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Jeffree Star, a beauty vlogger with nearly 1 million YouTube subscribers and a makeup line of his own, wasn't immune to the Kylie Jenner lip gloss hype.
But unfortunately for Kylie, the lip gloss Star bought was totally busted. As Allure notes, Star took a photo of the brush of his brand-new product, which looked like it had been through the wringer.
He tweeted a pic and his thoughts about Kylie's apparent lack of quality control for this product, and then started retweeting other Kylie lip gloss shoppers who had broken wands (including a really apt comparison of a brush to a Cynthia doll from the '90s cartoon Rugrats).
So I got the new @kyliecosmetics lip glosses.... SO disappointed in this product. That wand is unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/NCkkUer2aV
— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
No shade but... How the fuck can a multimillion dollar celebrity, think this is acceptable?? Was there no quality control?
— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
Those were brand-new straight out of the box, and I pulled them out for the first time and saw that… umm...
— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
I've seen on her personal Snapchat, that she kinda addressed this issue and said the wand would be better next time… do I get a refund?
— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
So the first customers were just guinea pigs? How is that fair for a consumer to get something shitty and then the next launch its fixed?
asd — Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
Just sad as a fan and a makeup customer.. Not what I expected. :(
— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
If you have a voice, use it. I'm sick of celebrities getting away with half assing everything.
— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
The average customer gets ignored with these huge companies. My timeline is full of horror stories about the lip glosses
— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) April 15, 2016
Star wasn't the only one complaining about unusable lip gloss wands. Shoppers are not pleased that Kylie seems to be using paying customers as a focus group of sorts.
She's been changing aspects of her cosmetics on the fly with each launch: a shorter lip gloss brush, for example, and a "fluffier" applicator on her original liquid lipsticks. Some Instagram commenters even recommended not buying until the first or second round of product drops because of all the changes. This is not a strategy that would work for any other beauty company.
But because Jeffree Star has 511,000 Twitter followers, his complaints were heard, unlike regular people who were battling with customer service over the brushes. Kylie tweeted that everyone who ordered on April 1st would get new brushes.
@JeffreeStar from this to that real quick! pic.twitter.com/VY2w6Xpolx
— evuhhlynn (@evuhhlynn) April 17, 2016
Kylie even goes into how she's reformulating her products based on negative feedback in this Instagram apology:
And a recap of the whole thing from Star: