Written by Frosty Rose

I spent a long time, both during and after my Mary Kay career, being angry with my director. You see, I was a high driver, high achieving, high D (for those who know the DISC behavior profile). That’s what drew me to Mary Kay in the first place.

I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny, to decide for myself how I would spend my time. I didn’t want to have a boss, I wanted to be the boss. At least of myself.

And in Mary Kay, all the doors are open to you. You simply have to do the work and walk through them. Everyone starts at the same level, everyone climbs the same ladder at their own pace. No one has any advantage over anyone else. At least that’s the marketing pitch.

I knew for a fact that I was doing everything right. I was calling the right number of people, using all the scripts, and I knew the product line backward and forward. But I wasn’t achieving the promised results.

The only explanation, in my 23-year-old, I’m-always-right brain, was that there must be something wrong with my director. She lacked strong leadership skills. She couldn’t help me troubleshoot where I was going wrong. When she helped me interview prospective recruits, they never signed up. None of the Mary Kay math was working, all she could give me was the same old tired suggestions, and the only thing I could do was pin the blame on her.

It was a convenient way to not blame myself for my failure, which is what the entire Mary Kay ecosystem is designed to make you do.

After I quit Mary Kay, I was angry with my director for a different reason. She lied to me, she used me for production, she (may have) actively sabotaged my success in an attempt to keep her own unit intact. She milked tens of thousands of dollars out of my family’s budget, and all she ever gave me was grief and a couple of baubles. She rarely called if she didn’t need something, usually at the end of the month when unit production was (yet again) short.

How could she do that to me? How could she do that to everyone else in her unit? More importantly, how could she teach me to do the same to the women in my life? Yet again, she became an easy scapegoat for the feelings of blame I carried toward myself.

Now, well into my healing journey after Mary Kay, I feel deeply sorry for my director. She was a single mom when she started her Mary Kay journey. While I resonated with the strong, determined parts of Mary Kay as laid out in her (fictional) autobiography, my director resonated with the soft parts. She wanted to be there for her kids, she needed a way to make a living that didn’t interfere with her ability to raise them. And she bought into the hype that Mary Kay was that vehicle.

The reality for her was, as it was for me, very different. The things I saw then as hallmarks of her success now scream to me of her desperation, her need to impress at the expense of everything else, and deep personal debt. The fancy house and shiny diamonds couldn’t have been paid for by her director check. She earned her first car while I was in director qualifications, 10 years into my journey.

We have proven time and time again on this site how little directors are earning, especially if they’re not making car production. She was barely above the poverty line in earnings, yet lived in one of the nicer houses in one of the nicer neighborhoods in town. How?

And all that dialing for dollars at the end of the month? She had to have been desperate to offload some of the minimum production requirements onto her team. As the highest producer, I was the obvious choice. Asking me to stretch wasn’t, for her, like asking the rest of her unit members to stretch. I had the customer base to sell it and get my money back, and I actually did sell most of what I ordered. And I can’t imagine the balance on her credit cards from shoring up production month after month, year after year.

Mary Kay Inc, like most MLM companies and many actual cults, turns their victims into victimizers, their prey into predators. It did it to my director. It preyed on a vulnerable, minimally educated single mom and convinced her that the best and only way to be a good mom was to own her own business. Since the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to invest in a “real” brick-and-mortar business was out of reach for her, it offered her the next best alternative—all the freedom of your own business with very little risk (ha!).

But what it gave her instead was stress, misery, desperation, and poverty-line earnings. Surely, she would have been better off working her way up at a real corporation and skilling herself up along the way. Instead, she spent years grinding away at a company that chipped away at her already shaky self-esteem. That robbed her of precious time with her children. That preyed on her insecurities. And that turned her into a predator herself. The only way to survive was to replicate herself, to victimize others as she herself was victimized. And to teach me to do the same thing.

Healing from time in Mary Kay is a process. It’s been a process to forgive myself for the harm I caused to myself, my family, the consultants who I recruited, and my customers. Part of that process of forgiving myself has also required me to forgive my director. She was doing her best within the system she was sold as a “dream job.” Blame in this case lies, as it always does, squarely at the top of the pyramid, with a corporation that consistently preys on women, their insecurities, and their deepest desires. Mary Kay, we’re watching, we know what you’re doing, and we’re responding. With the Pink Truth.