Mary Kay Junk Jewelry
It has always amused me how much the ladies ooh and ahh over the “diamonds” given out by Mary Kay Cosmetics. They flash around rings that you can get by ordering a ton of products (doesn’t matter if you sell any) and everyone pretends that MK is being generous. But the truth is that the rings are low quality, with terribly little crappy diamonds, and they’re worth next to nothing.
Enjoy this Facebook thread started by a woman whose finger turned black from her fancy Court of Sales ring.
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I’d still like to know if the settings are actual solid crummy gold or crummy gold plating over base metal.
Low quality alloys of gold are heavy on copper and nickel. Silver, too, and silver and copper just love to react with the sulfur in your skin proteins and leave the coating of black (silver) or greenish (copper) schmutz on your skin.
Good quality alloys, even with lower gold content ie 10-12K are formulated not to do that.
That goes double if it’s gold plating; the base metals contain even more copper and also iron and is even more reactive.
Oh, and the accent stones might be real diamonds, but so are the grinding wheels they sell at Lowe’s. They’re yellowy and lifeless with no sparkle at all, and anyone who thinks that Jolly Rancher in the center is a real diamond is cuckoo.
Supposedly, the COS rings are 14K gold. Your comment about the alloys used in the gold got me thinking that MKC’s jeweler might be using a lower-quality alloy and/or plating on the rings. Yes, your body’s chemistry and soaps and lotions can cause discoloration. Yet a high-quality alloy/gold should NOT be doing this.
I think the Jolly Rancher in the middle is a rose quartz, which isn’t an expensive stone by any means. The diamonds surrounding it are some of the lowest-quality stones out there and are nearly worthless.
Every Mary Kay award, including the “free” car, would be much cheaper if purchased/leased directly, instead of earned through MK product orders. Oh, if the consultants only knew the actual cost of these awards. Similarly, if they knew Mary Kay’s true “cost” for their beauty products, they’d be far less willing to pay the outrageous mark-up baked into Mary Kay’s “wholesale” prices.
Put another way, directly buying/leasing items similar to the MK awards would cost the consultant less overall then “earning” those same items from involvement in Mary Kay.
It’s the same with any other prize “giveaway”. The only winner is the company. I remember 1990-ish my sister wanted this black leather backpack Virginia Slims was giving away “free” with something like 250 UPCs off their packs. So she started smoking even more and got her friends who smoked to switch to VA Slims and give her their UPCs. I don’t know what a pack of smokes cost in 1990, but even then (I was 14) it seemed like a hell of a lot of money and effort just for a backpack. I mean, unlike the MK crap it’s a really nice backpack that I used all through college and still have somewhere, but not THAT nice.
People get so fixated on the “free” that they don’t stop to think of the cost behind it.
(Epilogue: that sister died in 1994, right before her 29th birthday and my high school graduation, of a massive stroke due largely to uncontrolled high blood pressure, Which sure as hell wasn’t helped by smoking. If you think I’m vicious about MLMs, you’ve never seen me in anti-tobacco mode.)
It’s bad enough that these rings are crappy, but even worse when MK issues 1099s to the “winners.” That crappy jewelry, along with the “career cars,” is taxable income. Thus, the “winners” end up getting the green weenie from MK & the IRS. A NSD I know of has taken money rather than jewelry for years. She’s been in MK for nearly 40 years & says she doesn’t need any more jewelry. She still drives a pink Escalade & gets to pay taxes for the privilege.
All their crap is pink?? A PINK Escalade? No thank you, you can keep it.