For 15 years, Elizabeth Spiridakis Olson used a matte lip pencil in a shade of red called Dragon Girl. It was “one of the great reds, and the perfect consistency.” She used it almost daily and kept one at her home office and another in her handbag.
Ms. Spiridakis Olson made a chilling discovery while shopping at Sephora: the store no longer carried her go-to liner. In its place, NARS was selling a similar product, Powermatte High Intensity Long Lasting Lip Pencil, which offered a different shade of red and consistency.
“I panicked,” Ms. Spiridakis Olson said. On the NARS website, she found that Dragon Girl was available on what was billed as a final sale. “I bought as much as they would allow me,” she recalled. Her stash should last her many years. “It’s so pigmented, you’re not reapplying it a ton,” Ms. Spiridakis Olson said. “Now, do I know the proper way to store this for optimal conditions? No. They’re under my sink.”
There’s a thriving gray-ish market for out-of-stock lip pencils and other discontinued products. Customers are hitting up eBay and other resale sites to find things like almond Dial soap, which has been out of circulation for years. They are paying many times the original retail price for Benefit Hello Flawless Powder Foundation, which was discontinued in 2019. There is even an e-commerce site, Discontinued Beauty, whose motto is “keeping you connected to your favorite beauty products.”
Fans of discontinued products, from clothing to cars, gather on message boards to commiserate and share sourcing tips. Loyal users of Jason Powersmile toothpaste lamented on Reddit that they were no longer able to purchase a tube after the company exited the dentifrice business in December. Dawn’s recent decision to change the scent of its dish soap provoked a similar flurry of online kvetching and strategizing.
Source link
