I first heard about Younique when my Facebook feed was bombarded with posts from two old school friends.
I was on maternity leave at the time with my 4 month old and hated the prospect of going back to work. My friends were pushing the mascara as it was about to be relaunched with ‘new and improved’ ingredients but I really couldn’t justify spending £23 on something I could get for a quarter of that price! However, there was a deal running on the presenters joining kit which meant I could get two mascaras and more makeup worth over £150 for £69 (allegedly – Timeless Vie) so I decided to join to get the half price makeup but never wanted to be active.
I was added to all the presenter groups and warmly welcomed by hundreds of lovely women, I felt like I was in an exclusive club! There was lots of chatter on the groups, lots of motivational talk and some of the women had brilliant tips and tricks so I decided that I was going to use my time off work to build up my business.
I was made to feel that I could be a total success and now that I had my daughter I thought it would be lovely to be able to work from home. I threw myself into the social media marketing, promoting the products on Facebook whenever my baby was asleep, adding lots of new Facebook friends, making connections and messaging all the women on my friends list! My exclusive purple and green elite leaders had hundreds of files to follow that could be copied and pasted into messages and as statuses, this was certain to make us hugely successful as long as we kept at it!
I posted on Facebook, instagram and twitter, making my Facebook profile all about positivity; we were told never to write anything negative as we were meant to look like we were loving life constantly, people would join us if they thought we were living the dream!
I bought lots of makeup for myself to try out so I could tell people all about it. I actually found a lot of the products sub par to the drugstore equivalents that I had been using and claims that the eyeshadows didn’t crease or the lipstains didn’t budge were false.
It didn’t take me long to realise that most of the presenters were struggling to sell anything.
It was about 6 weeks after joining when I felt like I was putting hours of time in each day and getting little to no sales that I reached out to my sponsor and my green elite. Turns out my sponsor was struggling just like me, she had started to put a lot of her own money into promoting the products, buying a stall at craft fairs and giving out free samples to entice people to buy but I had already spent a lot of money on products..I didn’t want to spend more before making any! My green elite and purple leaders didn’t have anything productive to say, the message was just to keep at it, message a hundred women a day and ‘fake it til you make it!’ They seemed to only be interested in the presenters that were making money lining their pockets!
I was told to get out more and talk to people about the makeup, at baby groups, the supermarket, anywhere I could strike up a conversation and sell, sell sell! When I posted on the groups saying I wasn’t keen on some of the products, a lot of the presenters agreed but we had to pretend to love everything, the only thing I liked was the mascara and I didn’t want to promote a product that I didn’t like, especially when they were so overpriced!
In September they launched their first liquid foundation and concealer. I so desperately wanted to love them but the concealer was so thick it caked on my skin and the foundation either slid off or cracked and separated on my skin within hours. When I posted to other presenters about my problems, the majority found the same! All these amazing after photos are taken immediately after application, it doesn’t show that it looks awful within an hour.
(Timeless Vie – like this foundation comparison below. Guess which foundation had the most oil & the least pigment…)
After a couple of months I was spending so much time on social media trying to sell and/or recruit that I was actually neglecting my new daughter! I decided then that I was not going to dedicate any more time or money as it just wasn’t worth it. As I then didn’t sell anything in three months my presenter status was suspended and then cancelled another three months later. The two old school friends that were doing well with Younique have since quit and jumped ship to a brand new MLM company, without even trying the products first!
I think this just shows that things aren’t always as they seem and direct sales is very fickle. I kept using the mascara after I left but the latest one dried out very quickly and was clumpy with a lot of fall out so I threw it out. I will never use a Younique product again and advise everyone not to bother. They are no better and often worse than much cheaper drugstore products, they are certainly not high end. I would never join a MLM company again either, the compensation is minuscule for the amount of work that has to go in and they have such a bad reputation that I now actively avoid them!
Timeless Vie 