May Kay is not a business I am familiar with, but the August issue of Harpers magazine gives a new view of the underside of the Pink Cadilac written by investigative reporter Virginia Cole-Smith.
Here is the top of her story:
I met my first Mary Kay ladies at a beauty school wedged between a liquor store and an offtrack betting parlor on the backside of a strip mall near Poughkeepsie, New York. “Independent Beauty Consultant” Kim Montero was giving her very first “skincare class,” the preferred term for the direct-sales cosmetics brand’s shopping parties at which friends help friends buy lipstick, hand cream, and “unlimited opportunity,” as the company’s founder, Mary Kay Ash, described it. Mary Kay ladies have been holding skincare classes in suburban living rooms and church basements since the 1960s, and have come to represent a Steel Magnolias kind of Americana—all big hair and folksy aphorisms.
The modern-day version of the shopping party is a little more business, a little less coffee klatch, though the hair, pink packaging, and talk of “opportunity” are much the same. Presiding over the evening class was a kind of Mary Kay consigliere, Daria Rocco, carefully painted and pressed into a royal-blue skirt suit, the official sales director’s uniform, which she accessorized with black fishnets, black knee-high boots, several rhinestone pins, and a gold charm necklace from which dangled three heads in silhouette, one for each of her children. Next to Daria, Kim, at least ten years younger, looked uncertain under her own pancaked foundation and penciled brows.
Kim and I had first met two months earlier, when we both enrolled in the beauty school’s 600-hour esthetician training program, where we spent our weeknights learning to give facials and wax bikini lines. During class breaks, she smoked Newports and showed me cell phone photos of her ten-year-old son and their cat, both at home with her live-in boyfriend. Before signing up for the program, Kim had worked—and been laid off from—a variety of low-paying jobs: bartender, bank teller, retail clerk. After signing up to be a Mary Kay consultant, she had received special permission to hold her “grand opening” skincare class in a small room off the beauty school’s main salon floor. Kim had actually signed up as a consultant twice before. “The first two times, I didn’t make any money,” she explained later. “But this time, with my esthetics knowledge, I think it makes a lot of sense.”
Hmmm, while I would have liked to read about the ‘preying’ part – I couldn’t because I would have to subscribe to Harper’s to get the entire article…this part of the article really didn’t touch on that at all – I will add that I was a MK Lady for a short while after being ‘stalked’ while shopping…would have liked to have seen the similarities with my experience!
George, you have the byline but the store is written by someone else? Also the link to the story is only for subscribers on that site..
Years ago, Mary Kay Ash fired one of her employees because the woman was going through chemotherapy for breast cancer and could not meet sales goals. I stopped using Mary Kay cosmetics just for that reason.