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.

*****

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.

*****
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.

More on Blogger Comments

Blogger forced me into the new interface a couple days ago. I didn't like it when it was in preview mode, and I don't like it now, but I'll adjust. One thing that has improved since I looked at it when I wrote about blog comments in February is that I am able to find the option to turn off word verification. To do this in the new interface:

1. Get to a page that has options listed along the left side of the page. I'm not sure if this is still called the dashboard or not.

2. Click on Settings.

3. Click on Posts & Comments.

4. Look for the dropdown labeled "Show word verification" and select "No". (As of a week or so ago, this was defaulting to yes regardless of whether you'd already turned it off, but they seem to have fixed that bug.)

5. Click Save Settings button in upper right.

And I do still urge you to consider turning off word verification. It hasn't been getting any easier for me to decipher the wonky images, for sure. When confronted with them, sometimes I just click away and don't bother. Sometimes I persevere, and if I'm feeling especially energetic will add something to my comment about turning off the option. I know that some bloggers who have it on aren't doing that to vex me but just don't realize it's on, because Blogger won't make you do it on your own blog.  So if you ever come here and find it's on, be sure to let me know!

On Joining an Ad Network

Nail Wheel Wednesday will be happening today, just a bit later on. Right now, I want to share that I've joined the BlogHer Advertising Network. What this means to you is that instead of my smiling face at the top of the sidebar, there's an ad followed by some links to other blogs in the BlogHer network (and then my smiling face). What this means to me is that I might make enough money to offset the hosting costs for the photos I post here (okay, I'll probably spend any money I get on more nail polish, but I could use it for hosting costs if I wanted). I also might not make much money at all, but I decided to give it a try.

I got an e-mail from BlogHer a couple weeks ago explaining that they were adding beauty blogs to their network and had come across mine and liked it and wanted to invite me to apply to join. I'd heard of BlogHer and was surprised and even a little bit giddy at the idea that they'd heard of me, too. Since I hadn't been thinking about joining any ad network, I needed to do some research before I decided how to proceed. I found some helpful posts, including ones on WordCount and Life Blessons. After mulling it over for about a week, I filled out my application online and heard back pretty quickly that I'd been accepted. After that, I followed the clear directions in the followup e-mails and today installed the ad code. So far it's been easy to work with BlogHer, and I'm hoping that continues.

I don't expect this change to affect my posting here at all. I hope it won't affect your reading experience either. In the short time I've had the ad code live, it hasn't seemed to slow the page load time, but do let me know, either in the comments or via e-mail, if you see any negative impact. That's all for now. Later today I'll be back with glitter.

On Blog Comments

Blogger recently changed their word verification so instead of getting one clear word that I could usually read and retype fairly quickly, there are two distorted words. At first, one of those was obscured with a background blob, which made it even less easy to decipher. This new setup, even de-blobbed, is not really working so well for me, as my eyesight is strained enough as it is and my patience is not sufficient for me to keep trying if don't guess right the first time. If you have word verification turned on for your Blogger blog and notice I'm not commenting as often as I used to, it's not that I don't like you anymore, it's that I'm too blind and cranky to deal with the wonky words.

If you have both word verification and comment moderation turned on, please turn off word verification, because the reward for figuring out the code should be a comment that posts immediately. Why make your commenters jump through hoops to get into your comment section if you've also got the door locked on the other side of the hoops? If you only have word verification turned on, please consider turning it off to make life easier on people who want to comment. I haven't had it on in a long time and get very few spam comments, mostly because I don't allow Anonymous comments. The spam comments I do get, I mark as spam to educate the automatic spam detection code and then delete; it's easy.

Should you want to try turning off word verification, you can do this in Design mode. (The steps below are using the old interface—I can't find the option in the new one, which I suppose isn't surprising since I can't find a lot of things in the new one. If you're in the new one, you can, for now, switch back the old by clicking on the gear button in the upper right and then clicking on Old Blogger interface.)

1. Click into Design mode.

2. Click on Settings tab.

3. Click on Comments link.

4. For "Who Can Comment?" select something other than "Anyone"; I've found it's Anonymous users who generate the most spam and/or drama. I've got mine set to Registered Users.

5. For "Comment Moderation", select "Only on posts older than ___ days", since some spammers like to hit old posts where they think you might not be paying attention. I've been gradually setting this number up; now I've got it at 200 days.

6. For "Show word verification for comments?", select "No".

7. Click Save Settings button at the bottom.

All that said, over the past few days I've had a persistent spam commenter visiting my blog. I have contacted Google about them (this person has a Blogger profile) and am marking the comments as spam and deleting them as soon as I notice. If this person's behavior continues, I may turn on comment moderation for a while until they give up. In the meantime, the links they're leaving are helping me build up my list of companies to never to do business with.

So, to sum up: if you're using word verification on your Blogger blog, please think about turning it off, and if you notice I've started to moderate all comments, know that there's a slimy SEO spammer to blame and once he slithers off I'll go back to my usual setup.

Blog Tweaks

Instead of doing my nails today or editing pictures from my backlog, I've been playing with my blog set up. I'd seen other blogspot blogs recently that could reply to individual comments without having an outside comment service like Disqus, but that didn't show up on my blog automatically. Turns out I had to change a setting, which I found out from an article on Blogger Sentral. So far I've only tried replying to one comment, but that worked, so that's good. Of course the old comments I did replying to a bunch of people at once now look sort of goofy, but that's progress for you.

I also added a Pin It button at the bottom of the entry. I joined Pinterest a few weeks ago and have been pinning all sorts of nail stuff, and it's handy when there's a button right there for me to use, so I thought it might be nice if I had a button here for other people to use. If you're on the home page of the blog, the pin will link to the home page, but if you're an entry, the pin will link right to the entry. If you want to see my pins, my profile is here. If you need an invite, let me know; I think I can do that, though I haven't so far. If you want a Pin It button for your Blogger blog, too, do like I did and follow the directions on Chykalophia Design, which I found my way to thanks to a tip from ReecesPeeces, the proprietess of Spit & Polish.

While I'm on the subject of blog changes, some time back I noticed my list of tags in the sidebar was getting really long, so I switched to dropdowns. I learned how to that from Spice Up Your Blog. Since another problem I was having was not being able to add all the tags I wanted sometimes because the names were long, being prefaced by brand:, color:, and so on, so when I switched to the dropdowns, I also shortened the names. At first I thought I'd just drop the prefixes, since the dropdowns would be separate, but that meant on the list of all of them, the colors were mixed in with the brands and finishes and that was too much chaos for me, so I just shortened the prefixes to things like b: for brand. That made me much happier. The one drawback I've found is that to maintain the dropdowns by category, I need to remember to add new labels to them, which I don't always do. (When I do, though, having the prefix makes it easy to see which ones are missing.) The top dropdown one always has all of the tags, though, so everything's accessible there.

Wow, I didn't realize I had so much to say about this subject, but I guess it's not surprising since I am a tech geek of sorts. I'll be back to nail stuff next week, though when exactly I'm not sure since I have to report for jury duty on Monday and who knows how that'll turn out. I might be home early or I might be stuck downtown all day or all week. In the meantime, if you notice any issues with the new setup, please let me know!