At Pink Truth, we know that 99% of all participants in multi-level marketing lose money. Nonetheless, recruiters for Mary Kay and other MLMs tell recruits that they can make money just selling the product! They will tell you this while knowing that they have lost money, with hundreds or thousands of dollars of inventory sitting in their basements or garages.

But the story sounds good! Buy a product for $1 and sell it for $2! You have doubled your money!

Here’s the dirty truth: Sales of multi-level marketing products to actual customers are very low. This is primarily because the products are overpriced in order to pay many levels of commissions. While Mary Kay’s products might work just fine, they are comparable in quality to brands found at Walgreen’s or Target, and they generally cost more than those brands.

How do I know that relatively little of the products purchased by Mary Kay consultants are ever sold to real customers? First, I have my own personal experience. I was an active Mary Kay consultant for about 18 months, working very diligently to develop a customer base. My goal was to hold 3 to 4 skin care classes a week, and I worked the way I was instructed…. daily calling of leads, warm chatting, trying to book follow-up appointments, etc… but found it was incredibly difficult to book those classes and then ensure that the classes were held.

After that, I spent another year or two trying to unload the inventory I had. I found that the claims about women spending $100 or $150 on average at a class were lies. I found that the claims about the amount women will spend each year on reorders were lies. The products were difficult to move, and I was constantly discounting, giving hostess gifts, and offering other incentives to get people to buy.

I was consistently the top seller in our unit, yet I could never achieve the sales I was told were “average” before I signed up and bought my inventory package. I watched my recruits and fellow unit members, and found that they weren’t having success with moving much product either.

We also have the stories of thousands of consultants who have visited this site and discussed their experiences. These stories make it clear that selling Mary Kay products is very difficult, and almost impossible to do consistently. The vast majority of women who are on the Court of Sales at Seminar (ordering $40,000 retail value / $20,000 wholesale value of products per year) do NOT sell all of those products. Much of it goes unsold as stockpiles of inventory in consultants’ homes grow.

But maybe we’re all just lazy losers and that’s why we’re a part of Pink Truth? Maybe everyone else is sooooooo successful and that’s why they’re not lending their stories to us? No, I’ve ruled that out as a possibility. Each week we have a few Mary Kay consultants who visit Pink Truth to bash us and tell us how much money they’re making selling the products. But any time we ask for proof of their income claims, they inevitably run away, screaming how mean we are.

When it comes time to put the money where the mouth is, consultants and directors claiming to retail lots of Mary Kay products won’t provide proof of those alleged sales. (And of course, Mary Kay doesn’t track retail sales…. likely because they know how pitiful the actual sales are, and they don’t want to have any hard evidence in their hands that might suggest MK is a pyramid scheme.)

Look no further than information freely available on the internet to see that women are desperate to unload their Mary Kay products at any price. If Mary Kay products were so easy to sell, people wouldn’t be offering them at a deep discount (and in large quantities) on sites like:

• eBay – More than 70,000 listings when this article was written, with plenty of the listings for groups of products
• Amazon – More than 1,000 listings in the beauty category when this article was written
• Etsy – Over 1,000 listings that include plenty of MK products
• Websites like pinkchoices.com selling heavily discounted MK products

In addition, social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are overrun with Mary Kay consultants peddling their products. Tiktok sort of has a ban against selling MLM products on the platform, but plenty of people get around it. Thankfully, there are lots of women like this who speak out against MLMs like Mary Kay, so I think TikTok might be better for fighting this scam.

On social media, almost all are offering some sort of incentive or discount to attract customers (with little success, of course) and there are plenty of stories and pleas for help on these sites from frustrated consultants who can’t find customers or sell the products. (“We’re going for a big goal this month and just need to sell ___ more products!”) This is in addition to the “lifestyle” posts which suggest that MK is the reason behind certain material goods or opportunities.

Is there a market for Mary Kay products? Yes. There are consultants and sales directors who sell the products. But the vast majority cannot sell enough products to turn a profit (much less support themselves), and women are left with inventory they can’t sell and debt they can’t pay off. This, my friends, is the reality of multi-level marketing.