What happened to Younique?

[siriusblackcat]

It used to be everywhere, women trying to flog it all over Facebook with badly applied make up videos.
Now I never see it.
Has it been overtaken by Scentsy?

I know one of the top 'presenters' for younique in the uk. She's made millions from it.

However she has a lot of haters. Sold false dreams to a lot of women.

She still has a huge following but she's more about fitness than anything else. She now charges people to give them tips on how to lose weight in return. She's had loads of work done to herself - it's very unrealistic but people still fall for it.

I have however noticed her 'likes' and comments are way down on what they used to be on her pages. She would literally get hundreds of comments every time she went live on her pages. Now she gets 40/50.

It's nothing like it used to be

It's all Forex and travel now

The MLM bot I know has moved from Younique to another make up brand (begins with F, can’t remember its name though). Big launch in December…apparently she’s already earned her first holiday after only a month! At least she’s not on my feed every morning applying her make up though.

BBC Sounds has a wonderful series called “A Very British Cult” about life coaching MLMs in the uk

Only ones I have now (thank god) are travel.

Poor woman I don't think has sold any holidays at all, but I'm sure she must be paying fees to someone.

Oh other than Avon.

What’s the deal with the travel one?

A vague acquaintance has started calling herself a travel consultant and posting holiday pics all over social media, and saying she uses her businesses to get discounts on her own holidays but there isn’t any sort of suggestion that she is a travel agent for anyone else’s holiday plans.

Granted she goes on a lot of holidays, but her husband has a very highly paid job so it’s not surprising

@YouOKHun you made me laugh about my daughter's application compared to the demo!!
This was given by my sister who got it from a very large toy shop, she has definitely never been a rep. Very suspect stuff though, as well as DD having a stained face I have multi coloured swatch stains on my hands an up my arms. An interesting look for the morning. Looks like I've been in a fight!!

Forgot all about Younique! Had a colleague who wouldn’t stop badgering us about it, she bought in one of the demo kits and left it in the staffroom and we all swerved going in for there for about 2 weeks until she’d got the hint and taken it back again 😂 she was quite persistent but then you would be after sinking all that cash into buying whatever starter kit and then add ons - trying to recoup her ‘investment’ money, not even getting into profit.
She then moved onto Juice Plus and then she left our work (not because she had been successful enough to be a full time boss babe!) - no idea what she’s up to now but I daresay she’s not cruising about the town in a white Mercedes!

I see the odd FM perfumes post on my FB but thats about it....Im a bit sad about it really as the incessant boss babe posts used to give me a really good belly laugh.

Another one I've noticed is the amount of online personal trainers/ coaches. Sorry but as far as I'm concerned a pt cannot know how well you're doing the exercise programme if he's on a computer screen, they can't tell you if your form is correct(like my real life trainer was the other day when he was correcting me on how I was standing doing a RDL) if they aren't there watching you.

A lot of MLMs are based in and around Salt Lake City. It is apparently ‘frowned upon’ for Mormon women to work once they are married. This explains more: https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2022/01/25/hibben-mlm-pyramid-scheme-utah/#:~:text=Since%202018%2C%20there%20have%20been,church%20or%20other%20community%20organization.

yeah lots in Utah

forever living is in Arizona

Is the principle of pyramid schemes and how to spot them explained in PSE (or whatever it's called now) in schools?

SIL is involved with the travel one. You go on holiday with all of the other members. And all pose together for pics. You dump all of your friends (or they dump you) & hang out with these fuckers…

@powershowerforanhour not sure that it is but it would be good if the avoidance of MLM and how to spot it in its many disguises was part of teaching about debt and financial management. MLM loves to target university students with promises of extra money. It’s a disaster for them financially but also extremely damaging socially as generally students in tertiary education are hostile but it still catches some. If they were made aware of MLM schemes, product free pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes it can only be a good thing.

YouOKHun
It's hard enough trying to cover the basics of finances in 1-2 hours of PSHE a year. The number of issues that keep being added is leading to a very bloated curriculum.

It would be good to have information available in universities about MLMs as poor employment options.

I'd also love to see education and awareness about MLMs in baby and toddler groups as there's a lot of predatory recruitment that goes on when mums are on SMP and tight on money, or when they're feeling guilty about returning to work

@LolaSmiles I agree and I was thinking about bloated PSHE curriculum as I typed it! I also agree that it’s not just an age thing but also providing information where there is understandable vulnerability to the way MLM sells itself, new parents being a particular rich seam for MLM.

It is tricky though, what got me to loathe MLM was the targeting of new parents. I started running a PND group in IAPT (NHS) at a children’s centre (quite a few years ago) and had to work hard to weed out MLM as quite a few of the staff were involved in Juice Plus and Younique let alone any parents. I was not popular at all but I did stamp it out. So many groups are run as a vehicle to recruit or by people who aren’t really aware of MLM and think it looks harmless, or don’t feel they can police a group in that way. The pushback from MLM recruiters can be very aggressive (as demonstrated in the Secret of the Multimillionaires documentary). Perhaps health visitors and ante natal groups are a good place to start!

Schools too, a teacher at a school close to me was sacked for (among other problems) GDPR breaches which included using private details of parents in the school to try and recruit them for her Arbonne business. Again a few years ago and there is now better awareness of MLM and of data protection, but MLM lurks in all sorts of places and I was trying to think of where a red flag could be placed about MLM early on!

Life Coaches are the new thing it seems.

@mumsytoon yes, coaching is a great cover for recruiting. Often it’s a coaching/quasi therapy system which people pay for and then are sent out to share the method in order to recruit new coaches, while they also continue to pay for further training. Cheap as chips to start up as all the founder needs to do is create some coaching/therapy “system” to sell, they don’t need to ship white label goods from China to act as the product! Have you seen “Belief Coding®️”? It’s the creation of a former Apprentice runner up and as scammy AF (any therapy system that puts a trade mark/registered symbol by its name is inherently dodgy IMHO).

Shut down as an offensive against the English language?

Is this one of the travel agent ones? The line about ‘working from home to earn an extra income’ is screaming MLM.

I know someone who's part of a travel agent one. I'm so confused as to how that works. At least with make-up you might be able to shift the odd mascara or lipstick, but surely no one uses travel agents anymore??

I went down an anti-MLM rabbit hole a while back and came across a really interesting youtuber called Hannah Alonzo. She exposes various MLMs, does deep dives, and reads out MLM horror stories that people send in. I'd definitely recommend checking her out if you're interested in anti-MLM content.

There are actually quite a few people making anti-MLM content so it is possible that more people are becoming wise to the tactics and learning to protect themselves from these predators. I really hope so. Although another part of me thinks these types of people will always find another way to exploit the vulnerable, which is probably why we're seeing a shift in the type of MLMs that are about.