I had heard of cheapsmells.com from a number of blogs and YouTube videos over the years and I recently decided to purchase an item from their website. I decided to purchase a MAC item and I wont say which yet because I will be writing a blog post on it soon. I will however say that it is the first MAC item I ever bought. The reason for this is that I am young and will soon be a poor student living in halls.
Cheap Smells is an online website in which you can buy perfume, make up, hair care and skincare for discounted prices. I had a bit of another look today and the most discount I saw was £25 off the RRP! You may be thinking- 'yeah, but the stock is probably older stuff no one wants'- but there's everything from items in MACs permanent collection to Clarins skin care to OPI nail polishes. Too good to be true? Well.......
That is probably where the good points finish. I ordered my item pretty late in the evening and chose standard delivery because I didn't mind waiting a bit longer for free shipping. I got an email straight away telling me that they'd received my order and it got dispatched the next day. The website stated that you should wait 3-5 days which I did and when it didn't come I decided to wait a few more days as it said to wait for up to 8 days before emailing them. I did this and got an apologetic email back straight away and my order came 2 days after that.
I was so excited to receive my MAC item however when I opened the packaging I had reservations about the authenticity straight away. This is saying a lot as I have never owned a MAC item before. The colour of the product didn't seem to fully match the swatches and pictures that I had seen from the internet and the packaging seemed cheaper than I had expected. In saying this, these details were only very small and the item could easily get away with being genuine. I did more research about Cheap Smells and their MAC products to find that quite a few people had the same problem as me. Some had even emailed them and got a reply saying they were 100% genuine when it was clear they were not. I also read a blog post (which I can't find sorry!) saying that they thought maybe the packaging was different because it was old stock however the company emailed back saying they never sell old stock. This seems strange as the code on my item refers to 2009 which I would class as older stock.
Because I didn't want to waste my money, I sent the item back for a refund which I eventually got after two weeks of waiting. With the email of confirmation that they had received my return came this from the Customer Service Team:
'We’re very sorry to hear you weren’t satisfied with your MAC purchase. We’ve spoken to our supplier who has offered a 100% assurance that all our MAC stock is completely genuine. Despite this assurance, and in response to a small number of customer comments, we have decided to remove all our current MAC stock from the website for further inspection and internal testing to ensure it meets our strict quality guidelines.'
To me, this shows that they have had a lot of other people complaining about fake MAC items and surely not all those people were wrong? I am glad to see that Cheap Smells are going to test the products for authenticity however such a well know website should really do this before they sell the items instead of just taking the word from their suppliers.
If you are worried about fake MAC items the I will be doing a comparison post soon of how you can tell if your MAC purchase is real or not.
I know this post has been very negative however I can say that the customer service is very good. The free shipping as well as the long returns policy is also brilliant. Keep in mind that this post is only about MAC products from Cheap Smells and other items on the website may be completely genuine. Will I buy from the website gain? No, I would rather just pop along to MAC and pay a few pounds more.
Hope you have found this post helpful and tell me about any other discount beauty sites that you have had good/bad experiences with!
Hayley xxx
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