The scandal has officially erupted and come to a close. The celebrity-favourite beauty brand Sunday Riley, has settled with the FTC after reports that they ordered employees to post fake product reviews on Sephora’s website in order to boost sales.
The investigation by the FTC came boiling when an ex-employee wrote a tell-all on Reddit saying ‘Sunday Riley is majorly vindictive.’ They wrote, ‘I’m sharing this because I’m no longer an employee there and they are one of the most awful places to work’. The FTC found that managers and even Sunday Riley herself created fake accounts to post reviews between 2015 and 2017.
Victoria Beckham, Cameron Diaz and Helen Mirren are among the many celebrities that have pledged allegiance to this botanical skincare line. While products like their retinoid oil Luna and their Ceramic Slip clay mask don’t come cheap (a travel-sized enzyme cream starts at £20), they do come with a cult following. Supposedly. With Sephora reviews for the most in-demand products racking up 30,000 ‘loves’, you would think this was the case. However, in the Reddit user's explosive statement it revealed that employees, ‘were forced to write fake reviews for our products on an ongoing basis, which came direct from Sunday Riley herself and her Head of Sales.’
To add salt to the situation, they included an email from the company clearly titled ‘Homework Time - Sephora.com Reviews'. It asked staff to write three reviews for the Saturn acne treatment mask - all positive, of course - specifically counteracting any negative points made by legitimate comments. To fool Sephora into thinking these are real reviews, employees were advised to use a VPN and create separate profiles and to make the accounts believable they also needed to review three or four non-Sunday Riley products too.
These breadcrumbs were too substantial for Sunday Riley to deny and the company admitted the Reddit email via Instagram. ‘The simple and official answer to this Reddit post is that yes, this email as sent by a former employee to several members of our company’, they said, continuing, ‘There are a lot of reasons for doing that, including the fact that competitors will often post negative reviews of products to swing opinion’.
However, the FTC investigation draws a worrying subject of how we, as consumers put our trust and money into reliable honest reviews.According to a survey, 91% of people regularly read online reviews, and 84% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. And they make the decision quickly: 68% form an opinion after reading between one and six online reviews to purchase the product or not.
Surely, there needs to be more regulation than a slap on the wrist as Sunday Riley have avoided a fine and they were warned to not do it again.