Ok, so Sephora has (had?) a negotiation with Disney that they would release a make-up line inspired by the Disney princesses, appropriately titled the Disney Princess Collection by Sephora. Each section/release of the collection was inspired by a princess, the first one being Cinderella, the second being Jasmine, and the final being Ariel.
As you can imagine, having missed out on the Cinderella collection and being unimpressed by the Jasmine collection, I was pretty excited to see what they would pull out for Ariel. Ariel isn't my favorite princess (though for a very, very long time she was), but she was by far my favorite princess represented in the collection and knew that I at least had lots of greens and blues to look forward to in the color palettes. When I got my first glimpse at the large eyeshadow palette, I was not at all disappointed:
I was looking forward to this palette. I found out about it the day after the first customer service snafu where they had an "accidental" release of a few of them to "select" VIBs, leaving lots of other VIBs and card holders irritated that they weren't notified. Sephora at one point said that it was an accident and at another point said that it was an intentional prerelease to VIBs. The erroneous information (because one of these situations has to be a lie told to somehow help cover Sephora's ass), has created a bit of a backlash, but most were satisfied knowing that it would at least get another release with more stock of the product and ample warning to everyone in July.
The good part of the few palette's to go out in the prerelease were early swatch tests and reviews from established make-up gurus. The reviews were somewhat mixed, but I was still excited. I still wanted to spend my hard-earned cash on this specific item from the collection and this item only. I immediately signed up to receive an email notification when it was back in stock back in June, and waited patiently for a month.
Then finally, that day came earlier this week. I was in class when my phone beeped at me, indicating that I had an email. Fifteen minutes later, when class was out, I saw that Sephora had emailed me about the palette being back in stock, and I immediately darted home to purchase it (which, considering my commute, took about 30 minutes). By the time I was in front of my computer and ready to order, only an hour had passed since I received my email and the palette was once again out of stock. What gives, Sephora? I looked around and saw that I definitely was not the only one. People were complaining all over their Facebook, the product page in the reviews, Reddit, Twitter, etc. It was not a cute look and Sephora simply responded to every single inquiry about an online restock with "the items will be available in your local Sephora starting in early August". This, to me, was unacceptable. Knowing full well the potential popularity of this product and the hype it has been receiving from both Sephora and it's customers, it makes no sense that they only made enough to sell to a few hundred people who managed to snag them during the hour that they were up.
The day wore on and, of course, I was still fuming about it the next day. I had been considering the potential to get one of the palettes at one of my local Sephoras (I'm pretty comfortable with the manager at the one inside JCPenney and considered giving him a call about the release date and if he'd hold one for me), but I sincerely do not want to reward Sephora for their terrible customer service and game of cat-and-mouse with the release of this collection by hunting down the palette and giving them my money anyway.
Then this morning (well, now yesterday morning) I got another email from Sephora at 7:15am. It told me that the Ariel eyeshadow palette was back in stock. When I clicked on the link, the item had been removed from the site entirely.
My mind has been made up. At least for this particular collection, Sephora will not be getting my money. As much as I can't stand ULTA, I will probably start shopping there again and I will make a point of not ALWAYS going to Sephora for all of my cosmetic needs, because they don't deserve it. I'm not boycotting the company, but I could care less how many points I have/need to get certain perks and I no longer care about being a VIB. Some might think that this is harsh, but I don't have time to be jerked around.
What do you think? Am I being too harsh? I'm interested in hearing what other people have to say about this whole thing and I hope Sephora actually addresses the issues involved at some point to the public.
*sigh* Until next time, my dears,
♥ Princess Kisha ♥
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