“I Hired a Lab to Counterfeit-Test a Dozen Suspicious Beauty Products I Bought Online. Every Single One Had a Problem.”
Of all the skin-care and cosmetics products I recently bought online that turned out to be counterfeit, expired, used, or otherwise problematic, the one that still makes me squirm is a curiously distended tube of lip gloss.
I’d purchased it from a third-party seller on Amazon because I wanted to find out how, or if, someone could really know that the popular beauty product they bought on the internet was the real thing.
I’d also ordered a second tube of the same product — Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment, one of Wirecutter’s lip gloss picks — from the brand’s official website, Rhode Skin. This latter purchase was my control group, my straight-from-the-source version, my real thing.
From the jump, I found inconsistencies between the two.
The tube that arrived from Amazon was about a quarter-inch longer and a slightly different shade than the one I bought from Rhode. In several places, the labeling wasn’t a word-for-word match; plus, that text had been printed with two different-colored inks. The Amazon version also felt lighter, even though it was the bigger tube, making me wonder if I’d actually received the full 10 milliliters indicated on the label.
And then there was the bloating.
The tube from Amazon appeared slightly puffy and inflated next to the one from Rhode. That discrepancy wasn’t as obvious as the others; in fact, I’m not sure I would have noticed the bloating on my own. But I was working with a cosmetic chemist — Rachel Johnson, founder and chief chemist at The Charismatic Chemist, a cosmetic research and development lab in New Jersey — to compare and analyze my makeup and skin-care purchases, and once she pointed it out, I couldn’t not see it.
“That could suggest microbial growth,” Johnson told me, “or that the formula might be reacting to the packaging.”
Ew.
A few minutes later, Johnson confirmed that the chemical compositions of the two lip treatments were off by a significant amount: a 20% difference between them, according to a spectrometer analysis.
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