The 3 Problems with Make-up Reviews

The beauty industry is often cited as being one of the fastest- growing and profitable industries of all. And for those of us who love participating in it, that makes for an abundance of products to try with many more always about to be released. So how do we go about determining which products we want to bring into our lives? Well, quite a few of us devote minutes, hours, or days (some of us many days admittedly) to reading reviews of products on the Internet. On the one hand, this seems smart. We want to ensure that the products we select are all things we wish and that they promise to be. And, because it is not always possible to “try before we buy” and also because a sample, when we can get one, sometimes does not give enough of the product to tell a lot about it, reading reviews seems a kind of safety net that tells us the ins and outs of a product before we purchase it.

Though they may be numerous and easily accessible, especially thanks to social media platforms, reviews do still have their limitations:

1. Faulty expectations of products: Many products will claim by their name or in its description to be one thing, but a customer will be wanting something else. For example, a “lightweight tinted moisturizer with a dewy, skinlike finish”, and a reviewer might criticize the product for not covering enough redness or for not mattifying the shine common in an oilier skin type. Now, probably what might draw this person to try this product is perhaps the promise of a “lightweight” feel, but the word "lightweight" referred to a level of coverage instead pf a textural feel. So the product was not designed to be what that person might have been looking for. Does that mean the product performs poorly? No. It just means the reviewer wanted something different from what the product was intended to be.

2. Different Preferences: No one's individual experience of a product will be identical to another's. There are many reasons for this. Two people with fair skin could be two different tones of fair and have different undertones, making colors appear differently on them. Two people may both have dry skin types, but one have sensitivity to a certain chemical used in a moisturizer than the other person swears by. But in the context of a review, we are limited to what the person chooses to tell us about themselves, and we may not always have the full picture of what makes a person like or dislike a product.

3. Skewed Reviews:We may never know which companies do this and to what extent. Recently, luxury skincare brand Sunday Riley admitted to doing so according to the article on Allure.com titled, Sunday Riley Responds to Allegations of Fake, Employee-written Sephora reviews. Now, in their statement quoted in that article, Sunday Riley claims that they encouraged the writing of positive reviews by their employees to offset any negative reviews that could be posted by their competitors to sabotage them. But either way, fake reviews or skewed and whether positive or negative, are still being posted in hopes of influencing our perceptions of a product in some way or another. But these reviews do not come from an earnest place of a fellow consumer reporting their own genuine experience.

So because of the the subjective nature of reviews and on our own needs and wants for and expectations of a product and us all just having different preferences, product reviews do still have their limitations. This is not to say that they are bad or not useful-- far from it but these are just things to continue to keep in mind when we read them.