I was scammed! Counterfeit Red Cherry lashes on eBay: What you need to know

Fake makeup is all around, and usually, it’s really easy to tell when something is fake or not just by looking at a picture. I don’t give eBay a second look when it comes to buying actual makeup – I buy my products from companies directly or via BeautyBay and Lookfantastic, but one thing I have used eBay for in the past is eyelashes. Lashes that I buy from verified sellers that hold physical shops here in the UK and use eBay as their only online sales platform.

I’ve used specific eyelash stores on eBay for eyelashes over the years without a problem, and came across a new shop over on the site a couple of weeks ago that were selling my favourite Red Cherry #WSP lashes that I couldn’t find listed with my usual supplier anymore. I clicked onto the listing and checked out the images along with the written work that stated that they were 100% genuine, unopened and unused. I ordered a stack of them and awaited their arrival.

The lashes arrived and I opened the pack to take a closer look and immediately noticed that the hairs felt very different to usual. Another alarm bell rang as soon as I saw the thick, horrible glue that was pasted along the lash band and impossible to get off without ripping the hairs off. The lashes weren’t carefully cut and the band didn’t look the same as my previous pairs at all. The lashes were stamped with a bar code, the parent company website and even their standard ‘Made in Indonesia’ stamp, but I was sure they were fake.

I immediately contacted the Red Cherry Counterfeit team over in America and sent them images and a description. Sadly, I was correct – they were 100% fake!

Here’s what Red Cherry had to say:

“Hi Rachael,

Thank you so much for contacting us. I can definitely help you with this. You are correct, they are not Red Cherry. I do see the glue that you are referring to. Thank you for these images. 

I looked at the listing that you linked, and noticed that the third picture shows a “Red Cherry” box. A box like this is one giveaway that you can note for future references. I have seen many counterfeit lashes with this box, and we do not make this box whatsoever. We do have a gift tin, but that is metal. We also have a Valley of the Dolls edition gift box, however it is pink, comes with four select styles, and some booklets.

 I also wanted to mention two more key points. One, is that all of our packaging has the trademark symbol ®. We have old packaging (which looks like what is listed) and we have new packaging, which is in a little black box.

Secondly, we do not really allow our lashes to be sold on eBay at all, and authorize very few sellers to list them on Amazon. If you could let your friends and colleagues know, then that would be super helpful to us and to them.”

I immediately raised a case with the seller on eBay who issued a refund within a couple of hours and said she’d talk to her supplier if I felt that these weren’t genuine – something that the actual company had already confirmed and I’d already sent her a copy of the email stating this. The seller hasn’t removed the listing to date, but has since updated it and still maintains that the lashes are genuine. So now I’m in the process of reporting the item to eBay in order to have them removed so nobody else falls into the same trap.

Being scammed online is SO easy and can happen to anybody. I’ve used eBay for absolute years and I’m extremely careful and diligent with my purchases, but even I had the wool pulled over my eyes this time.

I wanted to share this post for anybody else out there who might decide to buy their Red Cherry lashes from eBay (or any other lashes for that matter). Please do be careful and keep your wits about you when shopping online.

© This post is copyright of Rachael Divers 2017.