Sinful Colors Behaving Badly

By now most of you reading this will have already heard about how Sinful Colors used photos from nail bloggers without getting permission or giving credit. These photos are in an instructional pamphlet distributed with the big Passion for Color display, and the images on the display itself have models with what appear to be digitally created manicures copied from the bloggers' photos. Whether it was an dumb mistake, sloppy oversight, or deliberate act, this is a wrong that needs to be addressed. Apologies need to be made to the bloggers. Compensation needs to be provided to them. If those things don't happen, I won't feel okay with buying any more Sinful polishes or sharing them or their displays here. I'd feel icky supporting a brand that takes advantage of bloggers. Sinful can make this right; I really hope they do.

There are three nail looks featured in the pamplet and on the display. The one that Sinful calls "Sponge Effect" is a glitter gradient stolen from The Swatchaholic. No Sinful Colors were used in the making of that manicure. Infuriatingly, whomever created the pamphlet removed The Swatchaholic's watermark from the original photo. The "Swirl It" manicure is stolen from Swatch and Learn. Again, no Sinful Colors were used. Stupidly on Sinful's part, the manicure they stole images of is a stamped mani, not accomplished with a toothpick as the accompanying text in the pamphlet instructs. Way to mislead your customers, Sinful. I haven't heard where the third manicure, "Half Moon", came from, nor have my own searches turned up anything on that one. I suppose it's possible it was not stolen from anywhere, but I'm very skeptical at this point.

Sinful doesn't appear to have an official Facebook page or functional website, so contacting them through those venues is a no go. Revlon, who owns Mirage Cosmetics, the company behind the Sinful Colors brand, does have an official Facebook page, and comments there have been blowing up with this issue. The response so far is "...we are so sorry this happened. It was an unintentional mistake. We want you to know we do respect the rights of bloggers and have reached out to Jeanette to apologize and resolve the issue as soon as possible." Having worked in companies that were owned by other companies, I can believe that no one at Revlon knew what was going on with this Sinful campaign and can understand if it takes a while to resolve this theft perpetrated by their sister company. But it does need to be resolved in a manner that the bloggers involved are satisfied with, or there are a lot of nail polish aficionados who will be purging Sinful from their stashes.

There is an online petition created so people can express their desire to have this addressed. I signed. If you haven't and want to, here's the link on change.org.

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UPDATE 26-Jul-2012:

Revlon has posted an apology on the official Revlon Facebook page. It states that they have reached out to the two bloggers, will correct the materials, and are putting procedures in place to prevent this sort of thing in the future.

The petition has been closed based on getting the apology from Revlon.

The two bloggers linked above have removed the most/all content from the entries I linked yesterday. I take that as a sign that negotiations are ongoing.

The MUA member who thinks it's her mani in the half moon photo (and based on seeing another photo of her hand, I agree) hasn't found her original post yet (MUA board search is quite limited).

I'm glad to see there's been positive movement on this from Revlon (where Sinful/Mirage is hiding, I have no idea). I am hopeful that it will be resolved to the satisfaction of the bloggers in question; when they announce that's the case, I'll let Sinful polishes back on my blog.

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UPDATE 24-Aug-2012: Because this post is still getting hits, I wanted to add a note here that the companies involved have taken some further action. The big display which had the stolen blogger photos has been updated to cover the two images onto which the bloggers' nails had been placed without their permission. The pamphlets with the stolen photos have also been pulled.



I'd still like to hear from the bloggers involved that Sinful has made things right with them personally, but since some positive action was taken, I am going to allow Sinful back onto my blog.