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Popular luxury skincare brand Sunday Riley has been under fire recently. On October 15, a former employee of the brand got on the popular website, “Reddit”, to expose Sunday Riley for allegedly mistreating their employees. The post is shown below.

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Employees of the Sunday Riley brand were forced to visit Sephora’s website and write fake positive reviews of the brand. Sephora is a major retailer for many high-end makeup, skin, and hair care brands. In an email to Sunday Riley employees, you can see they were asked to write “at least 3” positive reviews on their new “Saturn” and “Space Race” skin care products.

Sunday Riley has been a very popular skin care line for quite some time, which makes it very interesting that they feel the need to write fake reviews and counteract any negative thing that has ever been said about their products. I have even bought some products myself, but after hearing this news I would rather return the products than use products from a dishonest brand. I know I am not alone in this, which could spell trouble for Sunday Riley’s sales.

Pictured: The email written to Sunday Riley’s employees detailing their instructions on how to create fake reviews that could not be traced back to the company in any way.

Sunday Riley took to Instagram to address this matter in a recent post.

The brand defended itself by saying they could not have posted all the thousands of reviews they had. Sunday Riley herself has mentioned one of her major brand ethos is transparency. Many people are calling the brand out on social media for being sneaky and dishonest, but every exposing comment is being immediately deleted by Sunday Riley’s team.

Angry customers isn’t all this brand has to worry about, A “persistent online review fraudster” in Italy was recently fined €8,000 ($9,300) and sentenced to nine months in prison for operating a company that sold fake reviews for hotels.

At this point, it seems Sunday Riley has dug her brand into a hole by trying to promote the brand, and now the honesty of Sunday Riley and true quality of their products will always be questioned by consumers.

The beauty community has grown in popularity hugely over the past few years. In this age of booming social media, “influencers” have begun to take over. There are many types of influencers that brands are using to campaign and advertise for them, such as fitness models, beauty gurus, fashion bloggers, and gamers. Influencers often use their social media platforms with thousands (or millions) of followers to promote certain brands in exchange for payment or free product. Many of these influencers have made these promotions and advertisements a full-time job and have been able to afford new cars, new homes, and expensive designer clothes.

One of the biggest businesses at this time is the beauty business. Multiple brands are teaming up with YouTubers and Instagrammers and various bloggers that have a large following to either promote their brand or collaborate with their brand to create a new product.

Jaclyn Hill, for example, is a big name in the YouTube and Instagram beauty community. Jaclyn has 5.7 million followers on her Instagram page and 5.4 million subscribers on her YouTube channel as of September 4, 2018. Jaclyn has done multiple collaborations with different brands but one of her most recent would be her “Jaclyn Hill Palette” and “Master Brush Collection” with California-based brand Morphe Brushes.

Pictured: Jaclyn Hill with her “Jaclyn Hill Palette”(left) and “Master Brush Collection”(right).

The “Jaclyn Hill Palette” sold 1 million units at $38 in 2017 alone. The palette is still being carried online at morphebrushes.com and major beauty retailer Ulta. Jaclyn Hill’s success is just one example of how multiple influencers have started sharing their love for makeup online and grown their following into a full-time job.

Instagram ads have almost taken over the feeds of instagram users. There are “Instagram models” who act as influencers for clothing and makeup companies, and all sorts of brands. The influencer world is huge right now and growing rapidly every day.

These four photos are screenshots from various advertisements from Instagrammers. As you can see, even huge celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who has a whopping 116 million followers, do paid promotions. All of the other Instagrammers pictured have above 1 million followers, making them perfect candidates for promotions.

Influencer advertising is a smart move from beauty and clothing companies. These companies will send out their product to popular social media users and give them instructions on what and when to post about their product. They can be offered simply the free product or even large amounts of money for their product to be reviewed. Most beauty companies have a “PR list” of influencers to send their products to every time they put out a new release.

At first, you may look at the job title of “Influencer” and think, “What the heck is that?”, or maybe think that it cannot possibly be a real job. The beauty community is huge right now and being an influencer can really pay off and earn you lots of money. If influencer’s play their cards right, they can land numerous campaigns and collaborations with well known-brands and grow their name to celebrity status.