Younique and facebook

[Paddington68]

One fo my friends has recently started selling this stuff - Younique make-up.
On Facebook she has become this embodiment of positivity, lots of quotes, lots of photos. Then she does these videos about the product and her happy, happy life.
I know that in real life she doesn't have a happy, happy life and we (she and I) have talked previously about how other people's happy, happy, facebook can be damaging to mental health or hide mental health issues.
AIBU to think younique is like a cult and tell her to stop the pretending?

I regularly earn £800 to £1,000+ every month

This is a weird way of attempting to imply something without saying it! Either you earn it every month - which by definition is 'regularly' - or some months you earn this ('regularly' but not monthly) ie not every month.

Mlm bots are very non-specific with language particularly when it comes to figures... Odd, that!

Also if you have such a great client base, that you 'regularly' (what, annually?) get orders for £150 (so apparently you make less than £50 for that), what does your work actually involve?

This was one thing the documentary seemed to completely forget - what is the work you're being paid for? Constantly posting on fb and throwing parties - if i wanted to order loads of products regularly I doubt I'd bother going to parties each time and the fb posting would annoy the crap out of me.

We are no different to the make-up ladies in Boots, Harrods, Self ridges etc

• do you get paid for every hour you work, even if you don't sell something during that hour?
• do you get holiday pay?
• if you're ill do you still get paid?
• are you getting paid (without having to do any work) even though you've just had a baby? ie. maternity pay
• do you get paid to attend training events?

The products have to be expensive because the people above the rep in the pyramid (the 'upline') all need to take a slice of the sale. Huge margins mean huge price tags which are justified with grandiose claims made by a maverick sales force.

@Bezalelle and the best bit? What do I, the person she is trying to peddle her magic beans to, do for a living?
I'm a fucking food scientist.

I just wanted to say I absolutely love the way this thread has gone and how many women are aware of how predatory these MLM schemes are, that’s several less people to be preyed upon! And a real life hunbot duly appeared to fake their income, aren’t we blessed

Also lol at the delusion you ‘own your own business’. Did you choose a company name? Come up with a business plan? Decide on a registered office? Draft a breakdown of how business capital will be distributed? Register for self assessment with HMRC? Keep track of your income and outgoings?

Or... did you get sucked into a pyramid scheme, call yourself ‘CEO of Karen’s lashes’ on Facebook and then start referring to yourself as a business owner?

The absolute lol btw of how many of these women call themselves CEOs 😂

Seriously though, what upsets me the most is how the business model infantilises women: Get paid to play with makeup!’ While insulting their intelligence by assuming they’ll pretend (which they do) that they’re a business owner. Buying a £70 makeup kit from an MLM scheme makes you a customer, not a business owner. It’s really funny how you see people posting ‘I own my own business’ in one breath, and ‘wow, our business has sold 4 million mascaras this year!’ In the other. Which is it?

It’s just all pure nonsense preying in desperate women by selling the dream that they can make money from home while with their kids when in reality less than 1% of them can make even minimum wage for the hours put in. Then you get all the horrible attraction mindset bullshit where if you’re failing it’s because you’re not being positive enough, not because the business model is inherently flawed. Just keep smiling!

To the PP who asked who is buying this crap, it’s the presenters. They are the customers. That’s the thing with MLMs, they need a physical product to dodge being an illegal pyramid scheme. The product is cheap and nasty because it’s not important, recruitment is. It’s a facade. The product is incredibly overpriced because everyone needs to get their cut from a sale: you get your £2 but the next three women above you get money from your sale too. Money flows up the pyramid all while women on the bottom rungs are pressured into recruiting more and more suckers until the market is saturated. But every women who joins buys product. They’re told they need to so they can demonstrate the products, be a walking billboard, etc. Even the ‘Y cash’ earned goes back into buying the next product. You just can’t make money. But it’s okay because people can pretend to be a boss babe on social media and it gives them a confidence boost to have a new group of ‘Y sisters’ and to believe they’re taking control of their lives. When really they’re falling deeper and deeper into financial difficulties.

The BBC documentary is definitely worth a watch, there's a good blog somewhere too that another poster shared on a different thread, might be worth her having a read next time the subject comes up. I'll try to find a link.

One of my friends started doing Anne summers and she drove me bonkers with the constant badgering to buy something

This makes me so upset...a family member has got themselves into so much trouble financially off the back of a mlm. I know we all have the ability to refuse to spend money we don't have etc. But it really is a cult mentality with the fake it til you make it ethos and encouraging you to attend seminars in far flung locations as the only way to make money, this normally intelligent person has now risked their career due to credit card debt.

This is the blog I think, February.

ellebeaublog.com/poonique/

It taught me so much.

BAB you are not a business owner. You are an unpaid sales rep and a customer of Younique.

If you get paid in Y cash which you spend on products, you are not earning profit. You are buying from the company.

You have been conned into a very clever scam and brainwashed into believing this has made you successful.

When you submitted your annual tax return what was your net profit please? As in, the amount of money you earned minus the expenses you incurred. Website fees, samples, starter kit, stationery, training, zoom subscription, petrol, tablecloths, everything. Assuming you are registered as a sole trader. What is your hourly rate of pay? Each party must be about four hours once you've travelled there, set up, done the hard sell, packed up, travelled home, processed orders.

Also why would I buy from you when I could walk into a department store and pick up makeup in colours that suit me, which I've seen in person, for less money, rather than waiting for a week to receive your inferior product? Exactly. So I highly doubt you have many customers at all.

With respect BABS you're saying the exact same thing as a close friend of mine, and if I didn't know the script was the same for all the bots, I'd actually think you were her!

You've had a harsh time because of the lies and manipulation and shitty tricks reps are encouraged to do.

My friend is not a business owner at all either. She's a scheme member.

What most concerns me is the robot speak... A la BABS 'we all have the same 24 hours in a day' it's such bullshit and dooms you to failure. This is the MLM stance-if you're not a millionaire it's because you haven't tried hard enough, not because if their shitty business model. And Poonique make up is terrible

I think it's sad as well they have to do fake shots to show how well they're doing when it's far from the truth. In that blog Elle mentions she saw a friend with all this new stuff she'd brought using her earning. Ipads etc
Then then turns out was just stuff they'd already owned but was trying to put on a front.

I can't believe that BABS thinks that spending their y cash on products isn't spending their own money the y cash is what you 'earn' when you sell at parties.

CodenameVillanelle but don’t you understand? That Y cash is simultaneously ‘free makeup’ (cos you spend it on products), and also a full time income you spend on bills. Even though you’re charged to use the money every transaction. 😂

I love how MLMs are built on logical inconsistencies and the victims/predators (they’re both!) overlook them in order to keep pretending to be business owners.

I’ve seen younique huns post images of a coffee with ‘Can’t believe I just bought this with Y cash! So blessed!’ As if being able to purchase a £3 coffee is some unimaginable luxury nobody else with a proper job could afford. Wow, I’m sure jealous you could buy that coffee. I could buy 166 coffees every week with my salary from my real job even if I’m off sick or on holiday but I didn’t get to play with makeup so I guess you win 😂

I have a Y-bot on my Facebook. I dont know her personally, she is a friend of a very dear friend, and asked to be friends. Now i follow her out of horrified fascination. She posts videos of herself applying her makeup (which to be fair, she does well), but they are always so toe-curlingly unprofessional, as she constantly screams out 'hellos' to everyone who posts a comment on the video, even while she is in the middle of putting on mascara or whatever. She has obviously done quite well at recruiting people below her, but i do get annoyed when i get messages from her, calling me "hun" and begging me (literally begging!) to buy just one mascara so she can win a trip to Mexico or something.

Friend of mine virtually destroyed her separate business by becoming a Juice Plus bot. She was a relatively well-respected professional in her field and started setting up annual conferences which were quite well-attended and well thought of. However, things got shaky financially so she thought JP was the way to go. Her FB posts suddenly changed into pre-scripted bot-speak, and she made the fatal mistake of bringing a JP speaker in to do a slot and have a stall at her conferences, despite the fact that the relevance of JP was tangential at best. The result was that the reputable professionals who had previously come to the conference stopped as they didn't want to be associated with MLM, and bookings fell off a cliff. Worst of all, her professional reputation was also severely affected because of what the whole JP saga revealed about her judgment.

When she posted a particularly evangelical FB comment asking people to support JP, I felt I had no choice but to make a mild response saying that sorry, no, I really couldn't support MLM. She became quite defensive and I suspect I was blocked thereafter, though I've never been interested enough to find out. But she does seem to have rowed back on JP in a big way, so I suspect the horrible truth may have dawned on her.

Younique's own website tells would-be presenters that they will uplift, empower and validate women everywhere by selling their shite.

Don't you know that by buying a Youneek eye infection causing mascara you support sexually abused women?

No?

That's because it's utter bollocks and a deplorable claim. Even if you didn't know much about Younique, the ridiculousness of that claim should be enough to avoid Younique like the plague.

She posts videos of herself applying her makeup (which to be fair, she does well), but they are always so toe-curlingly unprofessional, as she constantly screams out 'hellos' to everyone who posts a comment on the video, even while she is in the middle of putting on mascara or whatever.
I hate those.

I was added to a group a few months ago and DH and I had bets on how long until the bot talk started. Sure enough, they'd just signed up to Poonique (around the same sort of time someone else I know left the same company having got quite high because they realised how full of shite it was).

Now this friend has changed totally on social media. All photos of her working on her sofa, bossbabing it.

The videos though, it's like they aree trained to be like robots. New bot's approach is the same as old bot's approach.

• lots of over exaggerated pitch variation
• lots of lives and 'heeeeyyyy Tasha.... hello hun, yeah the kudos is awesome Lynne... heeeelloooo Mandy... Hey Emma' every 5 seconds
• lots of squeeling and eeeping every other sentence because we wouldn t know how much your bog standard eye shadow will transform our lives without lots of sound effects

Same shit, different bot.

I also remember reading that reps of MLM are encouraged to keep the empty boxes and packaging of previous orders (including stuff they’ve ordered for themselves) and include it in the photographs of ‘this weeks order all ready for my customers’. Some would actually buy empty boxes online as well for this exact purpose.

A girl on my FB was doing forever living then stopped and I was surprised because her ‘order day’ photos always showed a pile of huge boxes and loads of packets. It was most likely all empty boxes of non-existent orders!

Why would a customer purchase items from a rep in another country? If you're in Australia why would you not find a local rep?? So weird

My friends MIL sells it and has for a couple of years. I personally really like the make up (not the mascara) and have bought some.

I don’t think she makes much money tho, my friend did it to but gave up after few months as didn’t find gave her much profit for the work involved.

It’s interesting as The Body Shop are starting to do the same thing as few of my friends are now selling that to. I wonder if will be the way retail goes?

I do think the way it’s marketed to the people selling it is abit of a fairytale, when it is actually more work then let on.

I think Body shop has been doing it for a while. A friend tried it about 5 years ago but again made no money.
We have a body shop in town and they have a website too. The body shop reps on FB dont seem to be offering anything better in terms of prices then just ordering online or going into store. It doesn’t make sense.

it would be good to compare business model type documents to see which actually are upfront and give a decent commission for selling well and which rely on you 'building a team',

The whole thing always reminds me of a scene in Peep Show where Jeremy is 'recruited' by Toni to sell washing up stuff. 'Jonny and Sally-come-lately think they're getting some money pie... but oh no, it's just pastry! Boo hoo Jonny and Sally!'

I will stick with matched betting alongside my FT job no MLM and actual profit