Discontinued Beauty Products: The Items I’m Mourning
My favorite discontinued beauty products
I’m in Weekend Recovery mode, so I’m taking the easy way out today: I’m perusing my personal makeup bag for items I’ve loved and sadly lost. Not for because I’ve misplaced them, but because the brands that once made them have stopped doing so.
RIP, beauty products …
I’m a pale, pale gal. Blonde hair, pale skin, light green/blue eyes. Which leads to the original makeup conundrum: in order to not appear as a Casper-ish blob of pale, I need to define my eyes; yet, I’m so pale that dark liner is out, and brown looks drab. Avon recently discontinued the plum shade of its fantastic Jillian Dempsey for AVON Professional Kohl Eye Liner – black, brown and navy are still available, but I’m missing the beautiful bluish plum. It was so perfect for day to day wear – it went on smooth and stayed all day.
A stroke of in-shower genius: Clean & Clear SOFT In-Shower Facial. It’s a fantastic exfoliator that uses fruit enzymes to banish dead skin. You just applied it in the shower, let it sit for a minute (the steam activated the enzymes), and scrubbed gently before rinsing. Skin was left soft and gorgeous.
Remergent was a line of premium skin creams that promised to repair DNA damage. And, get this, there was some credible truth to the brand’s claims: a clinical study on patients with a genetic condition known as Xeroderma Pigmentosum, or XP, that prevents their skin from repairing itself normally. XP patients are 1000 times more prone to skin cancers because they lack this natural repair ability. The study showed that when a certain DNA repair enzyme was encapsulated in a liposome (a microscopic oil vesicle), the XP patients showed an increase in cellular repair.
That same technology was used in each of Remergent’s products, making for some truly groundbreaking results (I personally saw a ton of progress when I used it). Whiler Remergent as we know it is gone, I do believe they’ve been bought by Clinique Medical – so perhaps that magic formulation will live on.
Years ago, L’Oreal Sublime Bronze Tanner was the best formulation to be found – not orangey, not stinky. Just perfect. Then they went and changed the formula – all of a sudden, what had once been a sun-kissed tan was orange. Where it was convincingly natural, it now has glitter. So while the name lives on, the product does not.
What To Do About It
Still looking for an old favorite of yours? ShopSmart, from the publisher of Consumer Reports, offers these tips:
The first place to go to track down a much-missed favorite is the manufacturer:
Call the makeup brand’s customer-service department to ask about leftover inventory, upgraded formulas/names or comparable substitutes.
Estée Lauder brands: You can find products discontinued in the last 24 months through the company’s Gone but Not Forgotten program; you can buy up to six pieces, depending on availability. Call 800-216-7173 to start your search.
Almay, Revlon & Ultima II: You can find discontinued products at cosmeticsandmore.com and their affiliated retail outlets (in Arizona, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina), or call 888-882-5629 to place an order.Lancôme, Molton Brown and Nars: These companies sell discontinued items on their sites—Lancome-usa.com, Moltonbrown.com, and Narscosmetics.com—until inventory runs dry. Some brand sites, including Benefitcosmetics.com, Clinique.com, Lancome-usa.com, and Prescriptives.com—feature online alerts, so customers have fair warning when discontinued goods are disappearing.
If the manufacturer is unable to track down an old fave, here are some other sites worth checking out:
Discount.makeup.com: This subsidiary of Makeup.com sells discontinued beauty products from many brands, including Shiseido and Bare Escentuals.
Beautyencounter.com: This site sells hard-to-find products from Max Factor, Neutrogena, Goldwell, Sebastian, KMS, and more.
Vermontcountrystore.com: Its niche is hard-to-find items, and customer service will track down products for which they get a lot of requests, even if the site doesn’t carry them. When an item is no longer manufactured and demand is sufficient, the site buys an original formula and reproduces.
Threecustom.com: The go-to place for celebrity makeup artists, Three Custom Color specialists can replicate the exact shade and texture of just about any color cosmetic product, including blush, eyeshadow, lipstick, concealer, and foundation. The company has an archive of 9,000 makeup shades dating back to the 1930s, and it will duplicate a hue if you send a dime-size sample.
Still no luck? Here are other places to do makeup research:
Ebay.com, Amazon.com and Overstock.com: These sites can list discontinued products. Since the goods offered can come from third parties, there’s the risk that a product is old or wasn’t stored or shipped properly, so read the fine print carefully regarding any return policy before ordering.
Makeupalley.com: You can find in-depth information on tons of products, including discontinued ones, at this social community of beauty-product consumers. You can post a product request on the Swap Board; if another member owns the item, you can negotiate a trade.
The Fragrance Foundation: For detailed information on just about any fragrance that’s ever existed, go to fragrancefoundation.org and click on Fragrance Directory.
Totally out of luck? Never!
Contact us and we will talk to some of the PR people and see if they can find it for you.
Rest in peace, MAC Spanish Fly lipstick.
[...] Original post by Femmeiniste [...]