The Aromaleigh Drama

Moar makeup blogging!

Aromaleigh has been The Big One of indie mineral makeup since the late 90's.  They have...had...over 300 shades of eyeshadow, gorgeous, complex colors, mattes and shimmers and sparklebombs in every color of the spectrum and then some, sheer and opaque, limited edition collections a few times a year...plus smaller lines of foundation, primers, and lip balms/colors.  Miss K (founder and owner) discontinued the lippies early this year, and the foundations a couple months ago, but there was no hint of intent to close entirely.  Until today.  Aromaleigh is closing, what's in stock is all there will ever be, and when it's gone it's gone.

It's funny.  I'd never actually ordered AL eyeshadows before; I'd gotten samples, because their policy was two free samples with every order, but I hadn't actually used them yet.  Two of the samples were bright reds from the Rocks! collection, so really only useful for special looks I hadn't had reason to do yet, and the others...well they looked *nice* in the bag, but not great, and I tended to forget I had them.  But the other day, I learned that this is pretty common with AL shadows, what you see in the bag is NOT what they look like on the skin.  I'd gotten a sample, Mireille from the Bete Noir collection, that was described on the site as a cool purple with pink and copper sparkles.  But when I got the sample baggie, it looked like a charcoal-grey-black with some purply shimmer and a few pink sparkles, so I never bothered to use it.  It languished in my makeup drawer, unused, until I was putting together a blue and purple look for Ozz's birthday Saturday, and I decided to give it a shot as a crease color just to darken the purple I'd already put there. 

OMG it was gorgeous.  Everything the description said, a rich opaque purple that simultaneously manages to be cool-toned and yet have sort of a fuschia shimmer to it.  I fell in love.  And I went back and started going through and wishlisting the AL shadows I wanted to try eventually.  I'm still interviewing for this job at Lane Bryant, so I figured I'd get around to ordering a few colors at a time once I had some income, right?

And then got the news this morning that AL was closing.  Suddenly I had to OMG GET EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW BEFORE IT'S SOLD OUT!!!  Thankfully, my mom helped me out and advanced me the next 6 weeks or so's worth of the money I'll be making cleaning her house for her, so I was able to place an order.  I got my entire wishlist, totaling a $250 value, for $175 since Miss K put the shop on clearance.  I'm glad I'll be able to get what I wanted (or at least most of it, hopefully, assuming it's not all gone by the time my order is at the front of the queue), but it's so strange to think of Aromaleigh going out of business. 

So why is this huge, apparently quite successful business closing its doors?  In a word: drama.  People being people, horrible politicking drama manages to show up in the weirdest of places sometimes.  High school marching band (oh, the politics of band parents and booster clubs are AMAZING, in the worst possible way).  And apparently, the online makeup community.

Miss K has a bit of a reputation in the indie makeup community.  People either love her, and support her unquestioningly, or hate her.  Her products are awesome, but from what I've heard she can be a bit of an asshole about any customer service issues that aren't clearly black-and-white.  People have shown evidence of her being a total shit and throwing 4-page-long tantrums at people, calling them names and accusing them of not appreciating her enough for daring to ask if something that went wrong with their order could be fixed please.  She'd been horrid enough at enough people that they even banded together to start the Rant4theUgly forums, which, depending on who you ask, are a bunch of troublemaking haters just trying to take down the biggest name in the industry, or a bunch of courageous souls informing the world of Miss K's evil.  I'm kind of in the middle - yeah, she's come off pretty assholish in the stuff I've seen, but the company and products were solid and it seemed if you stayed out of her way she'd stay out of yours, more or less.  I'm not here to do drama, I just want to buy sparkly stuff.

And then there was the Mineral Makeup Mutiny, started by Miss K under a pseudonym, a banding-together of MMU companies to expose and denounce "repackagers", a term for people/companies who purchase wholesale pigments (ingredients for making one's own colors of mineral eyeshadow) and instead of blending them to create unique shadows to sell, just "repackage" the wholesale pigments and resell them at hugely inflated prices.  A worthy idea, I thought - nobody likes the kind of person who more or less scams customers into buying wholesale crap, thus bringing down the reputation of the whole industry - but some people saw it as Miss K being dishonest by not admitting it was her/AL leading the MMM, and just trying to leverage an astroturfed movement to gain publicity and praise for her company. 

After the MMU was disbanded, there was the dustup with Jenna and Stardust Cosmetics.  Jenna, under a pseudonym (are we seeing a pattern here?) started "investigating" the formulation of AL's Rocks! eyeshadows, claiming that they were formulated with non-FDA-approved ingredients and therefore were not safe for use.  The issue was over the fact that the listed ingredients for Rocks! had a "may contain" section that listed some non-eye-safe ingredients.  According to some, this was AL using bad ingredients and playing that down with "may contain" while still selling unsafe cosmetics.  According to others, "may contain" was required even though those ingredients weren't actually IN the shadows, because the Rocks! shadows were being made on equipment that also was used to process other products which *did* contain the contested ingredients, so the Rocks! shadows might contain trace amounts of these unsafe ingredients even though they weren't in the actual formula.  I don't purport to know one way or the other.  The Rocks! line was pulled for "reformulation" shortly after Jenna's alter ego posted the emails she exchanged with Miss K, whether the one prompted the other or it's unrelated is all speculation at this point.  When it came out that it was Jenna and Stardust doing this investigation, there was a sharp divide in the community.  You either supported AL and felt Jenna was being dishonest in her snooping, or you supported Stardust and felt Jenna was just trying to do the right thing by making sure AL's makeup was safe.  The two camps attacked each other, sometimes getting pretty vicious, and in the end Jenna opted to close Stardust, saying that makeup was supposed to be fun and pretty, not dramatic and petty.  I was sad - I'd just started ordering from her and was looking forward to more - but it happens, life moves on.

And now, Aromaleigh is closing, with Miss K citing burnout from the drama:

I can't and won't provide a detailed explanation for this decision... those who know me well know that this has been a decision that has torn me in two for several months. Nothing I say or don't say can matter at this point. All I will say is "You've won... I'm gone. You can stop now..."
It's makeup. It's supposed to be fun, and empowering and beautiful. But it's all become ugly. More ugly than I ever imagined.

So.  A resonding FUCK YOU to everyone who felt the need to make an issue out of all of this.  Now we've lost both Stardust AND Aromaleigh to peoples' need to be petty and attack each other.  I hope you're all pleased with ruining - or at least putting a severe dent into - a lot of peoples' enjoyment of mineral makeup.  This is directed, by the way, at EVERYONE involved.  Miss K herself, Jenna, the Rant4theUgly people, the AL supporters who attacked Jenna, the Stardust supporters who attacked Miss K, EVERYONE.  If people could have just been mature about it and played nice, we wouldn't have been deprived, as a community, of two great makeup makers.  I'm lucky I was able to get a loan to stock up on AL.  Not everyone can do that.  And there are people who will come to the makeup community after the dust has settled and never have the chance to try AL products at all, only hearing about them as wistful memories. 

I'm going to go have a smoothie and grumble to myself about stupid people ruining things now.

Soooo....I'm back!

Oh, for all I know, nobody ever reads this anyway, so I'm announcing my presence to a metaphorical empty room.  W'ev.

So I've been all over the place of late.  School year finished about a month ago, and I completed my first straight-A semester EVER.  I'm quite pleased.  Particularly as one of the classes was Accounting, which is my kryptonite.  Anywho, with that done, I got back on the job-hunting wagon, almost got hired to cash control at Six Flags in Vallejo, except that I was referred to the job by my brother, who works security there, and they have a policy about not having family members in those two departments.  It makes sense, it's just frustrating, particularly as they hadn't managed to connect the dots and tell me so until after three weeks of various kinds of interviews, despite the fact that at every step I was asked "Who referred you?" and replied honestly, including the familial relationship and his department EVERY DAMN TIME. 

Turns out I dodged a bullet there, according to someone I know of who used to work that position.  It sucks.  Hugely.  And then not two weeks after that, my mom and I had gone to Lane Bryant (plus-size women's clothing store) to do some shopping with the freebie dollars she had accumulated before they expired.  As we usually do at LB, we had a stack of probably $500 worth of clothes between us at checkout.  So Eugenia, the saleslady who was checking us out, asked if I wanted to open my own LB account (Mom already has one) to take advantage of their first-purchase discount.  I told her I wasn't sure I'd qualify, since I'm unemployed.  She ran the approval anyway, it came through, and as we were checking out I joked with my mom that she'd have to help me pay the bill when it came due, what with the whole no-job thing...Eugenia handed me an application right then and there, I sat outside on a bench and filled it out and brought it right back, got a call back from the store manager less than 15 minutes later scheduling an interview for the next day!  I did well at that interview, did a second brief interview with the store manager a week later, and now I'm scheduled for an interview with the district manager to see if I'd be suitable for a management position!  Dude, seriously, I've never managed anything in my life, at work anyway.  But they just like me that much I guess, heh. 

So, interview Tuesday.  Wish me luck, internet!

I've also been accumulating and trying various bath/body/beauty products that I think I'm going to start reviewing here.  Why not?  Someone might stumble across them on Google or something.  Haus of Gloi's scrubs and lotions, One Hand Washes The Other's balm and Deep Black soap, Beauty In Balance's gel moisturizer (when it gets here), and the Maybelline lip stain I just picked up at Rite Aid.

Oh, and not that it matters anymore as they're discontinued and sold out anyway, but Aromaleigh's lip balm was not all it was cracked up to be - it was better than any drugstore product I'd ever tried, but it still had a slightly-too-solid texture and made my lips peel a little bit, just like everything else.  I'm way happier with OHWTO's balm.  But I'll blather more about that another time.