I got my e.l.f. cosmetics order in today. I am super excited. I have tried a couple of the lip products already and they are nice. I have yet to know if I can recommend any of the other products. There was a little bit of a problem with the order in that they didn't ship a couple of things, but I called them, got a person to answer on the first ring, explained the problem, got a good response and shortly thereafter had a credit refund show up on my card for those items.
BUT, while I was searching on their site for their contact information, I came across a little About Us section which included a note about why they sell their products for $1 and it listed an entirely different reason from the one that they had stated on the Fox 10 morning show back in May. According to their site, they sell their cosmetics for a dollar for the simple reason that they don't sell in any retail outlets, but strictly from their own site. Hmmmm....this is a bit different from the information I garnered from our local Fox station. So I did a little digging at one of my favorite sites - Snopes - and apparently the morning gals over at Fox got duped by an email or one of the numerous blogs (I found about 4 in a cursory search this morning) that have picked up on this false email rumor. Now as any of my email friends can tell you this is one of my pet peeves…false forwards I often call them. Almost any email forward that comes my way that claims to be a true story gets checked by me on Snopes.com or truthorfiction.com. Both of these sites do fact checking and try to get to original sources to get the information straight. Nor do I believe any email that comes to me with the claim that ‘this email has been checked on Snopes.’ Too often I find that some prankster has included this line just to make you comfortable about passing it on without doing the fact checking yourself. This particular instance is not a major situation. I went to e.l.f., ordered some of their products, and will now enjoy them. In fact, now that I know that this site exists and that they are actually quite good at customer service as opposed to some internet based companies, I will be likely to order from them again. However, I have been forwarded emails which were either full of downright lies told about a political candidate or full of indecent rumor that could ruin an innocent person’s reputation or full of silly confusion such as the one that purports that a mid-eastern hotel is the palace of a sheik making millions off of us poor duped Americans buying all of his oil. Though they range from slanderous to silly, they are all false and far too many people see fit to just hit Forward and send them on without ever stopping to consider the consequences.