MLM Critic Doesn’t Like Pink Truth
Sometimes we have Pink Truth critics who come from within the anti-MLM community. They don’t think we’re doing enough or doing the right things. People focus on different things, and that’s okay in my book. Fans of Mary Kay say we should stop trying to “take down” MK. No, that has never been the mission.
Critics of MLM say we SHOULD be trying to take down MLM. I decided long ago that trying to get the government to stop MLMs was futile. Trying to destroy individual companies was useless. What I *thought* could make a difference is education. If you’re considering Mary Kay and you bother to take 5 minutes with a search engine, you’ll find Pink Truth. If you can be bothered to read for 5 minutes, you’ll find enough that should stop you in your tracks. You should seriously question signing up.
And we’ve seen that happen. We have helped women avoid MK. We have helped others get out and get their money back. Have we helped enough women? Probably not. But this is where I think we do our best work, and it’s what we’ve been doing for almost 14 years.
Yet this critic has a problem with how we go about our business:
If you want to operate a grown-up website that pokes fun of MK and the MK “leaders” AND is also devoted to reaching outward to educate others about Mary Kay and other MLM scams, I’m all in. If you want to coddle your little girls and not support greater change, I’m not interested in wasting my time.
I want to help other people not get scammed. I want to get media attention towards these MLM scams. I want to influence the FTC to take action against them. Your website needs to change, or it’s simply not worth my time.
People think they have the upper hand when they kick me off their websites. But it’s not my problem, it’s because they’re not serious about working together to cause real change to take place. They think I don’t understand when it’s really that they don’t understand and aren’t serious. I fully understand, and if they don’t want to work together to go after some rich fat-cat scam artists with lots of lobbying money, then count me out.
The internet is the greatest tool ever for leveling the playing field against scam artists, but if people aren’t willing to leverage it and use it for good, then it’s just like a hammer that lays on the ground and is never used.
Strong discussions are what is needed, we won’t always agree. Friction causes progress, if the subject is the problems in MLM rather than somebody getting bent out of shape over an obvious joke. I don’t see any curiosity on the website to discuss problems. You decide. Your website will be known for how you decide to run it.
Visit the
WAAAAAAAH! UR NOT INTERWEBSING TEH WAY I WANT U 2!!!!!
Dude. It’s like you’re in a soup kitchen shouting at the people handing out the food that feeding the local homeless is the wrong way to go about ending world hunger.
There was more I wanted to say but one of my cats flopped down on the keyboard and so I had to wait until I got to work,
Using denigratory language about the users of a site does not endear them to your cause. Calling the site “childish” (how, exactly? The only sparkly pink unicorn graphics and cutesy characters I see are the ones used to mock MK) is condescending, dismissive, and insulting to us.
“Coddling little girls”? Really? GIANT THROBBING MISOGYNY aside, the site us run by and contributed to by intelligent adult women and men who have all kinds of letters after their names. They’re called letters of accreditation, and means they have earned post-secondary degrees and certificates in complicated things like science and math that even some men don’t understand. (See? I can be condescending and insulting, too!)
Big problems require complex solutions requiring the cooperation of many different entities and take a long time to come about, if they’re even soluble. You can’t email the President and tell him to end hunger in America by Halloween. You can’t call up the Pope and tell him to get rid of corruption in the RCC Right Now! You can’t go up to the head of the FCC and tell them to shut down X, Y, and Z companies because they’re pyramid schemes.
On the do-able level, you can feed a hungry person, counsel an abuse victim, or support the new consultant who just ordered $1200 of makeup she can’t afford and her husband is going to flip out, but who’s not sure she should return it because maybe she can make it work and she’s not quite ready to burn her bridges by returning it.
It’s called doing your smallest bestest, and they add up over time. A blizzard starts with a snowflake.
And btw, as the old chestnut goes, if one person thinks you’re a jerk, that’s their opinion. If everyone tells you you’re a jerk, you’re a jerk.
Jerk.
Has today’s critic caused a single NSD (or equivalent) to be exposed and removed? If not, s/he can take a seat and take some notes. Real change happened here when a whistleblower was provided a forum for the truth.
“People think they have the upper hand when they kick me off their websites.”
Simple solution: Create and pay for your own web site instead of telling others how to run theirs. You can then set all the rules…no one is stopping you.
Good luck.
^^^This is so good. Thank you for this. The Kaybot response would be crickets (assuming they have the balls to even attempt a response).
No one put a gun to his head to get him to read here.
I was hesitant to put it that way because of how often that phrase is weaponized against IBCs (and former IBCs). But, PG, you hit the nail on the head, as always.
And if being here is a waste of their time, surely, writing in to say this is a waste of time is… even more of a waste of time?? I’m unclear on their end goal here.
Your website will be known for how you decide to run it.
God, I hope so.
You’ve actively been a thorn in MK’s side for 16 whole years with dignity, confidence, good humor, and courage. It’s brought about real change without a single torch or pitchfork being brandished.
It’s ok, I guess 😛
They say it’s hard to argue with success, yet this critic went there. Not a good look, in my humble opinion.
Lol Tracy, don’t you understand how hateful your “speaking the truth’ is? Thanks to you, people Google Jamie Taylor or Chelsea “Princess” Claytor Adkins or one of the many other supposed “Mary Kay royalty”.
If you would JUST STOP TELLING THE TRUTH, these Kaybot ladies might actually build their units/areas.
If you’d just BUTT OUT, Chelsea will easily hit her million dollar goal this year. People under her will buy buy buy to help her win some goal (since NSD is out of the question…oh Chelsea, how tough that must have been to find out that you’re NOT the super skilled businesswoman you think you are).
I mean in conclusion, it’s obvious that MK is indeed the: number one selling makeup, skincare, lousy perfume, whatever else company in the world. And those on the lowest rungs of the pole will soon and sadly ,earn just how little they mean to their uplines.
“I want to help other people not get scammed.” Same.
“I want to get media attention towards these MLM scams.” Sure. Check out the Pink Truthers on 20/20 back in 2015.
“I want to influence the FTC to take action against them.” Go for it!
“Your website needs to change, or it’s simply not worth my time.” Uh, what?
“People think they have the upper hand when they kick me off their websites.” So apparently this happens often?
“But it’s not my problem…They think I don’t understand when it’s really that they don’t understand and aren’t serious.” If you’re getting booted from other anti-MLM spaces, sounds like it is your problem.
“I fully understand, and if they don’t want to…[blah, blah, blah]…then count me out.” OK! Glad we got that settled.
This website does a world of good…you, not so much.
This person gives anti-MLMers a bad name. Haughty, elitist, egotistical, dismissive of the efforts of others.
Writer, stop being so judgemental. Team up with those who choose to operate differently; don’t run them down.
This has been bugging me all day and I finally figured out why. The whole message gives off incel/”Nice Guy” vibes.
“Coddling little girls” was a bad way to start.
But then a whole bunch of people are apparently kicking you off their websites and it’s always a “them” problem? Hmm….
And people getting bent out of shape over “an obvious joke”?
Yep, it’s official, folks. We have a real-life, caught-in-the-wild Nice Guy ™.
I totally agree wit you, Frosty Rose. The whole diatribe reeks of Nice Guy mansplaining.
Is Pink Truth going to take down the MLM sector? No, the lobbyists have too much money and by association influence over our elected officials.
Is PT going to take down MK? Probably not, though even if we did, there are far more MLMs clambering into the ring to grab a cut of the now spare pie.
Can PT help one person escape? Yes, there are many people who have thanked Tracy et al fir helping them to leave and get back as much money as possible. We have helped them and their families, so Yay US!
I’m watching the WFABB girls jump from Monat to iGenius and now to Qsciences. Elomir (sp??) seeming to be spiralling round the plughole.
Pink Truth is possibly the oldest anti-MLM website out there but the whole business model is coming under more and more scrutiny with the r/antiMLM sub-reddit along with the increasing numbers of YouTube creators focusing on exposing the MLM culture.
If this guy wants to help, he needs to find his own niche rather than try and hang on to the coat-tails of people who are in their own small way successful.
Frosty Rose, you have uncommon insight. I agree completely, and I’m a bit embarrassed I didn’t pick up on that myself.
I’m going to guess that this is Tex-Tex? It sure sounds like him.
Tex Tex…it rings a bell. Can you explain who he is? Was he here before stirring things up?
Someone who mansplained how he thought Tracy should be running Pink Truth. This one sounds a lot like the other one.
Tex-Tex has been around since my old scam .com days in the mid 2000’s. He’s definitely passionate about anti-MLM, and back then he was really pushing RICO fraud. I saw him pop up on the DB a few years ago having words with Tracy; I think she banned him in the end. He was always very brash, but I do think his intentions are good re MLM – albeit tainted, wittingly or not, with misogynistic tendencies. I’ve actually conjured up a curious image of him in my mind given his name, brashness, and that side-dish of misogyny. There’s a blog out there which I’ve suspected is him, but idk.
He claims: “I want to help other people not get scammed. I want to get media attention towards these MLM scams. I want to influence the FTC to take action against them.” So what is stopping him?
Open your own website then
MLMs are like drug dealers – for every one you “take down”, two more new ones pop up. If Mary Kay went under, Avon and Arbonne would get bigger (with more consultants joining) or another makeup MLM would come along to fill the void. The only sensible weapon in the war against MLM is information. If enough people see what a scam it is with all the evidence on sites like these, it will just collapse under its own weight.
“ If you want to (blah blah blah irrelevant), I’m not interested in wasting my time.”
…And yet HERE YOU ARE wasting your time.
*sigh* why are they all so very clueless about what they actually type and how hypocritical they are?
Oh and “ Your website needs to change, or it’s simply not worth my time.”
You’ve told us twice how this site just isn’t worth your valuable time, yet you use your time to tell us how you will NOT waste your time here…I’m flummoxed. Do you always spend time on things that you already know are a waste of your time? You should look into taking some courses on time management. Heck, there are several previous MK directors who offer services like teaching you better time management. They might be a great option for you.
“ Trying to destroy individual companies was useless.”
That’s a great point, and your helping to expose the MK fakery is huge and respected. Fortunately we have behindmlm.com to take on some of the other MLM companies. You keep doing your good work of exposing Mary Kay. Others can take on MLM companies besides MK.
I know I’m really late on these comments, and I apologize.
Thoughts on this: “ I want to help other people not get scammed. I want to get media attention towards these MLM scams. I want to influence the FTC to take action against them. Your website needs to change, or it’s simply not worth my time.”
In the above quote, she tells us what she WANTS to do. She does NOT tell us that she’s actually DOING those things.
If her quote was evaluated using basic statement analysis parameters, she would be labeled a LIAR.
As we can see above, she had many opportunities to tell us that she did NOT do XY and Z. I can only conclude that while she claims that she wants to do those things, she isn’t ACTUALLY doing those things. And she hasn’t tried to.