https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HnRr_KEVU0k
Range Beauty Review (posted to the Sephora website/app):
I do not support that Range Beauty. Range Beauty's founder is petty, immature, and unprofessional. When Range Beauty had incorrect & inconsistent information on their site that led me to receiving the wrong shade pack, they would not own up to their mistake and even blocked me for mentioning it to my followers when explaining why I didn't have the shades ready for them to swatch. I didn't even say it in a mean way, I just explained calmly what happened and they blocked me over $20 and an explanation of fact. Other makeup brands do not behave that way, even when called out by consumers on bigger faux pas and even when the customers make mistakes. I don't know if that Black-owned brand decided to disrespect me because I'm also Black and they have some internalized issues so they don't see the value in my support or if the owner and social media team are just petty and emotional, can't own up to their own mistakes and don't know the business 101 lesson that you retain more clients by rectifying mistakes fairly than you do by not even having made the mistake in the first place, but either way I will not support a brand who behaves like this and I will get my $20-worth of value by continuing to tell others what they did and potentially costing them even more than that petty little $20 they were so desperate to cling to. I hope some entrepreneur learns from this by proxy, even if Range Beauty is too stubborn to do so themselves. I guess the good news for those of you who will buy through Sephora is that the brand will hopefully have no choice but to comply with Sephora's good web design & return policy. As for the foundation itself, in a previous order, I tried "Rio" & it was very orange. As far as I remember, the formula itself seemed oily/separated when wet and like it easily crackled or something once it dried down after being applied. I had also posted a swatch photo of three shades and the brand incorrectly said that a shade that looked grey on me, "Sol" was my match.
Essentially, even though both lineups were posted with the impression that they were in the order of lightest to deepest on a gradient, if you looked at the product page and decided that you wanted to get the "Brown" pack, which was shown there to be the third deepest shade, but then came out of the product page and put "Brown" in your cart from the home page, you'd actually bet betting the fourth deepest pack instead of the third deepest, and vice versa for "Medium Brown."
(See video linked above for walk-through).
Here is how the home page looked and the shades were in the order of Light, Tan, Medium Brown, Brown, Dark Brown. This wasn't simply a matter of randomizing the shade order as Sephora sometimes does on their website and app, because the Range Beauty shades were shown connected to the icons for depth and those still formed the typical gradient.
Here is how the product page looked where the names and shade orders were different. On the product page, the shades were in the order of Fair, Tan, Brown, Medium Brown, and Deep Brown. As you can see, the category of "Light" was changed to "Fair," "Brown" and "Medium Brown" switched places, and the category of "Dark Brown" was changed to "Deep Brown."
That's to say nothing of the terrible interface of white letters on a tan background.
I understand that the brand had just rolled out an updated version of their website around this time, but there was another problem with the site that I don't remember at the time but I remember mentioning it to them on Instagram, and the response was something like, "oh, I'm just a social media intern, so IDK" and it felt like that was being dismissed, only for me to still support the brand and then end up in this predicament because of other problems with their site updates that they did not thoroughly comb through before launch wasting customers valuable time and money, and squandering support from a page that would have promoted it to it's small but niche audience that is the exact audience for the brand (avid and interested makeup consumers, most of whom are people of color who had a vested interested in supporting brands from other people of color).
I supported this brand by posting swatches on my page before. I was going to support them again by posting updated swatches for my page's anniversary, but they above is what happened when I tried to support them (wasting about $40 of my own money to try to support them as I had purchased two different sample packs and one of them was the wrong depth so I decided not to post swatches of the other pack either). Whereas other brands have no problem even budgeting to spend money on having content creators share posts of their brand, I was spending my own money to try to support Range Beauty (something I don't usually do as I usually just swatched brands I could access for free at makeup counters or Sephora or Ulta). I went out of my way to spend my own money to support Range Beauty and had even been telling other brands about Range Beauty's sample pack feature in hopes that more brands would start offering that service, even if it was also at a cost.
I owed it to my followers to explain why I didn't have the shades I said I would swatch because I had already told my page's followers I was going to swatch this brand (Range Beauty had even re-posted my photo of the packaging to their stories previously) and when I initially discovered that I didn't have all of the correct shades, I told my followers that I wasn't sure what happened and placed the blame on myself so when I discovered that the confusion originated from inaccurate and inconsistent information on Range Beauty's website, it was only fitting that I update them to provide a complete picture of what happened. For some reason, Range Beauty took that personally instead of professionally and I am highly disappointed in them and offended that this is what I get as a Black consumer and content creator who tried to support a Black-owned Brand and highlight them to my predominantly Black and POC brown-skinned makeup enthusiast audience, who one would think would be the exact target consumers for Range Beauty. For a brand with "beauty" in the title, Range Beauty's behavior sure was ugly.
The text in the Instagram story Screenshots reads:
I was typing "I am more than happy to archive this post if @ range_beauty would like to rectify this situation." but it appears they have now blocked me from tagging them and so has their founder @ alicia.aes, so I will just say this old adage instead "when people show you who they are, believe them!" Keep in mind, I did not post this here until after I already reached out by email and had this where only a smaller number of people would see it in my stories. People say support Black-owned businesses, but some don't know how to treat customers. I have shared a lot of posts highlighting their products in the past but I guess they are happy to throw all of that away over $20 and misplaced pride in keeping their false information up insteas od correcting it. Since I always tag brands when I showcase them, no more Range Beauty highlights from me. I guess the 20 bucks was more important to them. SMDH
The funny thing is, I was so looking forward to featuring this brand again. I was going to do a comparison shot to show how far my swatching has come from the post below from over a year ago that I did before I started this page (when I was just swatching for myself to now that over 1000 people follow this page. I was going to showcase more of their shades and do them neatly and maybe even do another chest swatches photo in addition to arm swatches (which I rarely ever do but was going to make that extra effort because I was invested in highlighting not only my growth but this black owned brand). I originally planned to do this for my birthday or the page's anniversary in September but was not feeling up to it so I tried to do it this month only to discover that they sent me the wrong shades after I had already started swatching them. Then they refused to fix what happened and left the wrong information - which lead to me getting the wrong shades - on their website. This is such a slap in the face!