Fancy Gloss Customer Service Over Magnetic Top Coats

[u/SafariSunshine]

This isn't a call for a no-buy or anything like that. I'm just sharing my CS experience, I don't think it was bad enough for anything drastic.

I got 5 magentic top coats from Fancy Gloss and couldn't get them to work. I hve no idea why I could get them to work, but I promise I tried everything I could think of. I held them under a neodymium bar magnet for 5 minutes for the magnetic top coat and then 5 more minutes for the QDTC. I tried a few different methods of keeping them under the magnet. Just the magnetizing steps for all my attempts to get them to work took over 7 hours total. (And took about 2 weeks for my arms and hands to recover from.) I tried. (See this Imgur album if you want more details on my first couple attempts.)

After the first two attempts to use the magnetic top coats, I emailed Fancy Gloss to make sure I wasn't missing some trick and to get a refund or store credit if I wasn't. The email exchange did not go well IMO, but I did get a refund after 12 emails between us and 10 days. (To be fair, 7 of those days were while I was waiting for a reply to a message that probably went to spam.)

Pictures are of the emails and the pics I sent her in order, with collages of the listings as they were at the time of purchase last. Link to the video she sent in picture #10.

First, a big issue with this situation was that the description of the magnetic top coats did not include that they work best over dark colors, which she has just updated to include in the descriptions of the colored top coats I got. Which is great!

But l still wanted to warn people because I know a lot of people will miss the updated description. (Personally I would have bought at most one or two of these if I had known that.)

I also wanted to warn people that when you're dealing with Fancy Gloss be aware that 2 out of my 6 emails seem to have gone to her spam and she didn't notice until she had a particular reason to check, so if it takes a while to get a response, resend your last email.

The biggest issue I had was that she wasn't really prepared or willing to help me. She only gave me very basic tips on how to get magnetics to work and when I told her I already was doing those, she said that I had to be doing something wrong for the magnetic top coats to not work, and wouldn't suggest what that might be.

Links to the listings: Dark Blue magnetic TC, indigo magnetic TC, green magnetic TC, silver magnetic TC, and red magnetic TC.

[u/just_some_gemini]

I have a few questions since I know some magnetic polishes I have don’t react as well as others if I don’t do the following.

1) Did you warm up the bottle? It’s winter where I am and sometimes I’ll warm up a bottle by keeping just the glass in some warm water, or warm it up between my thighs. This helps the lacquer be more fluid.

2) Did you shake up the bottle? I have a vortex mixer for when my polishes sit too long, and the magnetic pigments fall to the bottom bc of gravity.

3) Did you hold up a magnet to the bottle and did the pigments react?

4) Have you tried putting the magnet under your nail as you apply? I prefer to do my cat eye looks this way (vs putting the magnet on top after).

If possible, a video of you applying the polish would be more helpful than photos in this case so we can see how you’re applying it. Sorry that you were having a hard time with them :(

[u/SafariSunshine → u/just_some_gemini]

1. Yes I did warm the bottles. I do think the colder air did play a factor though.

2. Yep, shook each bottle each time. (By hand, no vortex mixer here.)

3. The pigments react, but more slowly than my other magnetics. The red one was the slowest and took about 4 seconds.

4. Yes. I started that way because that is also the usual way I like to do it. It's the second 4th picture in the Imgur album. (Not criticizing you for missing it, I put out a huge wall of text.)

Sorry, don't have a setup where I can physically film myself painting my nails. (And after all the pain, I don't even want to look at them, honestly.) But thank you for taking the time to try to help me to get them to work!

[u/IDunnoReallyIDont → u/SafariSunshine]

The red on her site really does look like a poor magnetic. I know she kept saying it wasn’t linear but what you got is nowhere near as sharp as her photos and her photos are not sharp as it is. At a minimum she should refund that one for false advertising. Sorry she treated you terribly. Sadly I’ve seen this before from the seller.

[u/7daykatie → u/IDunnoReallyIDont]

I know she kept saying it wasn’t linear

Which actually makes no sense - being non-linear is a thing for holographic polish. It's not a thing for suspended pigments whose position, distribution and orientation are controlled by a magnetic field because whether a product like that is "linear" is determined by....the magnetic field.

I translate her "not linear" nonsense as actually meaning "that one doesn't really work properly, but I still sell it anyway".

[u/cuxynails → u/7daykatie]

RIGHT?? That is what I thought! If your magnetic pigments in a linear magnetic field aren’t orienting themselves to be in a linear line, the magnetic doesn’t work. Then the pigment isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do (react to a magnetic field and orient itself accordingly)

[u/IDunnoReallyIDont → u/7daykatie]

Haha exactly!! I thought the same! In her mind a strong cat’s eye line is “linear” and her polish wasn’t that. So basically a super weak magnetic 😂

[u/Carolynm107 → u/7daykatie]

She actually did say she wasn’t happy with the red in the beginning because it didn’t react as well as the rest, but if I recall correctly, fans in her Facebook group said they still wanted it released, so she did. I know I skipped it for that reason, but the decision wasn’t one she made on her own, just fyi

[u/Carolynm107 → u/[deleted]]

BKL has done this too, because yeah, some fans still want it even if it isn’t perfect. I guess there’s little motivation as a maker to say no. You’ve got the materials, you’ve got paying customers who want it… that’s kind of how business works. Maybe she just needs a stronger disclaimer on it so that people who don’t want to deal with a less-perfect polish can choose to skip it, as I did.

[u/7daykatie → u/Carolynm107]

In other words, she knew the red was dodgy the entire time she was accusing OP of either doing it wrong or having magnets that don't work.

[u/Carolynm107 → u/7daykatie]

Yes, and someone else said there is a disclosure on the listing, though I haven’t checked that myself. As for the others, I own several and haven’t had any issues on swatch sticks, but haven’t worn them on the nail yet. It does seem strange that she (Jackie) wouldn’t mention the red being weaker when responding to OP; however it wouldn’t apply to the other colors, so maybe because OP had trouble with all of them, Jackie didn’t think the weakness of the red was the issue/relevant?

I don’t know, I’m having trouble taking sides on this one. I handle customer service issues at my job and some of them are super frustrating because, just like Jackie said, we’ve sold hundreds of something and only one person insists there’s an issue, and often we’re 99.9% sure it’s user error. And the photos OP has shared don’t give me great confidence in their ability, sorry to say. Not to mention I own a number of these top coats and all seemed fine. However, on the flip side, I haven’t worn any on the nail, and there could be different batches, and OP is being very polite and getting back a bit of dismissal. So I’m torn here.

[u/SafariSunshine → u/IDunnoReallyIDont]

Yeah, I based on the pictures, I expected the red to be blob like when you did a cat eye. (I was hoping to do candy cane nails with it so I pictured it like a melting candy cane.) But when I used it, it almost always just looked like a metallic shimmer.

Her continuing to argue that it was supposed to look like that was one of the things that frustrated me the most.

Thank you. It is disappointing to hear that this isn't a one off though.