What Happened To Seint Makeup? Explained
Seint Makeup, formerly known as Maskcara Beauty, is caught up in a pretty troubling controversy at the moment.
Here’s how it all went down. As reported by The Cut, Seint Makeup is a beauty company started by Cara Brook in 2013. The company’s modus operandi was diversifying beauty and creating products for all types of people, regardless of skin type and tone. They’ve gotten mixed reception to their products so far, as many people have argued that their product quality is poor.
Their artist program that kicked off in 2017 was where it all went wrong. The goal of this initiative was to platform and highlight influencers and artists showing off beauty products. If you’re familiar with shady corporate schemes, you probably know where this is going. This program has since come under fire for being multi-level-marketing (MLM) in disguise.
How MLM scams work is by recruiting distributors or “artists” to hawk their products to other consumers who, in turn, also get recruited by the same distributors. In theory, distributors are supposed to make money from products sold, and the company saves costs using this distribution model. But in reality, this is just a pyramid scheme with extremely low success rates for distributors. Even worse, you’re more likely to lose a ton of money doing MLM, as distributors need to make hefty upfront payments to receive inventory. John Oliver explained this concept best in his phenomenal video on MLM.
The program got even more exploitative when they announced, last week, their plan to drop all compensation for recruitment and team building, instead pivoting to affiliate program rewards. This means that distributors only get compensated through sales, tanking the meager compensation paid out already.
Distributors are not happy at the moment. An artist by the name of Sarah Aulbrook said, “A lot of people are emotionally in it right now, and it’s hard when you suddenly have your income ripped from underneath you.” Although, Aulbrook also mentioned that since she was doing affiliate work to begin with, the new change doesn’t affect her like it does others.
Numerous others aren’t in the same position and have taken to places such as r/antiMLM, a subreddit devoted to protesting against multi-level marketing scams. One user by the name of u/marlyyy said, “I signed up because I had a lapse in judgment and I fell for the social media marketing. Some of these girls make it seem so glam and they look amazing, have tons of money it seems and all these followers. I hate the makeup. It’s terrible and I can’t sell this to a single soul. I also don’t believe in MLM at all, so I’m not sure why I did it.”
Pyramid schemes are wildly parasitic, and it’s so awful that companies like Seint Makeup have ensnared people into their trap with a false promise of prosperity. We previously covered a similar MLM scheme from the company Beautycounter, which is embroiled in its own controversy at the moment.
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