The Truth About Counterfeit Beauty Products Online

Summary

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The Wirecutter Show: "The Truth About Counterfeit Beauty Products Online"

Date: March 25, 2026
Host: Rosie Guerin
Guest: Rose Laurie, Senior Staff Writer at Wirecutter

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Episode Overview

This episode uncovers the unsettling prevalence of counterfeit beauty and skincare products being sold through major online marketplaces. Host Rosie Guerin speaks with Wirecutter’s Rose Laurie, who spent months investigating the issue, even going so far as to purchase and lab-test popular products from third-party sellers on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Shein. The investigation reveals the alarming risks posed by these fakes and provides listeners with actionable advice for spotting and avoiding counterfeit cosmetics online.

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Key Discussion Points & Findings

1. The Spark: Why Investigate Counterfeit Beauty?

• Rose Laurie noticed suspicious "Jones Road" ads on social media after covering the brand in a different context (05:24).
  • “A Jones Road ad came up that did not look... it looked suspicious. It was advertising a very significant steep discount.”
• Initial attempt to buy from the advertised website was itself a scam, leading to a fraudulent charge (06:07).

2. The Experiment: Buying and Testing Suspect Cosmetics

• Laurie bought 12 popular beauty products from third-party sellers on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Shein. The same items were also purchased directly from the brands as controls (06:47).
• All 12 third-party items were flagged by a cosmetic chemist as “counterfeit, expired, used, or otherwise problematic” (07:18).

3. How Counterfeits Infiltrate Online Marketplaces

• Laurie details the difference between first-party (brand/authorized retailer) and third-party sales channels, highlighting how most online marketplaces now rely heavily on third-party listings (09:03–11:49).
  • “If your merchandise is now in a third party channel, something didn’t go according to plan… every handoff point is an opportunity for bad actors to come in.” — Rose Laurie (10:51)
• Third-party chains are minimally regulated, creating the perfect conditions for counterfeit or compromised products to slip in.

4. What Is a Counterfeit? What’s at Stake?

• Counterfeits may be tampered with, expired, or manufactured from unsafe, unregulated materials (13:08).
  • “They may be doing it in a bathroom over a toilet… this is badly intentioned action to produce a product that will fool the customer enough.” — Rose Laurie (13:08)
• Health risks run the spectrum from ineffectiveness to serious allergic or medical reactions (14:07).

5. Scientific Testing: FTIR and Sensory Analysis

• Samples were subjected to FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) laser testing to compare chemical compositions (14:44–16:59).
• Legitimate samples should match at least 95% with the control. Chemists allowed a "gray area" down to about 80–90% (16:52–18:13).
  • Only 3 of 12 third-party products met the 95% match standard; 5 of 12 were below 80%.
  • “[Our chemist] told me this may as well be applesauce. That’s how unalike they were.” (00:33, 18:25)
• Sensory testing exposed telltale differences in texture, color, and scent between real and fake products (21:26–22:47).

6. Notable Examples and Memorable Moments

• The “NARS” concealer from a third-party seller had only a 2% ingredient match. Visually identical, but entirely different chemically (18:25).
• Drunk Elephant cream: Suspect product’s yellowish hue only obvious when placed next to authentic white cream; puffiness in packaging signal bacterial contamination risk (22:33–24:24).
  • “If you’ve ever seen anything puffy at the store... you don’t want puffy, right? Puffy’s bacteria.” — Rosie Guerin (24:16)

7. Why Can Counterfeits Thrive?

• Platforms like Amazon have anti-counterfeit policies ("Counterfeit Crimes Unit") but struggle with enforcement at scale, especially since many products ship direct from the seller and never pass through Amazon’s warehouses (28:05–29:46).
  • “The cavalry is coming, but slowly.” — Rose Laurie (29:46)

8. How to Spot a Third-Party Seller and Avoid Counterfeits

• Check who is selling and shipping: it should be the brand itself or the major platform (Amazon, Walmart, etc.), not a random company name, especially if it includes words like "premium" or "authorized" (31:39–33:33).
• Examine the brand byline—on first-party sales you can click to a branded storefront; with third-party, you land on a list of search results (32:46–33:32).
• Prioritize buying from physical stores, direct brand websites, or well-known digital storefronts.
• Scrutinize reviews—especially one- and two-star complaints indicating fakes (34:44–37:32).
• Check for lot/batch codes, though these can be forged; discrepancies in code location or formatting are red flags (37:38–39:04).
  • “If the lot code doesn't show up, it’s probably a red flag. That’s a big red flag.” — Rose Laurie (37:43)

9. Personal Takeaways and Actionable Advice

• “It definitely makes me more cautious about all categories, even though I only looked into and reported on beauty and personal care.” — Rose Laurie (34:44)
• Tips:
  • Prefer in-person or official brand channels for beauty purchases.
  • Double-check URLs and spelling for fake “direct to consumer” scam sites.
  • Do extra research and don’t trust high product ratings at face value—inspect negative reviews.
  • Compare sensory characteristics and look for unusual packaging or labels.
  • Use lot code checkers, but don’t rely on them 100%.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “A NARS concealer…that was a 2% match to its real counterpart…may as well be applesauce. That’s how unalike they were.” – Rose Laurie (00:33, 18:25)
• "Third-party chain... every handoff point is an opportunity for bad actors to come in.” – Rose Laurie (10:51)
• "If you’ve ever seen anything puffy at the store…you don’t want puffy, right? Puffy’s bacteria.” – Rosie Guerin (24:16)
• "The cavalry is coming, but slowly." – Rose Laurie, about anti-counterfeit enforcement (29:46)
• “The lines in the sand for me, the things that I just will not do now are much… I was so naive about how prevalent this is.” – Rose Laurie (34:01)

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Segment Timestamps

• How the Story Began: 04:45–06:43
• Experiment Set-Up & Results: 06:47–14:44
• Lab Testing Methods & Findings: 14:44–24:29
• Systemic Problems & Retailer Response: 27:22–29:46
• How to Spot and Avoid Counterfeit Products: 31:26–39:34

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Practical Tips for Shoppers

• Buy from first-party sellers or official channels
  • Retailer stores (in-person or digital) and brand websites are safest (34:53)
• Double-check seller and shipping info in listings (31:39)
• Scrutinize negative reviews (34:44)
• Check and compare lot/batch codes, but be wary as forgeries exist (37:38)
• Be alarmed by changes in texture, color, packaging, or labeling (22:47)
• Be especially cautious with heavily discounted items and unfamiliar sites

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Conclusion

The episode provides a deep and alarming look into how easy it is to unwittingly buy fake—and potentially unsafe—beauty products online due to the proliferation of third-party sellers on major marketplaces. Laurie’s investigation, supported by lab testing, clearly demonstrates the risks and offers listeners concrete guidance to stay safe. Her bottom line: “Start with your high percentage shots”—meaning, opt for purchases from straightforward, reputable, and direct channels whenever possible.

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Read Rose Laurie’s article for more details and in-depth tips on identifying counterfeits on the Wirecutter website.

Transcript

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[Rose Laurie]

There was a NARS concealer, alleged NARS concealer that was a 2% match to its real counterpart and Rachel and she told me this may as well be applesauce. That was how unalike they were.

[Rosie Guerin]

I'm Rosie Guerin and you're listening to the Wirecutter show. Hey, it's Rosie. I'm running solo today and my guest is my colleague here at Wirecutter, senior staff writer Rose Laurie. Rose spent the last several months trying to answer a question that even I admittedly didn't realize was an issue as widespread as it actually is, the problem of counterfeit makeup and beauty products being sold online. You probably know about bootleg products. Maybe you've even bought some. But counterfeit cosmetics can actually pose serious health risks, and unfortunately, it's becoming harder and harder for regular folks to spot the real from the fake online. Rose spent months reporting in what she calls the astonishingly pervasive cesspool of counterfeit beauty products sold online. As she writes in her article, quote, in certain corners of the Internet, your chances of buying an item that isn't what you think it is are unfortunately and shockingly high. So after the break, Rose is going to walk me through her findings and we'll talk about how she set up to answer the question of what's real, what's fake, and how we as online shoppers can identify the differences and avoid being scammed. Stick around. We'll be right back.

[Rose Laurie]

Foreign.

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[Rosie Guerin]

Welcome back. My guest today is Rose Mora Laurie Rose is a senior staff writer here at Wirecutter. Several months ago, Rose laced up her investigative reporter boots and set out to explore and understand how widespread the issue of counterfeit sales really is in the online beauty and skincare market. Rose, welcome to the show.

[Alexa Advertisement Voice]

Hi.

[Rose Laurie]

Nice to see you. It's the Rosie and Rose show.

[Rosie Guerin]

It's the Rosie and Rose show.

[Rose Laurie]

It's the Rosie and Rose Show.

[Rosie Guerin]

I'm not sure our theme is gonna be ready in time to publish this, but I wanna jump right in and ask, where did this idea initially come from?

[Rose Laurie]

Yeah. So about a year ago, I wrote a story about a cosmetics brand called Jones Road. It is about five years old. It's Bobbi Brown's. She's very legendary. And that was not about anything counterfeit. That was just reviewing sort of the line and the products. And because I assume because I was doing so much typing and googling about Jones Road during my reporting, my social media feeds started putting certain content on my screens.

[Rosie Guerin]

Yeah.

[Rose Laurie]

And a Jones Road ad came up that did not look, it looked suspicious to me. The post was advertising a sale and it was like a very significant steep discount type of sale, like $40 mascara for like $8. And I knew from my that Jones Road doesn't go on sale. And if it does, it's not that steep of a discount. So the plan originally was to buy from the website that you were sent to when you clicked through on this Jones Road ad.

[Rosie Guerin]

Okay.

[Rose Laurie]

And see what came up. So we tried to place an order and this was like basically A credit card type of scam.

[Rosie Guerin]

Oh, brother.

[Rose Laurie]

The wirecutter credit card did get a 2000, $2100 charge a couple days later from Australia.

[Rosie Guerin]

Cute.

[Rose Laurie]

So then it kind of morphed into let's just buy a bunch of products and get them tested and see if they're fake. It's not like I necessarily noticed a trend in more counterfeit beauty transactions or product being moved online. It was more just like I was curious and it turned out that this is a really widespread problem.

[Rosie Guerin]

So can you just tell me what you found out about those products that you tested?

[Rose Laurie]

Yes. We bought 12 beauty products all from third party sellers on Amazon, Walmart, ebay and Shein. And we brought them to a lab, to a cosmetic chemist who ran tests on them. And her assessment Was that all 12 are counterfeit? Yeah. In the story we phrase it as counterfeit, expired, used or otherwise problematic. And I feel very comfortable saying that all 12 were very much one or a combination of those things.

[Rosie Guerin]

That is dark.

[Rose Laurie]

It's crazy.

[Rosie Guerin]

That's really dark. So let's run it back. I wanna understand how you got there.

[Rose Laurie]

Yeah.

[Rosie Guerin]

Where did you actually start the reporting?

[Rose Laurie]

The trickiest part of the reporting was the first part, which is when I did the shopping online. Thefakejonesroad.com started all this, but I felt like we should really be looking at the places where most people shop, Amazon, Walmart, ebay, et cetera. And it was very tricky doing my shopping because I sort of wanted to get scammed. I sort of wanted to hit counterfeit, but I didn't want to stack the deck. Stack the deck?

[Rosie Guerin]

Yeah.

[Rose Laurie]

So like on the one hand I, I googled how to avoid, I don't remember the exact phrase, but something like how to avoid counterfeit beauty online or something. And got some caveats and tried to follow those because I could see people finding a listing of a product they want, but maybe an alarm bell goes off or a red flag goes up and you're not sure. So that's probably what someone would do. They would probably Google and get some advice on how to kind of fact check this listing they're looking at in real time. But on the other hand, people buy stuff on the fly all the time. So I also ignored some of the advice that I came across to sort of mimic that experience.

[Rosie Guerin]

So you ended up buying two versions of each product, one from the brand itself. Brand itself, the other from a third party seller. Before we go further, because third party seller, first party seller, these are terms that come up a lot in your piece. So can you explain the difference between a first party and a third party site or a seller?

[Rose Laurie]

Yes. And to me, this is the crux of the whole thing. Folks need to know what the difference is and how to spot the differences. So a first party seller, an authorized retailer, this is. Well, first of all, you could say that by default a brand's own website is a first party sales channel. Right? The brand is in charge of that whole chain. Okay, pretty much. Similarly, a department store, Sephora's brick and mortar store, sephora.com, ulta's brick and mortar stores, ulta.com, dermstore.com, these are places that only traffic in first party goods. Meaning Sephora has a contract with, with Drunk Elephant, Urban Decay, whatever the brand is, to sell their product. And basically the merchandise goes from point A to point B. It goes from Drunk Elephant to Sephora, or it goes from Urban Decay to Ulta, or it goes from Clinique to Macy's. So that's a pretty tight, well regulated chain. A third party chain, it kind of starts where the first party chain is ends because you've got the authorized retailer. And then sometimes merchandise leaves that retailer not in the hands of a customer who bought it. Whether that's overstock, whether that's returned merchandise, whether that's some sort of closeout situation, something didn't go as planned. As one of my sources said, everyone makes merchandise to end up in a first party channel. If your merchandise is now in a third party channel, something didn't go according to. So you've got your liquidation situation and then you've got product brokers who can be very legit or can be very shady. Product can be sold, bought and sold between who knows how many product brokers before it finally ends up in a third party seller's Amazon storefront or Walmart storefront or ends up on ebay. There's no real, honestly, there's just no regulation to that. And every handoff point is an opportunity for bad actors to come in. So counterfeits, from my understanding, from my reporting, they get snuck in there. I can't tell you exactly who's doing the sneakin' or at what point. Even the experts I spoke to, I mean, it's very murky. It's not a we can just nab the bad guy type of situation. But that's what makes a third party chain so vulnerable, is that it's not as regulated and there can be countless handoff points and each of those is an opportunity for something to go wrong.

[Rosie Guerin]

So ideally, you want to be as close to the manufacturer.

[Rose Laurie]

Yes.

[Rosie Guerin]

As possible.

[Rose Laurie]

Absolutely.

[Rosie Guerin]

And first party sellers, authorized retailers, are as close as possible.

[Rose Laurie]

They are as close as possible.

[Rosie Guerin]

I want to know what we mean when we use the term counterfeit. Are people selling products that are used? Are they tampered with? What's at stake?

[Rose Laurie]

Yeah, they certainly, first of all, they certainly can be selling products that are used or tampered with. I know you're making a face, you're grimacing right now.

[Rosie Guerin]

That's not good.

[Rose Laurie]

We wanted to see how much we could prove, not just that something was, well, maybe it's been sitting in a warehouse for a long time and it's not in its optimal best used by state or so what I say, when I say that we found very good evidence of counterfeiting. We found very good evidence that someone somewhere is getting raw materials that approximate more or less the materials in a beauty product. They are doing some sort of manufacturing, although they may be doing it in a bathroom over a toilet. She's grimacing again.

[Rosie Guerin]

It's troubling.

[Rose Laurie]

It is. This is badly intentioned action to produce a product that will fool the customer enough. Because listen, even a criminal loves a repeat customer. Like their goal is to fool you. It is bad acting, it is counterfeit. It's not just an oopsie or a person just trying to make back a buck that they spent on a product they no longer want. This is unauthorized bootleg, whatever words you want to use. Fraudulent manufacturer with the intent of deceiving people into buying something that if they knew what was the origins of this substance that they're going to put on their skin in some way, they probably might not want to do that.

[Rosie Guerin]

Right, because if you're using a beauty or skincare product that you don't actually know the origins of, it actually might not be safe for your skin. Mm, right. I mean, worst case scenario, you could have a negative reaction, you could need medical attention.

[Rose Laurie]

Right.

[Rosie Guerin]

Okay, so you have two versions of these 12 products. One direct from the original beauty brand, the other purchased from a third party seller, either Amazon, Walmart, ebay, Sheen. So you take these to cosmetic chemist Rachel Johnson. She's going to run chemical testing to determine whether the third party seller product is real or fake. So explain the tests Rachel ran and what the results were.

[Rose Laurie]

She tested these products using an FTIR Fourier transform infrared laser. Ftir. Now, I think there are different types of FTIR machines. The one she had, it looked like an electric pencil sharpener sitting on A tabletop. And you put a substance in front of the laser in just a clear glass like vial. You give it about a minute. And this machine, it can't create an ingredient list, but it can create sort of a breakdown of how many ingredients are in this substance. And, and it can tell you the concentration of each. And it spits this all out on a chart. And if you're someone like Rachel, our chemist, who obviously really knows her stuff, even though it's not giving you a written out ingredient list, you can probably make some good educated guesses about. Oh, well, these things on this end of the chart are probably your humectants and your thickeners, and these ones down here might be your fragrances and your whatever. What we did was we ftir'd the real stuff and then we ftir'd the suspicious stuff. And the machine gave us a chart with two lines on it. And all you have to do is look at the chart and see how similar the two lines are or are not. And then it also, it gives you a percentage of these two lines are this much alike.

[Rosie Guerin]

So 12 products.

[Rose Laurie]

So yeah, it was actually nine products, but in three cases I bought two suspicious samples.

[Rosie Guerin]

Got it. Okay.

[Rose Laurie]

Two. Just because I wanted to. I had no good. I just. There were two listings in three cases where I was like, I'm really curious about both, so I'm just gonna buy both.

[Northwestern Mutual Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Rose Laurie]

Nine products but 12 suspicious samples and shot em all with the laser. Got our percentages back. Now the second part of this, there's no number where a real becomes not real. There's no hard industry standard limit of how fake can something be before it's truly fake or you know what I mean?

[Rosie Guerin]

Sure.

[Rose Laurie]

So Rachel's assessment was she would want to see a 95% match or higher.

[Rosie Guerin]

And when we say 95% match, we're saying that the two samples are 95% alike. So in your piece you give the example of buying a Rhode peptide lip treatment directly from Rhode's website, first party. And then what appears to be the same Rhode lip treatment from a third party seller on Amazon. And so in this case, between those two samples, you'd wanna see at least a 95% match to believe that the Amazon one, the third party one, is legitimate.

[Rose Laurie]

Correct. In the substances in their ingredients, Basically.

[Rosie Guerin]

Okay.

[Rose Laurie]

And in the concentration of those ingredients, not just how many, but how much of each. But then she had mentioned to me that other people who do what she does, other people in her line of work, might accept a lower percentage threshold. And as still legit. So I spoke to a second chemist who said, yeah, it could be in his estimation anywhere from 80 to 90%. 80 to 90% was his gray area to him, 90% and higher. You are likely looking at a real sample, 80% or lower. You are quite likely looking at a counterfeit sample. And the gray area for him was 80 to 90%. It wasn't as aha. As I wanted it to be.

[Rosie Guerin]

You know, there's some margin of error.

[Rose Laurie]

There's some margin of error, but that was one of the tests that we did.

[Rosie Guerin]

What were the findings there? On, on, on that test alone, three

[Rose Laurie]

of the 12 surpassed the 95% benchmark.

[Rosie Guerin]

Okay.

[Rose Laurie]

Nine of the 12 did not. Of the remaining nine, four were in that 80 to 90% gray area. And the other five were below 80%. And they were well below. There was a NARS concealer, alleged NARS concealer that was a 2% match to its real counterpart. And Rachel and she told me this may as well be applesauce. Like, that's how, that's how unlike the actual. The one we bought from narscosmetics.com that was how unalike they were.

[Rosie Guerin]

So this is a quote unquote, NARS concealer bought from a third party site that doesn't even remotely resemble in a chemical composition way.

[Rose Laurie]

But you would. I have it right here. Would you like to see?

[Rosie Guerin]

Yeah, let's look at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rose Laurie]

Okay, so the one with the green sticker is our real.

[Rosie Guerin]

Okay.

[Rose Laurie]

And I'm opening the one with the red sticker, which was our suspect one. And I mean, this looks like concealer. This looks like concealer.

[Rosie Guerin]

It looks like concealer. And it doesn't look like what I have. And this is the real one.

[Rose Laurie]

Yeah, they are very convincing. I'm talking about the packaging. Although in this case, because we're now opening the concealer. It looks like concealer. It does.

[Rosie Guerin]

I mean, the logo looks exactly the same. The print on the packaging looks the same.

[Rose Laurie]

This NARS packaging, there were a lot of tells in the packaging, discrepancies between other products. This NARS one is kind of rock solid. I don't know where that tube came from. I don't know if it was like someone found a NARS tube and filled it with something that wasn't nars. But yeah, the packaging on this NARS was incredibly, incredibly similar.

[Rosie Guerin]

So to recap, five of the third party products failed spectacularly.

[Rose Laurie]

Yes.

[Rosie Guerin]

What were the limitations? If there were any of Rachel's testing, if there were limitations, how did you Kind of stress test your hypothesis.

[Rose Laurie]

Like I said, the ftir, although a great tool, has limitations. And when you get into that, 80 to, you know, four of our 12 were in the gray area. 80 to 90% matched to their authentically sourced counterparts. And so another testing method that Rachel employed was a 14 point sensory analysis. And this is just her subjective expertise. There's not a machine doing this. But this is something that she does a lot. She rates each substance, each sample on a scale from 0 to 10. On all these 14 points, shine, opacity, I'm gonna remember as much as I can. Tackiness, greasiness, absorption. I think there's something called soft pilling, there's something called threading. So she ran through the 14 points and not one of our 12 products got a 14 out of 14.

[Rosie Guerin]

So you're walking away thinking, what?

[Rose Laurie]

So she tested four of the products in front of me. This Drunk Elephant Cream, the Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment, the Skinceuticals Vitamin C serum and the Charlotte Tilbury Setting spray. And the Rhode and the Drunk Elephant were in the 80 to 90% range. But once she explained to me all of these things that you could look for with the naked eye, it was like you couldn't stop finding discrepancies between the authentically sourced product and the suspiciously sourced product. Do you want me to show you?

[Rosie Guerin]

I want to. I want to know what the worst offender was.

[Rose Laurie]

Let's look at this Drunk Elephant Cream. I'm going to read the whole name now. Proteiny Polypeptide Cream.

[Rosie Guerin]

So I have. You have the real one, the real version of the Proteiny Polypeptide cream. And it is a little tub. It's got a cream inside and it's white and it looks pretty fluffy. It looks like maybe it has the ability to have those stiffer peaks. What do you have here?

[Rose Laurie]

I have one that scored an 83% match to that on the FTIR. And tell me what you see on this one.

[Rosie Guerin]

Well, the consistency is different. The consistency is so off, the color is off. It's like a yellowy.

[Rose Laurie]

But it's the sort of thing where, like, if I just opened the suspicious one in my probably not well lit enough bathroom at home, I would say this looks white. It really only looks yellow to me. Once you see it next to the authentically sourced one, then the yellowness comes jumping out. When she showed that to me, I was like, fail. Yeah, yeah, Immediate. Once you see it side by side, it's almost immediate.

[Rosie Guerin]

Like, what is in here?

[Rose Laurie]

What is in here? Yeah. You have to understand that these folks who are making these counterfeit products, what are they actually making them from? Well, they might be sourcing similar raw materials, but they may be sourcing that from a black market. A black market for the raw humectant or whatever other materials are in the beauty product. There's plenty of cheaper, more easily sourced, less regulated materials. I was getting such insane little bits of information from my sources. Urine is golden, much like a perfume might want to look golden. Antifreeze tastes sweet and that's why it might end up in toothpaste. None of the prod. As far as I know, none of the products that I purchased had urine in it. I did have this almost certainly fake road lip balm that the tube was sort of puffy compared to the authentically sourced tube of lip gloss.

[Rosie Guerin]

And if you've ever seen anything puffy at the store, on the shelf, right in a can. You don't want puffy, right? Puffy's bacteria.

[Rose Laurie]

Puffy's bacteria.

[Rosie Guerin]

Yikes. Okay, quick recap. As part of her reporting, Rose ran a counterfeit experiment with nine different beauty and skincare products. She purchased one version from what's called a first party retailer, in other words, from the brand itself. And then she purchased another version from a third party seller through Amazon, Walmart, other online retailers. Rose wanted to see if any of the products she bought third party were counterfeit. She consulted a cosmetic chemist to help her compare samples. And all of the third party products had issues with when compared with their authentically sourced counterparts. This matters because, among other reasons, this is stuff we're putting on our skin, on our bodies, and we really have no way of knowing what it's made of. We're going to take a very quick break and when we come back, Rose is going to explain how we as shoppers might be able to determine when we're getting scammed. Plus, she'll talk about the things you should look for when you're shopping online to make sure you're buying products from a safe and reputable retailer. We'll be right back.

[Alexa Advertisement Voice]

Say hello to the all new Alexa and see how Alexa can do so much more for you. Need last minute concert tickets? Craving your favorite restaurant? Just sit back, relax and talk naturally. Alexa's on it. Alexa remembers what you love, anticipates what you need, and makes it all happen. Alexa brings thousands of possibilities to life, ready whenever inspiration strikes. And now Alexa is free with prime on your Amazon devices like echo and Fire TV.

[Northwestern Mutual Advertisement Voice]

Amazon.com Alexaplus this podcast is supported by Northwestern Mutual. As someone who trusts expert advice, you should do the same with your finances. So now is the right time to talk with a financial expert about money recommendations. Northwestern Mutual can match you with a financial professional who'll build a plan based on what's important to you. Looking out for your blind spots and finding new opportunities to help grow your wealth and protect what you've worked so hard for. Find a better way to [e-mail], the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company.

[Rose Laurie]

Bowser is back.

[Rosie Guerin]

Everyone calm.

[Rose Laurie]

The Super Mario Brothers can take care of the kingdom. Let's go. This Wednesday, Toad pack our things. The Galaxy Whoa. Is waiting.

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Who is this?

[Rose Laurie]

Yoshi. So some cool dinosaur just shows up

[Rosie Guerin]

and he's now part of the group.

[Alexa Advertisement Voice]

Cool.

[Rose Laurie]

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

[Rosie Guerin]

Pretty pg. Only in theaters Wednesday.

[Rose Laurie]

Get tickets now.

[Rosie Guerin]

Welcome back. My guest is Rose Laurie, senior staff writer here at Wirecutter. And we're discussing Rose's latest feature. Frankly, it's all there in the title. It's called I hired a lab to counterfeit test a dozen suspicious beauty products I bought online. Every single one had a problem. Why are these counterfeit products allowed to be sold in these marketplaces in the first place? Like why do we as consumers have to do this extreme vetting?

[Rose Laurie]

Technically, they're not allowed. You're saying why are they allowed? Well, technically they're not. On paper, they're not allowed. Why is it still so easy to access?

[Rosie Guerin]

That's the better question.

[Rose Laurie]

Yeah. So when I asked the four retailers I bought from what they made of our findings, they all stated that they strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit merchandise from the third party sellers allowed on their sites. And Amazon and ebay and Shein also said that they were investigating the third party sellers I bought from. So that's good to know. So yes, these huge e commerce platforms do have policies in place, do have preventative measures in place to prevent this from happening. I would say that these measures are very hard to do at scale. And when you're dealing with third party, this stuff is in many situations never getting inside an Amazon or Walmart warehouse. Do you know what I mean? The third party seller has their own storage. So how is Amazon or Walmart or ebay supposed to quality check a product that they never see even touch? Right. So Amazon has something called the Counterfeit Crimes Unit, which is not the latest law and order franchise, although it should be.

[Rosie Guerin]

I'd absolutely watch that.

[Rose Laurie]

A law and order ccu. Yeah, they have a counterfeit crimes unit that is tasked with proactively finding and doing legal battle, let's say, against folks who are pushing counterfeit product through their website. They do catch people. The problem is it takes months to put together these cases and in the meantime people are still buying this product and getting counterfeit product, quite possibly, quite likely, without knowing that it's counterfeit. The cavalry is coming, but slowly.

[Rosie Guerin]

So we know a little bit now about third party sellers and the murkiness of that arena. Where are we as online shoppers most likely to encounter these third party sellers?

[Rose Laurie]

Right. If you see an online platform, again, the big ones, Amazon, Walmart, ebay, Shein, Target could certainly fall into this. Amazon and Walmart, most of their business now is third party, is that right? Most of their business.

[Rosie Guerin]

I have to say I did not grasp the enormity of that. Yeah, until recently I think I was ignorantly under the impression. Yeah, me too, that you go to Amazon.com and yes, there are going to be third party sellers, but more often than not you can navigate to a brand and very easily just go grab something that you know is.

[Rose Laurie]

So this is where it really gets tricky because Amazon is an authorized retailer of many, many, many brands, beauty and otherwise. That brand and Amazon have a contract. The merchandise goes straight from one to the other and it's a pretty ship shape operation. The problem is that a product could be sold on Amazon or Walmart by a first party seller, which is Amazon itself, or by a third party seller. And the way that you can read a listing to find out, I don't think they make it easy for you. They don't just say, hey look, it's a third party seller. You have to learn how to basically speak their language and you have to learn the jargon of an online product listing.

[Rosie Guerin]

Can we talk about jargon for a second? I would love to because I want to know what some of those terms you might see are on a website or a product listing that might indicate that you are engaging with a third party seller.

[Rose Laurie]

Right. For most listings, or let me say specifically Amazon, Walmart and Shein to almost the same degree, there's two places I recommend looking on a product page. First, you need to find out who is doing the selling and the shipping. And on Amazon and Walmart that will be usually right below the price. There will be a phrase, it could be sold, shipped by. It could be two separate lines, one that says sold by and one that says ship by. But you want to see who's doing the selling and the shipping and you Want that to either be Amazon Walmart Sheen or you want it to be the brand name of the product that you're looking to buy. If it's any other verbiage, it's a third party seller. Even if the third party seller uses words in their shop name like authorized and premium and guaranteed, there's nothing premium or guaranteed necessarily about that store. It's a third party seller. That's the first thing. Then the second thing I would look at is the brand byline which is located either immediately above or below the name of the product. So the name of the product is usually front and center on your product page. And the brand byline, if it's a first party sale, it will say something on Amazon and Walmart like visit the Cerave store. Or it might just have the brand name in its stylized logo form. And when you click on either visit the survey store or the logo of Cerave, it should take you to their Amazon storefront. When you click on the brand byline and it's for a third party seller, you are taken to just search results of listings. You're not taken to this branded storefront, digital storefront.

[Rosie Guerin]

That's a good indication.

[Rose Laurie]

That's an indication that it's a third party. Yeah, that's where the usually brand colon brand name brand or just brand name takes you to.

[Rosie Guerin]

How has reporting the story changed the way you think about shopping for personal care, skincare, makeup online or frankly anything online?

[Rose Laurie]

I think that the lines in the sand for me, the things that I just will not do now are much. I am a skincare junkie and I've got my higher end products that I am willing to spend the money on. And some things where I'm like, I don't feel like I, I use Cerave moisturizer.

[Rosie Guerin]

Right.

[Rose Laurie]

I get mine from Costco. That is a contracted relationship between Cerave and Costco. So I feel good about that. It really I was so naive about how prevalent this is and not just in beauty. I think it definitely makes me more cautious about all categories even though I only looked into and reported on beauty and personal care.

[Rosie Guerin]

What can we do to prevent this from happening? What are some of the initial tells or suspicious things we can look out for?

[Rose Laurie]

What I most recommend you do is shop in person at authorized retailers. That's number one. Number two, shop what is sometimes called direct to consumer sites, which is namebrand.com, and sometimes there are scam sites of those. So you have to check your spelling. It's very easy to gloss over a Typo I have found when you're, you know, looking at a URL, when these fake sites are super convincing looking, so in person, authorized retailers are great. Direct to consumer websites are great digital storefronts of your brick and mortar retailers. Sephora.com, ulta.com, I would feel good about sending someone there. Then you're getting into Amazon, Walmart, Target, and if you're talking about online, because Target and Walmart also have brick and mortar stores, which I feel fine about. But if you're talking about online, all three of those, and of course eBay, they all host third party sellers. And that's where all of this detective work really has to happen. Who's doing the selling and who's doing the shipping? You have to confirm that brand byline. I feel like if you have all of that, if those are your rules, what I just said, that's gonna put you on ground that I would feel good about putting you on. Does that make sense? And then if you're gonna roll the dice on third party, couple things that you can do before you buy. If for whatever reason you're gonna buy third party, go click the extra clicks you need to click to get to their one star reviews. Do not let the fact that their Customer rating is 4.7 out of 5 or 4.9 out of 5, do not let that be your, your guide because it's amazing once you click through to the one star and maybe two star reviews, the things that you see. Some of my sellers had frequent and recent complaints of. You sold me a fake product. This isn't what I ordered. I know this product and it's not what it should be. If they give you pause, please heed and perhaps pause on this purchase. And then once you get the product, two things I would recommend. One, again, if you are a repeat customer, you will probably be able to tell right away this doesn't smell like it should smell. This doesn't feel like it should feel. And then the other thing you can do, which again is you want it to be a rock solid way to determine this, but it's not gonna be which is, you can look at the lock code or the batch code, which is the string of letters and numbers. I'm gonna show you one. Let's see. Ah, okay, so this one Nars. This one just has four numbers. Do you see that?

[Rosie Guerin]

5114.

[Rose Laurie]

Right. And so that's a lot code. And you can look that up. There's a few different websites. Sometimes a brand's own website will actually have a function where you can look up a product's lock code from that brand on their website. But there's also, there's something called cosmetic calculator. There's checkfresh.com, there's websites you can go to. You put in the name of the brand and you put in the lock code and they can tell you how old the product is and they can tell you if the lock code is illegit. Obviously if the lock code doesn't show up, it's probably red flag. That's a big red flag. But the problem is that the converse the opposite is not true because plenty of my super suspicious, including this alleged nars concealer, the lock codes worked when I put them into these websites because anyone can walk into Sephora and read some letters and numbers off a box. So there's a chance there that you could sort of catch or find out that maybe your product is whether real or not very old. That might be a red flag too. I just wanted to show you real quick. Here's the lock code on the fake one. Do you see how it's in a different part of the box than the real one?

[Rosie Guerin]

Different part of the box, different type.

[Rose Laurie]

It doesn't inspire confidence to see that the lock code, even the lock code looks very different from one box to the next. Not just if the code itself is a legitimate code, but where on the

[Rosie Guerin]

box is it and what is the lot code meant to indicate the lock

[Rose Laurie]

code is in case of a recall that it helps them track down or helps you as the person who owns it to. They'll say these are the lock codes affected in their consumer alert. It can be a tool to sort of suss all this out. But again, start with your high percentage shots. I like basketball. Start with your high percentage shots and that's a low percentage shot. Maybe you're going to find out, you know, aha. This lock code doesn't exist but probably it's going to slide through. But it is something else that you can check.

[Rosie Guerin]

Rose, thank you so much for joining us. This was really fun.

[Rose Laurie]

It was. Thank you.

[Rosie Guerin]

We'll drop a link to Rose's piece in our show notes. Highly recommend you read it for more details on how they identified counterfeits and tips for avoiding being scammed. You can also find it and so much more on the Wirecutter website. That's it for us till next week. Thank you so much. So much, so much for listening. The Wirecutter show is executive produced by me, Rosie Garon and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddie Mazziello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Elisheva Etoupe, Rowan Namisto, Katherine Anderson and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter's deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor in chief. And I'm Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening. And we are gonna come up with all of the possible CCU franchises. So we've got Counterfeit Crimes Unit Beauty, Counterfeit Crimes Unit Leather. Who's gonna start in that season? Yeah, we're gonna make billions.

[Rose Laurie]

Counterfeit Crimes Unit Leather.

[Rosie Guerin]

That's what I'm saying. Are you not watching that? Of course you are.

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