Ipsy May 2021 Review: Anastasia Beverly Hills, Kinship, and More!

Whoops, I meant, Marion, you are incredibly knowledgable!

WOW Nancy! That is crazy! You are incredibly knowledgable. As a contributing writer at MSA I have never deep dived into the production of products. My main job as I understand it is to receive the products in the mail and write my personal impressions. You are certainly doing an important service making people aware of where the products come from. Please always feel free to point out any nefarious products in my reviews.

@Also Beth – I also research companies when I’m unfamiliar with a brand and honestly, it’s put me off most boxes. You think you’re getting great deals but you’re really not.

Sephora Play, Macy’s and BeautyFix get so much hate for their small items but these boxes actually carry real brands, not the fake junk. I’m pretty much down to Boxwalla and Beauty Heroes.

I feel like my addiction to beauty boxes is coming close to an end. I was in Nordstrom’s for the first time in forever and going through the beauty department made me miss shopping there and buying exactly what I want.

@Nancy, sure thing!
So people are frustrated (or angry) because, over the last year or so, it’s come out that certain products in sub boxes are private-label, made-for-sub-box items. This came to light pretty dramatically when an allegedly $100 moisturizer being sent out by Boxycharm was found selling for ~$2 on AliExpress. Since then, it’s come to light that several beauty brands that heavily make the beauty box rounds (and have virtually no presence/popularity elsewhere) are owned by or heavily linked to the same woman, Emanuela DeFalco. These include: Dirty Little Secret Cosmetics (a.k.a. DLS), Bang Beauty, Luna by Luna, Saint Luxe, Basic Beauty, Steve Laurant, Faccia Skin, Glow on 5th, Give them Lala, and KAB beauty. Ipsy allegedly claimed that they would cease sending out products linked to DeFalco, but the controversy now is that items are appearing in boxes from companies linked to DeFalco, but ipsy is denying those links (Marion breaks down the Basic Beauty->Emanuela connection really well above!).
Different people break down their own reasons for having concerns about this, but I think a key concern here is the dishonesty involved. Many of us subscribe to beauty boxes to discover new brands or to receive new brands and products, whether those products are from luxury, indie, or drugstore brands, and, well, if we wanted to try an AliExpress product every month, that’s what we’d be doing and cutting out the middle man!
I don’t know about others, but since this came to light I’ve definitely lost a little bit of trust and started researching every company before selecting any Choice products, buying from unknown brands in sales, etc. And that’s a huge bummer, since ipsy (and other sub boxes) have so much potential to help boost legitimate small brands!

Nancy (it won’t let me reply directly to you). The issue with DLS and all the myriad of brands associated with it stems from what the company sells and how it gets those products. They buy them in bulk from Alibaba for next to nothing (some for pennies) and have them private labeled. They then turn around an claim ridiculously high retail price. The breaking point came last year in Boxycharm when the Faccia moisturizer had a claimed value of $100 and was found for sale on Alibaba for $2 (approximately) apiece. It was seen as a way to inflate the value of the subscriptions.

Nancy, it’s tough because some of us have been explaining it over & over & over ad nauseum for over a year. I can only type up an explanation so many times. MSA refuses to address it in posts, so it’s left to commenters to explain it, & obviously most people don’t read comments on the internet.

Dirty Little Secrets (aka DLS Cosmetics) is a white label brand founded by Emanuela DeFalco. “White label” means a company looks at what a factory already has available (cosmetics formulas as well as packaging/components), places an order for those products, and has the factory print the brand’s logo on it. This is typically extremely low cost to produce (for example, one white label company, Appeal Cosmetics, sells their lipsticks wholesale to sub box companies at $1 per unit, while on their website, the value is listed as $21). Quality of these products is often extremely low, as $$$ is the bottom line, and the brands that buy them to resell generally have no input into the ingredients or formulation of the product itself. Often, you can go on sites like AliExpress & Alibaba and find the exact same products for a dollar or under yourself.

To keep up the illusion of brand diversity (I’m assuming), DeFalco also launched multiple other companies under the umbrella of DLS. Bang Beauty, Luna by Luna Cosmetics, Steve Laurent — to name a few. Then, they decided to launch Faccia skincare through BoxyCharm. Their product was a “gold foil” jelly moisturizer that they claim is worth $100 & allegedly contained real gold. DeFalco wrote a flowery Instagram post about how she & her sister worked long & hard to perfect the formula of this moisturizer. Then someone found the exact same product on Alibaba (same ingredients + same packaging, minus the Faccia logo), selling for I believe $1.70. Someone else checked public import records — this Alibaba company had indeed shipped product to DLS.

Instead of admitting everything, DeFalco doubled down on her lies — she claimed the factory stole Faccia’s proprietary formula and had no permission to sell it, etc etc. Meanwhile, because she’s acting sketchy, people check her personal Instagram account to see what’s up. There are posts with fatphobic, racist, & misogynist content. When these were brought to light, DeFalco locked all her social media, claiming (I believe via Facebook) that people were sending death threats to her kids. (fwiw, while I do find it possible that this happened, I never saw anyone anywhere publicly mention her kids at all. I was not aware of the existence of any kids until DeFalco made these claims.)

Emanuela DeFalco’s behavior IMO is outrageous & untrustworthy, and if the CEO of a brand is willing to lie about how their products are made, I absolutely cannot trust that the products are safe to use on my body. Many people agree with me on this, & we wrote emails & social media comments to multiple beauty boxes about the issue, & several of them promised not to work with DLS again.

In the meantime, DeFalco got wise to how savvy researchers were using import records to research makeup companies, & started doing business as Worldwide Import Services instead of DLS. I believe they are involved with KAB Cosmetics & Give Them Lala, as well as others.

The saga doesn’t end there, of course. Ipsy has 2 brands (Basic Beauty & Saint Luxe) they’ve been promoting as black-owned beauty, run by Nicole Danielle. However, the trademark for Basic Beauty was filed by Emanuela DeFalco (this is public information). The Basic Beauty website is registered to DeFalco. Nicole Danielle has old ties to DLS, including posts of her wearing & promoting DLS products in photos posted to the DLS social media accounts. There is clearly a link between DeFalco & these other companies, which makes the whole “black owned” promotion look really gross, since it’s likely DeFalco is making the profit off these companies.

(You can see why I can’t take the time to post this in comments every. single. time.)

One person can own multiple companies. It makes a big difference, legally speaking, if Basic Beauty is owned under the parent company of DLS, or if they’re independent of that company, or are under another parent company altogether.

I only mention it bc Ive seen a lot of misinformation floating around about the issue, and the situation around white label brands is confusing enough as it is.

Can someone please explain to me the whole uproar over DLS and its owner/founder? I tried Googling and I’m not finding anything about it, but I see so many comments about certain brands being owned by DLS in such a negative way. Perhaps I am not searching for the information correctly. Some clarification would be great. I don’t want to support businesses if they don’t have good practices.

I don’t understand how you say it’s technically not when you agree the trademark registration and website registration is DeFalco. In addition I have screenshots of her import records showing DLS imports BB products. Nicole is literally just the face of the brand, nothing more, possibly on the payroll. People have sussed out her game so she had to think of another way to sell her products. So she used her friend as the face of these brands and used the BLM to her advantage.