Problems With Mary Kay’s Products
Written by Parsons Green
Talisha Freeman has a problem. She purchased inventory in December 2025. This month, she sold a customer a Shimmer Stick she had in inventory. The product was unusable because it wouldn’t twist up or down. She contacted the company and was told she needs to check each product when it arrives at her house. The company said consultants only have 90 days to report defective products. Does that mean she has to open every product she receives to make sure it’s working? She replaced the customer’s product herself, eating the cost of it since Mary kay wouldn’t stand behind it.
Laureen Stehle is shocked. Consultants should receive products that have a 3 year shelf life! She carries full inventory and this is not sustainable.
Kristi Mimbela wonders why the 1 year policy for customer satisfaction doesn’t apply.
Sharie Brumbaugh is having the same issue with the sticks. She threw hers away and didn’t bother trying to get her money back. She will replace product if this happens to her customers.
Piper Prinzi shares a helpful tip. If a customer has a reaction to a product, she doesn’t want to deal with the questions she’ll get when she does a product replacement. She’ll lie and say the customer prefers another product. Of course she’ll be honest if the product caused a medical issue.
Lizi Quinn rightfully states she’d be disgusted if she bought a product that had been opened. Why is the company doing this? Is the company trying to discourage consultants from having inventory?
Jeannie West laments that corporate is being ran by employees who have never worked in the field. Her part time consultants do not have time for this.
Karen Gummo agrees. Open product can become contaminated or stale.
Yajiara Luminosity signed up for Mary Kay in July 2025 and became a director in January. She has $5000 in inventory and will NOT be ordering more inventory.
Karen Saphos contacted THE Sherry West who assured her that product should be guaranteed for 1 year after it is purchased from the consultant. Why is customer service giving conflicting information?
Brigitte Iglay is also having an issue with the pencils. Is Ryan trying to cut out the sales force? Lisa Wehlmann feels Mary Kay has abandoned everything that Mary Kay Ash held dear. (INCLUDING NO PANTS!) She begs everyone to write write write!!!!
And finally Kay Georgina says what a lot of Pink Truthers are thinking. Why is there such a push for Mary Kay to require all consultants to opt out of binding arbitration before August 6th?
Visit the
“She replaced the customer’s product herself, eating the cost of it since Mary kay wouldn’t stand behind it.”
Mary Kay Corp 1, Consultant 0.
The consultant is Mary Kay Corp’s customer. MKC does not care about the consultant’s customer. MKC would love it if ALL consultants took care of product issues like this at the consultant’s expense!
Selling retail beauty products out of your home is so 20th century. There is no longer an underlying demand (or need) for door-to-door sales. Besides, selling overpriced junk to F+F is not sustainable, and it strains your relationships.
Time to get out, ladies.
That’s awful of Mary Kay. They should stand behind their money back gaurauntee. Consultants should check every product?! What the heck? Who wants to buy opened product?
The company says “you should only carry inventory you can sell in 6 months?” Hahahaha. The days of Mary Kay consultants are numbered.
I’m assuming the products have some sort of safety seals. The cosmetics I’ve bought over the years are either in blister packs or have those heat shrink bands around them, plus those little peel-off seals on bottles and tubes. And as often as not a retail box with cellophane, glue, or big hard to peel stickers. I certainly wouldn’t buy anything, especially something going on my skin, that didn’t have its safety seals. And anyone who knowingly tried to sell me damaged goods would get precisely zero of my money.
Bridget said “I think Ryan is trying to remove us.” Now you get it. If you read Pink Truth, you would have known this months ago.
I’m so curious to see how fast the company implodes once they get rid of their consultomers. Even if they lower retail prices, without huge inventory orders from newbies they’re cooked.
“Is Ryan trying to cut out the sales force? “
That seems to be the plan. These women are holding on to a sinking ship. They better find a life raft soon.
When are Nationals allowed to retire? Do they have to wait until December to announce for a January retirement?
Can they retire any time or do they have to wait until January?
I think they can retire at anytime, I’m not sure anything happens until the end of November~ most stay until they are vested,(5 years I think) and if they want to be a part of the emeritus ceremony, November of their last year is their last month.. December numbers don’t count..I think there was a football coach’s wife Carol, ( I think the coach was Bob… maybe at OU) who left mid year… and was at the emeritus ceremony at leadership conference in Jan..
It’s like when the company didn’t bother sending out all the Look Books that consultants had ordered, and gave consultants the onus of checking each customer if they got it, ONE BY ONE.
Just how much are the products going to be worth at ACTUAL RETAIL with ACTUAL COMPETITION? I’d love to see what prices land at a year after affiliate is launched.
Quality control is lacking.
They’re trying to shift the blame for their mistakes onto the consultomers: “it’s your fault because you didn’t open and test every item in your Pearl Star Inventory Order as soon as it hit your porch, even though it will make the whole batch unsellable because you’d have to remove tamper protection seals to do that.”
They’re making up random rules to cover their asses: “You’ve only got 90 days, even though this never applied before and we never bothered to let anyone know about it.”
The My Shop debacle seems designed to alienate as many consultomers as possible, not to mention the problem with it adding random items to orders and everything else. No other large online retailer would allow such a jacked-up site to remain… you know, that jacked-up for this long.
Then there’s the new consultant agreement with its icky binding arbitration clause, which will thin the herd still further by eliminating those who don’t or won’t sign. And it will further limit the rights of the remainder via curtailing the use of third-party apps, dictating what you’re allowed to do with your own legally obtained property, and what recourse you’ll have.
Don’t let’s forget the new agreement has that ominous bit about not buying more inventory than you can sell within a few months, which is now being echoed by corporate’s phone drones.
Also, there’s that thing about Something Big coming in late 2026. It’s almost August. This is late 2026. Tick tock.
They never cared about you, and now they’re being downright brazen about it. They’re announcing that they’re going to screw you over in a fairly major way while blaming you for everything: “You didn’t check your inventory. You bought too much inventory. You signed the contract that lets us do this. You should have read it carefully before you signed it. You should have taken advantage of the opt-out while you had the chance.”
Beat them at their own game. Return your inventory and get out now while you’ve got the chance. Then come here and tell us all about it.
But hey! If any of these Kaybots get fed up enough to give it up and get an actual job, MK Corp has an opening for a packaging engineer! Get paid an actual salary and benefits while focusing on securing quality packaging for the products so that these problems don’t continue! And if MK goes affiliate, while the consultants won’t be needed, corporate specialists still will be.
https://marykay.referrals.selectminds.com/jobs/packaging-engineer-ii-2323
Oh and for the ones who are saying they should ask for a supervisor when they call to complain…well, that position is open too!
https://marykay.referrals.selectminds.com/jobs/supv-customer-success-interaction-services-us-2319
And with all the problems/issues the sales force is complaining about (justified of course) why are these people NOT canceling their consultant agreements and sending back inventory?
A class-action lawsuit? Well, now! If that happens, you know that the lawyers will be devouring Pink Truth looking at the evidence – the testimonies that have been snapshot and posted here. I imagine Tracy will be hearing from them in some capacity. The timeline is here.
There will be no class action lawsuit. The new consultant agreement states any dispute brought to arbitration has to be individual, consultants can’t team up or bring a class action petition.
As for the ones that opt out, I bet Corporate will find a reason to terminate them. Can’t have potential troublemakers lurking about.
Exactly. The company knows that when they finally “ pull the rug out” and leave these directors and consultants with no commission check, they will possibly band together and sue the company. An individual is less likely to sue because of the attorney costs. I also agree with you they will find a way to terminate the ones who opt out.
Some are finally catching on that they’re in the Mary Kay Really DGAF About You Era.
Hint: They never really did, they just hid it better with pink glitter and smoke.
Years ago I received product in an order that had another consultant’s sticker on it. Those were the days when we were told returned product, for any reason, was recycled– MK goes green dontcha know. I used product replacement to get new “unstickered” products.
I thought I remembered something about not putting stickers on products from the agreement, so I went back to it. And found item 4a:
“You may not delete, add, modify, tamper with, or alter any labels, materials,
or packaging of Mary Kay® Products or associated Product literature. This is
to ensure safe use of the Products and compliance with applicable laws and
regulations.”
There’s no way to check individual products for function without deleting or tampering with labels and packaging! So if you follow their damn advice, you’re violating the agreement, breaking the law, and kicking your own butt out with no recourse!
Sweet jumpin’ Jesus, the deeper you go, the scummier it gets.
That happened to me, back when I newbie, on some of my INITIAL order. The stickers said she was a Sales Director. Now that I more about Mary Kay, I’m happy for this stranger, that she got out. I wish I knew then what I know now.
Getting product with someone else’s stickers on them, I mean. My response was supposed to be in response to SuzyQ.
If I got opened product, I’d think I was getting some else’s USED product (GROSS!) and technically I would be, and wouldn’t order again.
Nationals, RETIRE NOW. This is your last chance! Even so, if an announcement is made this fall and Nationals aren’t given a chance to retire then, it may already be too late.
What they’re telling people is “don’t you dare sell that at retail”. They actually don’t like retail because that magically-ever-elusive 50% profit – the few times it does exist – is money to a consultant and not directly to MKorp. That’s why personal use consultants exist.
Can you imagine anybody, any company, anywhere, allowing just anyone to bypass a retail profit margin? In fact, actively encourage it. Could it be that they’re… already paying a retail profit margin?
From MKCs perspective, the salesforce is paying full retail, because the sales force is the true end customer! What happens to the product after it is sold to the consultant is of no real concern to MKC. They have their money.
Even if the consultant returns it, MKC likely still makes a little money. The “cost” of the product is likely less than 10% of what MKC charges consultants. Plus they claw back all the upline commissions. The MK consultants carry all the risk…just like most MLM companies.
But they sure care if the consultant resells it on Amazon or eBay or overseas. Those are sales not going to corporate.
If the consultant really was purchasing from a wholesaler and selling at retail, the wholesaler wouldn’t care how the retailer sells it.
Good point! Also, if retailing the product was the purpose, consultants would buy from GOOB sales instead of paying full price to purchase from Mary Kay. Their margins would be higher this way.
But then they won’t get “production” credit. Which shows that product sales are not the primary purpose. Ordering and recruiting are the real purpose…to get production credit. Selling? Not so much.
BINGO!
Mary Kay retail prices are obscene. The only people paying full MK retail prices:
— are family/friends making pity purchases
— live under a rock and don’t know my better
*any better*
Yeah, that, too.
Anybody see this? I wonder if the order date was June 30th? Who’s her leaders?
https://www.wyff4.com/article/company-card-fraud-mary-kay-purchases/73230847
She has to be someone’s downline. No way did she steal a credit card just to buy merch to resell for profit as there is no demand for Mary Kay.
Trying to finish Queen’s court of “Sales” perhaps. Ha ha ha
From a manufacturing perspective, I would think that MKC logs returns from “customer changed their mind” differently than “product is defective”…if they want to keep their QC stats looking really good, then it’s better to say something was replaced due to customer preference (“It wasn’t defective, customer just preferred something different!”). When I was a sales rep for a manufacturer, we definitely wanted to keep our defect rates low. Just a thought.
I still purchase products from a cousin (I know better but…….) and I was a sucker and bought those eye shadow sticks. They suck. Broke right away. So I tried to salvage it for a bit and just use my finger or a brush, then realized it was just frustrating so I threw it away. The other one didn’t get used because the color just was weird. I looked on Amazon and found a cheaper one with great reviews and a million colors. So, why is anyone still ordering products from them? For the poor consultants, they try to sell a product and get a few dollars of profit and now they are supposed to open it all? When do these ladies just cut their losses? What is in it for them anymore? (Asking for the cousin who will probably spend good money to go to Ft. Worth……..)