Written By Frosty Rose

One of the things that first attracted me to Mary Kay was the equal opportunity aspect of it. We all start with the same Starter Kit. And each of us has the opportunity to make from that kit what she wishes. It could be a “free” car. It could be fabulous trips all across the world. It could be the ability to stay home and raise your kids. Or it could just be some extra girlfriends and fun money. That was the pitch that sold me. And it sounded good. I wanted to be able to be myself, my authentic self, and to drive my own success. And Mary Kay sounded like the perfect opportunity to do that.

The retraining of my authentic self started gradually with quasi-motivational sayings like “She doesn’t have anything you can’t get fixed.” I can’t tell you how many times my director intoned those words.

And at first, the changes were very small. Dress professionally (always in a black skirt and white top). Have your makeup done every time you go out. After all, you wouldn’t get your hair cut by a slob, would you? Be image-conscious! So I scraped together a professional outfit that I wore to every event. And I learned how to apply makeup (my previous routine had included clear lip gloss and mascara on fancy nights). And I started having success. The success proved the validity of the tropes I was being fed, so I kept following my leaders.

Like an abusive relationship, the demands to “fix myself” grew increasingly insidious. It makes me sick to think back on some of the things I thought. And some of the things I said.

There was the Success Meeting early on that I finally convinced one of my new recruits to join me for. She was eager, but so self-conscious around all the glamour. A skunk had snuck under her house the night before and everything she owned smelled like it. But she came anyway. She showed up to go up, just like our training said to do. The Cadillac (now dational) director made an exceptionally rude comment about the smell and I could see the light leave that consultant’s eyes. I never saw her again. But I was told it was just a numbers game—enough numbers and I would find the lifers. It was her choice to disappear.

Then there was the Red Jacket Retreat—for the elite consultants to gain extra training. At that retreat, the national made a mean comment about the waitress’s choice of career—she could be doing so much more with her life, why was she wasting it here in this dumpy little restaurant? By that time, I agreed with the national and laughed along with the joke.

The most shameful moment was when I made the decision to continue hounding a new consultant for her inventory order. She said she was committed to a $3,600 order, and her financing was approved. She just needed to hit send. And I needed her to. It was the last day of the month and that order would have put us into car qualifications. But her daughter was in the ER. And I kept calling. She, very rightfully, ghosted me. For a long time, I just couldn’t understand what had happened.

It took ten years for me to be sucked into the fog enough, to lose myself enough, that I really started fitting in and doing what everyone else was doing—asking consultants who were never going to sell to order more and more. Bringing on fake consultants and activating them “with their permission.”

And loading up my own inventory to the point where I was suffocating. And guess what? It worked! I earned directorship. And all the accolades that came with it. What I didn’t realize was that the achievement also came with a near total loss of integrity on my part. The woman I was before Mary Kay was a vague memory, barely recognizable under the layers of glitter and makeup.

At DIT week, I came to grips with the fact that I had put my family over $25,000 in debt for this “job,” much of which my husband was unaware of. I broke down to one of the nationals who was training that week. She empathized. She’d been there, too! She knew how I felt. When she completed her Cadillac, she was $75,000 in debt and her husband was clueless! But what she found was that she paid all that off easily with her commissions. Wait, what?? She was in that deep going into CADILLAC? The pinnacle of success for a director? Something wasn’t adding up. But I wasn’t ready to question it yet.

I came home from that week and made a tearful confession to my husband. I laid out the extent of the mess I had created. And I promised—no more ordering on credit cards! I scrounged around for odd jobs I could do while I was building my unit, working my business, and raising my family. I was berated for taking those jobs—a cat who chases two mice won’t catch either! I needed to focus on growing my unit. But the truth was that my unit wasn’t paying me.

Inevitably, we came to a moment of truth. My unit was over $2,000 away from minimum production, and if we didn’t hit it, I’d lose it all. I agonized over the decision. My director told me I HAD to make up the production somehow, even if it meant ordering the whole thing myself. If it was to be, it was up to me! After all, if I lost my unit, I didn’t get to keep any of my second- and third-line consultants. My husband agreed—just this once—to let me put it on a credit card. So I did. And I nearly threw up. Because this time, I went in with eyes wide open. I knew how hard that was going to be to sell. I knew the financial tailspin I was creating for my family. And I did it anyway.

And I regretted it almost instantly. I had a meltdown over the next few days and decided it wasn’t worth it. I refused shipment of the order and all five of those boxes went back to corporate. In that moment, I gave up on directorship.

It took me nearly three years to come to terms with my time in Mary Kay. To (mostly) stop beating myself up for my failures. I wasn’t failing forward to success—the sneaky truth is, no one actually does. We all just fail. And in our failure, we feed the machine with the consultants and orders it needs to keep it running through the next cycle. It’s a numbers game, after all. It was my choice to disappear.