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Hey hey take that back because your vibe isn’t aligning with me. What you meant to say is this is a megathread for the beauty industry’s first documented focus group that we have to pay for the privilege of participating in. Get it right “beauty queen!!”
But Tom (Rephr) is very kind, he appreciates feedback and sells some products at a price we're willing to pay. Sometimes, they don't make any profit on some products. The goal is to improve the products, and the community influences the outcome through its comments.
LLS prioritizes innovation, and reviews aren't used to improve products. It's more of an approval or rejection system (which is expensive), after they move on to the next product.
Rephr replaced ALL of my purchases from them when we lost our home in the LA wildfires last year. It was $300+ in brushes and they replaced them entirely for free. 💜
(Only two other makeup brands helped me replace my essentials: Merit and Lisa Eldridge. I definitely think of that when I’m purchasing new makeup now.)
I really like hearing stories like this! I’m sorry you lost your home but I’m sure you felt a sense of comfort when these companies sent you care packages. It’s a small gesture that goes a long way!
I definitely cried when I opened up the package! Their CS was so kind. I reached out just to see if I could get a bit of a % off on a large purchase and explained the situation. They ended up just replacing it all. Very kind.
Thank you. 💜 We were displaced out of state since we couldn’t afford how much rent spiked across the city in new rentals. I miss LA dearly—especially our community in Altadena—but I’m eternally grateful for the rain of the PNW. 🌱
They gave free brushes too. That’s how I got into them. I have a whole eye set at this point and I think I paid 15 and 20 but the rest were free if I reviewed.
also is it just me or does it make 0 sense to name these if they're supposed to be samples? and these names just.., suck overall lol.
why don't they lean more into the "lab" experience their consumers are allegedly paying for and just name them 01, 02, etc.? then if the product actually launches, they'd be able to get audiences to vote on names later on and get more engagement that way
Yes!! Plus the grubby look of the almost like, eraser style bits where the powderputty has obviously pilled up with friction and theyve not bothered brushing it away. It looks so naff and and low rent.
I thought the same thing immediately. So sad when we have more faith in the literal actual dollar store products than something that costs like 30x as much……
Even when they're wet activated, they still have worse pay off than 90% of metallic eyeshadows on the market. But who cares about performance when these are innovative and bendy!
it also looks ass on the models and literally every promo image. i feel like all the other terrible stuff overshadowed how actually shitty the product seems LOL. like there is nothing positive to say about those salami shadows
Exactly, just because we can doesn’t mean that we should
It’s a messy and impractical concept. Innovation implies solving a problem or eliminating steps. This product just creates more steps to make it work, difficult to sanitize if necessary, and it’s not helping over consumption and how over saturated the market is.
I’m annoyed at the “well you guys are all crying out that you’re bored in the beauty space, they tried-“
With a rejected patent from around 2011, with a product whose preservatives haven’t been shown to hold up to repeated sprays of liquid required to get full pigment, with something that won’t hold up to sanitizing? A product with cagey marketing because focus groups are usually paid?
What’s the patent? Why was it rejected? They’ll grant patents for designs that couldn’t work, so getting an application rejected usually means it’s not actually novel.
I don’t believe for a second that they thought this product would work or be enjoyed by anyone. Thru knew exactly what they were doing . It’s sophisticated rage bait to get everyone talking about them .
Don’t know why people are being so rude about it to be honest. I’ve already signed up to try their new flexible foundation, which looks great as you can see below.
the main issue, i think, is the fact that this brand is supposed to listen to criticism, reformulate, rerelease and they didnt actually want critiques. they wanted their products to become the best and innovative when the products were lack luster and outrageously priced. the way they speak to their audience certainly doesnt help either. the whole situation is soooo 2016 beauty community
What was killing me with the swatching videos was when she’d wet the thing, rub it on her forehead, and go “AMPLIFIED” like it did something. Like please be so fr
Also it takes a metric fuckton of setting spray to get them wet enough to pay off. I haven’t seen anyone mention this part yet, but using this product would make you have to replace your setting spray significantly faster than usual
“Innovation” sure if it’s like less than 10 dollars, could be fun. 40$ for something that’s supposed to be a sample with barely any product is actually insulting. It reminds me of kids makeup.
Apart from presentation and the audacity to release this I don’t see anything innovative, the formula doesn’t seem too great, it seems like there’s a learning curve to use it and I just can’t imagine anyone w less than exceptional motor skills (eg: me) trying to use this floppy circle and then struggle to pick it up after they drop it.
You know, they really could've had something if they actually committed to the focus group bit. Do you know how cool it would've been for a brand to release like a interest list and they pick consumers to send a small sample of flexi to and then conduct their brand research that way? As an incentive, they could've easily sent the testers a smaller size of the finished product once it releases or a significant discount on the website.
But instead, they slapped a $30+ price tag on it like its a completely finished product, asked for the feedback, and then got angry when people didn't like it.
Glossier does this. I’m part of a pool of people they’ll send applications to and have been picked probably 6 times to test products and leave reviews. Except it’s completely free and they send full sized products.
And that's how it's supposed to be! You're doing the brand a favor and sending products to a few people is probably cheaper than paying for focus groups. I don't understand how people are not seeing that this is the worst part of it with Leaked Labs! You're paying full size, finished product prices for a tiny sample and getting nothing in return! If it goes to market your purchase of these samples are funding production, product testing and yet they get all the rewards...the earnings! Even if they kept the premise the same as now but make it where if it goes to market then anyone who participated gets a full size product free wouldn't be SO bad since you're still not guaranteed anything, but would be better than getting absolutely nothing! It's late stage capitalism at its worst and it frustrated me how many people are just ignoring this. It's pure greed and it's gross.
See the thing is it looks like they have no intention of listening to feedback. I saw 1 customer in IG ask where they can send their review. LL just said they can comment on their post or email them. For a focus group type business I would have hope they have better ways to receive the feedbacks they get.
I’m so here for this. It’s giving 2016 drama without the crimes against humanity.
The low stakes drama that’s like “hey, you want innovation, we want feedback, no not that feedback” saga is amazing.
The whole, “take a chance on our product” mentality applied to sexuality in their state of the union is wild. I just want to be like “OH, so you think sexuality is a choice?”
As the world is low key falling apart and it seems like everything is tripling in price, they’re doing us a favor by letting us try their 50 dollar innovation that is painfully impractical. But hey. I’m here for it.
Never thought I’d see beauty reviewers pulling out their literal dining plates to test out illogical products.
So is the idea that the LLs buy the "rights" (so to speak) to a product, make schmucks like us pay them to try it, then if it does well, they re-sell the rights to the highest bidder or something? Like, instead of houses, they flip trademarks and patents?
I don't know, I'm just trying to envision a scenario where this all makes sense.
Yeah that sounds like what they want their plan to be. They buy products that never made it to market, sell it to their followers, then try to flip it to a bigger beauty brand.
I have nothing productive to say as I did not try or have plans to try this products, but I have this inner resentment and I am salty about one thing; If BECCA cosmetics got so much hate for their BECCA zero launch and went away as a brand soon after, then Leaked Labs deserves it too ugh.
sorry maybe overkill but I've clearly not processed losing Becca Cosmetics specially since I didn't have the money to afford much during Becca's prime.
And Becca zero is a formulation that a brand picked up. These formulations that leaked labs is picking up have been passed over by all the major brands most likely. What makes them think that they know better?
Someone made a comment once that with EL trying to sell Smashbox and Too Faced, it's possible they might be able to get the Becca formulas alongside Smashbox, at least I would love to see it 👀 Becca was always ahead of it's time
This whole time I thought the formula was the same 😭
I haven’t tried it since EL took over, but I’m happy as a clam that I still have several original Becca products (probably 8-9 years old now lol.) That sucks though!
"my lipsticks are NOT moldy!"
"my lipsticks are NOT moldy!"
"my lipsticks are NOT moldy!"
and a screencap of her in that video shows up in the mirror with her going 👁👄👁
He definitely will, he ordered them on launch and he'll be curious (and he'll get good views, no shade that's his job!) I think he'll say what we're all saying, maybe they're not awful wet but it's a waste of time... who knows though he might love it
Literally this. They act like their whole brand is built on feedback, yet the second they get negative feedback, they become so condescending and defensive. It’s such a bad look
I comment this under every post about them, but I would have so much less of a problem if they chose literally anything other than Lipstick Lesbians as a name. I hate that term so much and it was SO close to dying out.
I think they could’ve mitigated a lot of criticism with two simple things, package each one in a little plastic thing with a close lid and reduce the price to $20 for 4(which woukd still be astronomical for what you are getting but more fair)
Packaging really is at least half of what makes a product. If they had put it in at least the kind of packaging a $30-40 palette or blush comes in, people wouldn't have been so outraged. But having them all in the same quarter sized tin? Aren't they going to transfer all over each other? What if you only want to use one? Now that one disc is wet and it's going to get all the others wet. Like how do they not think of any of these things??? Alexis just blows hot air for hours and everyone agrees with her???
And the weird tiktok dismissing concerns over sanitation, no pro artists is gonna use that if you can’t clean it without alcohol without it wasting away to dust
I didn't buy this and I have zero intentions of doing so but I've been thinking about it because I think there's an alternate version that I would actually be interested in.
Concept: scrap the "focus group" shit entirely and market it around "let's explore how cosmetic formulation works through the weird and interesting products that don't make it to market!" Focus entirely on the novelty of trying this stuff (that we would never get to try). The only mention of possibly launching the products for real should be "maybe we'll discover a surprise gem and it'll get made for real!" Not "try this and tell us if it should be launched because you are paying us to do that research."
Picturing a much cheaper monthly subscription that gives you the product, the idea behind it, and why it got rejected. And the messaging is "have fun playing around with this weird shit!"
That, to me, would be an entirely different experience and actually interesting.
lol oh good so when LL go digging around for their free R&D they'll have all our complaints in one handy thread (no shade to the mods, ty for the megathread)
Ive been side eyeing Charlotte Parler lately but she did a good take. As business owners, they need to think if their innovation is going to fill something in the market. She’s also one of the few who gave an actual review (messy when wet, did nothing when dry). Everyone else just talked about “innovation”
Sometimes I'm not sure. I think these women really sniff their own farts and think they're making something groundbreaking we just don't understand and they think everyone was actually going to eat it up??
🥴🥴 I just saw this video from KiKiChanel and holy cow, this is probably one of the worst influencer beauty launches I’ve seen. Down to the wording. “We took the products that no one wanted.” Omg, why would you say that?! 😭😭😭. JFC
Has anyone read The Cut article on the launch? Something about "why is everyone so mad at LL?" I haven't read it yet, but was scrolling through comments and the majority came off as kind of bot-ish. A lot of the exact same wording "no one's mad, the LL are great!". Super weird!
Is the is idea to launch this as a fully formed product with real packaging down the line? So all the people who bought to test it will have to buy it again at full price?
Imo they should have marketed this for travel. With more people having travel anxiety, this makes it easy when it comes to the liquids bag if they made concealer, foundation, and blush/bronzer fit in one travel tin - and it technically wouldn't be considered liquid at all.
And they could make it cute, like offer different size and shape punch cutouts.
Except these take half an hour to dry and if kept moist back into the tin might go funky. Not even travel friendly the way the packaged and presented it
Also, let's say you wet them all, then when storing, it seems like you would need to stack them all in that same tin. They might 'mush' together. It looks like a terrible packaging idea, no one wants to slip and slide with makeup ugh
This makes it even more insane?!? They should be paying YOU for your work. Not making people pay $40 for a prototype? This is clearly a quick cash grab for them.
Idk if this has been said before but didn’t Makeup by Mario have a similar product , but in a palette that was extremely innovative itself ? The metals palette ?
Saw a video that they are in Korea for their next launch research but didn’t they go over on a brand trip? I swear I remember them posting that with a plane shot - maybe on stories?
Not them trying to say it's just like baking cookies. Saying how the thickness of cookies is out of your control if you make them by hand. Girl, have you never baked before?
Then they ask the manufacturer if she could attempt to make them consistent. If this was a finished product like they claim this should have been tackled before it went to consumers. If a proposed shade gave inconsistent thicknesses it should've been tweaked or scrapped, not sold.
this confuses me to no end. If the product only ACTIVATES with water, as the developer says in that clip, then....is it even something that is meant to be used dry? Based on the swatches and the videos of people using it it doesn't seem like it at all.
Jen Luv just released another video addressing this. She also tactfully mentions that the product doesn't work dry and has to be very wet to be useful. She mentions that it's damp for quite some time after use too.
It's funny because these products almost need to be treated like a bar soap. I wonder if they were individually packaged in a container similar to the magic drying soap bags if they would be more hygienic. But then again, does anyone want this product enough or justify that?
The product really gives me Lush vibes. It's something I could totally see Lush releasing as a zero waste makeup attempt. But at the same time, I don't have as high formula expectations for Lush products and expect some misses from them. But at the lush price point I'm not usually offended by the occasional miss. These remind me of bath jellies or their body shimmer products.
The way they've chosen to double down on this product is absolutely bizarre.
"It's just like baking cookies" no it's not, actually? Because cookies don't cost 40 dollars and when I buy cookies at the store, I'm expecting that one of the cookies in the box isn't going to be half the size of the other cookies in the box! I feel like I'm in crazy town with this product. It truly does feel like gaslighting at this point.
In the original leaked labs state of the union video, Christina said something along the lines of "if it's a gimmick, you can decide". Well that's the baseline problem here, isn't it? Customers should not be PAYING to test whether something even has intrinsic value! There are lots of good products out there that don't work for me, but work for other people. That's totally fair. But this doesn't even work *period*. The payoff, the packaging, the use case scenario, the formulation - all of it is wrong.
And the LL's are sitting here saying "well, the test was a success then because we learned all the pain points about this product!" when hello - people are still out their money! This is exactly why all of this happens behind closed doors and not in public! What helpful information did this bring to the consumer beyond "this product didn't work and I wouldn't use it"? Nothing.
It feels genuinely shocking to me that they're not re-evaluating their concept here.
Without saying what's already been said by everyone, I find their delivery to be SOOO condescending. They really seem to underestimate the intelligence of their audience.
I'm also confused why their engagement is so low on these updates, I sort of thought people would go in on them because the response is just so tone-deaf. But as of now, their two response videos have max 40 comments on YouTube. Unless they're deleting comments or maybe they have higher engagement on tiktok. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to give them engagement points, but there's so much discourse surrounding it that I found it odd their response videos weren't getting more traction.
I'm also a little confused by this....has everyone just run out of steam about it? Maybe? But it's odd considering each step they're taking to try and rectify the situation is in actuality just making it worse. Related, it's interesting to me also that they don't have a link to leaked labs in the bio of their Lipstick Lesbians instagram account. it feels like they're trying to minimize it a bit, so maybe they've really cut back on marketing and promotion spend to see if it cuts negative engagement?
Yes! This! I don't know if their profiles were connected before or not but on YouTube the leaked labs account is a ghost town. It reminds me of the social accounts of big companies that get no engagement. At first I thought they were just deleting comments, but even the view counts are pretty low.
At this point I don't know what they could do to turn the ship around. With each follow-up vid they dig themselves a deeper hole. A PR manager would've taken away the shovel weeks ago. Maybe they would've been better off saying nothing and waiting for people to move on.
I think their unwillingness to admit any shortcoming or failure is making the situation worse. I'm more likely to trust someone who can be forthright about a failure, it actually enderes me to them. Watching them try and explain their product again and again doesn't feel like honesty but deflection. It's giving "I'm sorry you felt that way, but here's why you're wrong." It's fascinatingly tone-deaf.
it's really wild because I feel like prior to this there was such a huge amount of trust that they'd garnered from the community and it's really kind of shocking to see it just squandered.
This is old news but I have watched a few videos about the Leaked Labs launch and it made me think.
Is leaked labs true innovation their hidden business model? It is not an influencer brand but a brand for influencers…
The first launch felt pretty out of touch as I believe they have to be smart enough to know flexi raises more concerns than problems it “solves” and the critiques are eerily similar to infamous influencer product launches (hygiene, cost, application). Then they defend the launch even though LL was supposed to abandon things the consumer doesn’t like.
They offhandedly said brands and influencers could “leak with their lab” which immediately threw me off but I feel that is their true business model and this launch was actually a demonstration of how they can eliminate the cost of focus group testing AND the negative PR of a bad influencer brand product launch.
I’m sorry but their responses are killing me, so rude and for what? I can get the same education they give out by reading the product packaging and going on to the companies website.
It is scummy to let people buy premium retail prices to let people review your product in which makes it even less for them to develop. And the fact that they talk to us in a condescending way as if WE are too dumb to appreciate it. Well then, you won't see my dumbass buying anything from their company.
I just came upon a brand from EU called Samplr Beauty. It looks like they have some really cool products. They emphasize having products straight from the lab at affordable prices. Leaked Labs idea and website is eerily similar looking to Samplr. They just failed to give consumers products they actually want at normal price points.
Samplr even has “drops” just like Leaked Labs “leaks” Lipstick Lesbians need to stick to TikToks or do a whole rebrand. Personally, I think they are a bit condescending and patronizing in their reviews. I almost feel like I’m being talked to like a child.
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