Shine colors, in part because of the cost per ounce...but largely because of the packaging. I don't want an applicator that goes right back into the product and stays there, with all the bacteria that may be on it; and most people, unlike me, are not repotting fiends.

IndieLand

About Face does another about face At the beginning of 2010, The SheSpace announced that she'd be closing the larger portion of her business, concentrating on the Hope Quest concept (eye color quads combined with inspirational messaging). She put all her inventory on sale, re-released old collections, put out two new grab bags, and created one "final" collection. The closing sale lasted for a few months, but she finally closed the doors in early May...and soon after, Bad Heather opened up Eye Couture Cosmetics, where the "more colorful, wilder" shades would be sold. The products were still in 3-gram sifterless jars - which would doubtless leak in transit, the way so many of TSS' jars had. They were still $4 a jar - which, for colors that were often not too heavily pigmented, seemed a little excessive. Some said that the colors didn't look all that new; but another difficulty I personally had with The SheSpace was that about half the time, the pigments would look significantly different on the skin than they did in the product photo. For longer-time customers, who had been with Heather's Twisted Fayte company, this was second verse, same as the first. Then a few days ago came the announcement: About Face/Heatheresque/Eye Couture Cosmetics is closing entirely. Really. Totally. Utterly. After ten years in the business, she's clearing out and shifting her focus to something other than mineral makeup. (I think that, like Gwyneth Paltrow, Heather found that people aren't too willing to pay money for slips of paper with inspirational sayings on them, when they could make them themselves and design them however they wanted. The desire to spread positive inspirational messages was wholly good and good-hearted...but if it's something people can make themselves fairly easily, they'll do that. Most people these days have a computer and a color inkjet printer. Not everyone, not even most DIY mavens, knows how to mix micas, bases, binders, and ingredients to help with slip and adhesion...to create eyeshadows, eyeliners, blushes, et cetera.)

Everyday Minerals apparently not so "everyday" any more EDM was one of the first companies I bought mineral makeup from. They had fairly inexpensive products, an approachable, easy-to-navigate website, and an acceptable if not truly broad selection of colors. Their eyeshadows weren't always the greatest quality (some were, some weren't, it was about 75%/25% for me) but one could maximize savings by using their 45% discount for buying 11 or more "fullsize" items. In late 2009, the company's forum was shut down...and I remained blissfully unaware, as I wasn't a participant and hadn't actually been to the company's webstore in six months. In late May 2010, I went to see the newest colors from EDM and tried to find the forum and its swatch-photos. Instead, I found details. Lots of details. The 45% discount was still in place, there were a few shadows that I still wanted (Anna Karenina, which I eventually got), and there were a few kits that were a decent deal even if the discount wasn't applied to them. I made a few final sweeps through, got my goodies, and headed off...only to notice that, in September, EDM underwent another massive change. They got rid of their customer discounts, shuffled their web site again, raised their prices (what used to cost $2.50 now cost $4.50 and came in a bit of packaging that most definitely has its detractors), and shifted marketing focus again. From what I've been able to determine, they haven't improved the quality of the product, they've just raised the price. I'm selfishly glad that I got what I did when I did, before the prices went up and the discounts went away. The blushes are decent, on par with some of the sheerer blushes from Bare Escentuals; but the eyeshadows, for the most part, are fairly poor quality. The worst of them are extremely sheer and don't adhere well, while the average is only lightly pigmented and has virtually no shimmer, even for the shades that marked "sparkle". When one could buy 2.5 grams for $3.30, and would effectively pay $.75 a gram, the eyeshadows were somewhat worth the cost. The misses (Floating Feathers, Cherry Fizz, Leaps and Bounds, Chamomile) were balanced out by the hits (Anna Karenina, Jane Eyre, Southern Belle, I'm Keeping Your CDs). EDM appears to be trying to position itself as a lower-cost alternative to Bare Escentuals...with a trying-so-hard-to-look-handmade, "green" "eco-friendly" personality. I don't know that they'll succeed. Their brushes are not worth the money asked; their eyeshadows are on par quality-wise with lower-end drugstore cosmetics; their customer service reps need a bit of training in...well, customer service; their lip colors tend to be mostly warm shades; their foundations are chalkier and - for me - a worse color-match than Bare Escentuals; and they seem to have the occasional quality control issue. (I'd say putting an ingredient into their foundations and blushes, then trying to discredit lab tests and evade responsibility when a customer has a significant negative chemical reaction, counts as a pretty big "quality control issue".)

Let's get together...and bully people When customers receive substandard or outright bad products or service, they used to have the following broad options: 1) stand in the customer service bay and demand satisfaction/restitution; 2) go home and seethe impotently; 3) write a letter which may or may not get results; 4) suck it up and deal. They might tell their neighbors, but unless the offense was truly and universally outrageous, word may not spread beyond their own circles of friends and acquaintances. Now we have the internet, which allows people to communicate more easily with more people. It's also horrifying for the same reason. It's that much easier for peoples' worst tendencies to come to the fore and be exercised, instead of exorcised. Suddenly, people can take their legitimate anger at poor service and / or substandard product(s) and launch a personal crusade, instead of a campaign to get that specific behavior changed or their specific damages compensated. That's kind of what Jenna Whitman, formerly of Stardust Cosmetics, participated in. Several former customers of the company Aromaleigh - many of whom apparently had quite legitimate reasons for being outraged at the service and treatment they received from that company's owner - got together, started a forum called Rant for the Ugly, and proceeded to eviscerate the woman's character (not merely her business practices, but her personal life). They speculated about her marriage, the death of a family member, her home and family life, her mental and emotional stability, and more. Instead of attacking the products and service with the intent to educate other consumers and bring about a change for the better, they attacked the person and - whether they were aiming for this outcome or not - crystallized the owner's decision to close her company. Jenna Whitman, who was then the owner of an active competitor of Aromaleigh, started sharing SEO tips to lace the search engines with all of their arguments against Aromaleigh and its owner (and, hey, wow, suddenly Jenna's company goes "on hiatus" and is now "closed indefinitely".) Aromaleigh eventually made the announcement of closure in June 2010, and the final day will be November 15 2010. The Rant 4 the Ugly forum is no longer active; but since I'm such a cynic, I think this means that instead of learning how to research and provide information, then stand back and let people do with that information as they please, the people who started and participated in that forum have simply gone off to regroup somewhere else and will next aim their vitriol at another person, not giving a fat damn about any collateral damage they may cause to other customers who may depend on those products (or may just like the quality and overall value.) Jenna Whitman is apparently trying to wait out the storm, and - who knows - may try and go on with her life and her cosmetics career once people have stopped blogging about what she did. I feel badly for the folks who genuinely enjoyed Stardust Cosmetics' products, since they've lost that resource indefinitely; but I do hope that all of the admins and moderators of that forum, and every other forum like it, reap what they sow. The owner of Aromaleigh most definitely has, several times over. Unfortunately, her former customers are all paying the price right along with her.

I'm quite selfishly glad that I was able to load up on Aromaleigh's corrector powders, blushes, and eyeshadows before it all went away. I'm also selfishly glad that I don't have chemical sensitivities, so when I do go searching for replacements I will only have to worry about how well they work and how much they cost. I won't have to be quite so concerned about every single ingredient, and whether a given substance or combination might give me huge rashes, weeping sores, or some other expensive, painful, possibly permanently damaging reaction.

...but not everything has been bad Well, that was quite a lot of suckitude, wasn't it? But it's easy to remember the negative stuff, especially when it was so very splashy-negative. Tomorrow I'll kick off Buxom Week - showcasing Bare Escentuals' buxom lip sticks and polishes - and list the good things that happened in the beauty world this past year. There were some!! There always are!! I just want to start this series off by getting the negatives out of the way, then finish on a positive note. (And doubtless the other beauty bloggers' year-end wrapups, which will doubtless come closer to the actual end of the year, will have other views and news items and stuff that happens between now and December 31. Hopefully there won't be much more bad stuff.)

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