IPSY Gone Wrong, Be A BombShell Should Be Ashamed

Every month I eagerly await for the sneak peak posts, stalk my tracking number, and practically tackle my mail man when the shiny pink envelope arrives. I love Ipsy, it is such a fun concept and a great way to sample new products at an affordable price. For $10 a month one gets a whole lot of awesome in her monthly Ipsy Glam Bag. The typical bag contains 5 products, most of which are considered full-sized or deluxe sized samples. Ipsy has a lot of well known brands in there bags and a wide variety of products.

It seems that with each bag someone out there finds something to complain about. They don’t like the consistency of a product, fake eyelashes, the shade of a product, or as of late the scent. I’m not one to buy into the terrible product smell hype. I figure people complain so they can get something for free or to create an internet witch hunt. However this month, its not hype its actual truth.

The June Glam Bag contains a full-sized Be A Bombshell Lash Out Mascara and I was super excited when I saw the product in my Glam room. I could not wait for my bag to arrive and well my excitement was quickly dashed to disappointment. The mascara smells horrid, as in burn your nose hairs off horrid. The scent thou extremely unpleasant was very familiar to me. Along MN highway 52 sits a fuel refinery called “Pine Bend.” I literally felt like I was in my Prius with the windows down driving by the refinery. I don’t need to go for a drive, I just pull of the damn cap to smell the refinery.

What gets me is this, I understand that somehow Ipsy is able to provide this service to us for $10 a month. I am sure they work out deals with companies to obtain full-sized products at a good value without taking a profit loss. I think its great, especially since Ipsy is a woman owned company out of San Francisco. However I am not down with putting the health of your customers at risk. Something tells me that the Be A Bombshell Lash Out Mascara did not pass their quality control departments test and they were left with a foul smelling product that they could not sell. Everyone loves a profit so I am sure they sold it to Ipsy for less than it was worth just so they could wash their hands of the bad batch.

Facebook was swirling with reports of horribly scented Be A Bombshell product and soon enough they posted a response on their company Facebook page. This response is complete Bull Shit, as in how do you expect your consumer to put foul smelling mascara on their eyelashes. Some women have reported a burning sensation on their eyelids when they applied the Be A Bombshell Mascara that they received in the Ipsy bag. Yet as a company they are claiming that the horrible smell is completely normal and that they chose to leave the fragrance out. Or maybe the fragrance was simply forgotten to be added into this batch and they knew there would be backlash if they sold it to consumers. So instead of selling it to a consumer, they found a company to buy it and that company could take the blame for the bad product. When a problem occurs we always go back to the source to get resolution, in this case Ipsy is our source. Ipsy is getting the brunt of the backlash while Be A Bombshell is washing their hands of there horribly smelling product. It doesn’t matter how many times you wash your hands, you are still going to stink Bombshell.

Ipsy is not free from blame and they to need to put people before profits. If I were Michelle Phan (she is the CEO and Founder of Ipsy) I would be ashamed of myself and my company. I bet she would not even touch this foul smelling shit and would probably throw it away. Yet, it was deemed safe for us to use and we were told its perfectly fine. Ya know PG&E told the citizens of Hinkley CA, that Chromium 6 was perfectly fine and that it wouldn’t hurt them. Well long story short it was determined that Chromium 6 was detrimental to humans, and an entire town took on PG&E and won. Just because a company claims a product/chemical is safe doesn’t mean its safe for human consumption or use.

Be A Bombshell and Ipsy, just do us all a favor and own it. Own your foul smelling mascara and just come out and say “we off loaded a bad batch to Ipsy.” Fix it and send us your normal version of the Lash Out Mascara. Because as of right now, I don’t want to buy any of your products and I am quiet fearful of them at the moment. Don’t be a PG&E, or a Merck, or a Monsanto or a Ford Pinto, just own your shit and fix it. Otherwise your customers are going to lose faith in your brand and you will not be able to gain new customers to make up for the loss in profits, because you have a bad reputation.