Rosie Garren: 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. I'm Rosie Garren and you're listening to the Wire Cutter Show. Hey, it's Rosie. I'm running solo today and my guest is my colleague here at Wire Cutter, senior staff writer Rose Lorie. 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 out 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.

Rosie Garren: Welcome back. My guest today is Rose Mora Lori. Rose is a senior staff writer here at Wire Cutter. 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.

Rose Lorie: Hi,

Rosie Garren: nice to see you. It's the Rosie and Rose Show.

Rose Lorie: It's the Rosie and Rose Show.

Rosie Garren: The Rosie and Rose Show.

Rosie Garren: I'm not sure our theme is going to be ready in time to publish this, but I want to jump right in and ask where did this idea initially come from.

Rose Lorie: Yeah. So, about a year ago, I wrote a story about a cosmetics brand called Jones Road. It is about 5 years old. It's Bobby Brown's very legendary.

Rosie Garren: 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.

Rose Lorie: Yeah.

Rose Lorie: 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 eight dollar and I knew from my reporting that Jones Row doesn't go on sale and if it does it's not that steep of a discount.

Rosie Garren: So the plan originally was to buy from the website that you were sent to when you click through on this Jones Road ad.

Rose Lorie: Okay,

Rose Lorie: and see what came up. So, we tried to place an order and this was like basically a credit card type of scam.

Rosie Garren: Oh, brother.

Rose Lorie: The wire cutter credit card did get a $2,2100 charge a couple days later from Australia.

Rosie Garren: Cute.

Rose Lorie: 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 Garren: So, can you just tell me what you found out about those products that you tested?

Rose Lorie: Yes, we bought 12 beauty products all from thirdparty sellers on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Sheen, 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 we phrase it as counterfeit, expired, used, or otherwise problematic. And I I feel very comfortable saying that all 12 were very much one or a combination of those things.

Rosie Garren: That is dark.

Rose Lorie: It's crazy.

Rosie Garren: It's really That's really dark. So, let's run it back. I want to understand how you got there.

Rose Lorie: Yeah.

Rosie Garren: Where did you actually start the reporting?

Rose Lorie: The trickiest part of the reporting was the first part, which is when I did the shopping online. The fake drones.com started all this, but I felt like we should really be looking at the places where most people shop, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, etc. And it was very tricky doing my shopping because I sort of wanted to get scammed. I sort of wanted to hit counterfeit,

Rosie Garren: but I didn't want to

Rose Lorie: stack the deck. Stack the deck. So, like on the one hand, I Googled how to avoid c 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 Garren: So you ended up buying two versions of each product. One from the

Rose Lorie: brand itself.

Rosie Garren: Brand itself, the other from a third party seller. Before we go further, because third party seller, first party seller,

Rose Lorie: 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 Lorie: Yes. And to me,

Rose Lorie: 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,

Rosie Garren: right?

Rose Lorie: The brand is in charge of that whole chain. Okay? Pretty much similarly, a department store, Sephora's brickandmortar store, Sephora.com, Ulta's brickandmortar stores, ulta.com, dermtore.com. These are places that only traffic in firstparty goods. Meaning Sephora has a contract 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-reggulated chain. A third party chain, it kind of starts where the first party chain ends because

Rose Lorie: 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 plan. 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 sellers'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.

Rose Lorie: I can't tell you exactly who's doing the sneaking 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. So ideally you want to be as close to the manufacturer.

Rosie Garren: Yes.

Rose Lorie: As possible.

Rosie Garren: Absolutely.

Rosie Garren: And first party sellers, authorized retailers are

Rose Lorie: as close as possible.

Rosie Garren: They are as close as possible.

Rosie Garren: 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 Lorie: Yeah, they certain, 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 Garren: It's not good.

Rose Lorie: 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. 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. You're She's grimacing again. It's troubling.

Rose Lorie: 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 Garren: Right. Because if you're using a beauty or skin care product that you don't actually know the origins of, it actually might not be safe for your skin.

Rose Lorie: Mhm.

Rosie Garren: Right. I mean, worst case scenario, you could have a negative reaction. You could need medical attention, right?

Rosie Garren: 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, Shein. 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 Lorie: She tested these products using an FTIR Forier 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 a 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 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 writtenout ingredient list, you can probably make some good educated guesses about, oh, well, these things on this end of the chart are probably your hctants and your thickeners, and these ones down here might be your fragrances and your whatever. What we did was we FTIR the real stuff and then we FTIR 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 Garren: So 12 products.

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

Rosie Garren: Okay.

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

Rosie Garren: Nine products, but 12 suspicious samples and shot them all with the laser. Uh, 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.

Rose Lorie: Sure.

Rose Lorie: So Rachel's assessment was she would want to see a 95% match or higher. And when we say 95% match, we're saying that the two samples are 95% alike. Mhm.

Rosie Garren: So, in your piece, you give the example of buying a Road peptide lip treatment directly from RH's website first party and then what appears to be the same Road lip treatment from a third party seller on Amazon.

Rosie Garren: And so, in this case, between those two samples, you'd want to see at least a 95% match to believe that the Amazon one, the third party one is legitimate.

Rose Lorie: Correct. In the in the substances, in their ingredients, basically. Okay. 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 as still legit. So I spoke to a second chemist who said, "Yeah, it could be in his estimation anywhere from 80 to 90 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 Garren: You know, there's some margin of error.

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

Rosie Garren: What were the findings there on on on that test alone?

Rose Lorie: Three of the 12 surpassed the 95% benchmark.

Rose Lorie: Okay. Okay. 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, 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 Garren: So this is a quote unquote Nars concealer bought from a third party site

Rosie Garren: that doesn't even remotely resemble in a chemical composition.

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

Rosie Garren: Let's look at it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rose Lorie: Okay. So the one with the green sticker is our real

Rosie Garren: Okay.

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

Rosie Garren: This looks like concealer.

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

Rosie Garren: 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.

Rose Lorie: It does. I mean, the logo looks exactly the same. The print on the packaging looks the same. 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. So to recap, five of the third party products failed spectacularly.

Rosie Garren: Yes.

Rosie Garren: 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 Lorie: 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% match 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 going to 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 Garren: So, you're walking away thinking what?

Rose Lorie: So, she tested four of the products in front of me. This Drunk Elephant Cream, the Road Peptide Lip Treatment, the Skin Suiticles Vitamin C Serum, and the Charlotte Tilbury uh setting spray. And the Road 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 Garren: I want to I want to know what the worst offender was.

Rose Lorie: Let's look at this Drunk Elephant Cream. I'm going to read the whole name now. Proteini Polyeptide Cream.

Rosie Garren: So, I have you have the real version of the Proteini Polyeptide Cream

Rose Lorie: and it is a little tub. It's got a cream inside and it's white and it's looks pretty fluffy. It looks like maybe it has the ability to have those stiffer peaks. What do you have here?

Rose Lorie: I have one that scored an 83% match to that on the FTIR.

Rosie Garren: And tell me what you see on this one.

Rose Lorie: Well, the consistency is different.

Rosie Garren: The consistency is so off.

Rose Lorie: The color is off. It's like a yellowy. But it's the sort of thing where like if I just open 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 yellowess comes jumping out.

Rosie Garren: Mhm.

Rose Lorie: When she showed that to me, I was like

Rosie Garren: Yeah. Yeah. Immediate. Once you see it side by side, it's almost immediate. Like what is in here?

Rose Lorie: What is in here?

Rose Lorie: Yeah. You have to understand that these folks who are making these counterfeit products, what 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 hctant 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 pro, 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 Garren: And if you've ever seen anything puffy at the store on the shelf,

Rose Lorie: right,

Rosie Garren: in a can, you don't want puffy,

Rose Lorie: right?

Rosie Garren: Puffy's bacteria.

Rose Lorie: Puffy's bacteria.

Rosie Garren: 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-p partyy 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 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.

Rosie Garren: Welcome back. My guest is Rose Lori, senior staff writer here at Wire Cutter, 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? It's like why do we as consumers have to do this extreme vetting?

Rose Lorie: Technically, they're not allowed. Like you're saying, why are they allowed? Well, technically they're not. On paper, they're not allowed.

Rosie Garren: Why is it still so easy to access that?

Rose Lorie: That's a better question. 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.

Rosie Garren: 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,

Rose Lorie: right?

Rose Lorie: So, Amazon has something called the counterfeit crimes unit,

Rosie Garren: which is not the latest Law and Order franchise, although it should be.

Rose Lorie: I'd absolutely watch that.

Rosie Garren: 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 Garren: 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 Lorie: 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.

Rosie Garren: Is that most of their business?

Rose Lorie: I have to say I did not grasp the enormity of that

Rosie Garren: until recently. I think I was ignorantly under the impression that you go to amazon.com and yes there are going to be third party sellers but

Rosie Garren: more often than not you can navigate to a brand and very easily just go grab something that you know

Rose Lorie: right is

Rose Lorie: so this is where it really gets tricky because

Rosie Garren: 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 shipshaped operation. The problem is that

Rosie Garren: 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 Garren: Can we talk about jargon for a second?

Rose Lorie: I would love to

Rosie Garren: 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 Lorie: Right? For most listings or let me say specifically Amazon, Walmart and Sheen 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 shipby. 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 by line 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 by line if it's a first party sale,

Rosie Garren: it will say something on Amazon and Walmart like visit the Sarave 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 survey, it should take you to their Amazon storefront. When you click on the brand by line 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 Garren: That's a good indication that

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

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

Rose Lorie: I think that the lines in the sand for me, the things that I just will not do now are much clearer. I am a skincare junkie and I've got my higherend products that I am willing to spend the money on and some things where I'm like I don't feel like I I'll use Cave moisturizer, right? I get mine from Costco. That is a contracted relationship between Cave 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. 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 Lorie: 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 brickandmortar 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 brickandmortar 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 by line. I feel like if you have all of that, if you if those are your rules, what I just said, that's going to put you on ground that I would feel good about putting you on. Does that make sense? And then if you're going to roll the dice on third party, couple things that you can do before you buy. If for whatever reason you're going to 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 five or 4.9 out of five. 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 I it's not what it should be. If they give you pause, please heed that 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 going to be, which is you can look at the lock code or the batch code, which is the string of letters and numbers. I'm going to show you one. Let's see. Ah, okay. So, this one, NARS, this one just has four numbers. Do you see that?

Rosie Garren: 5114, right?

Rose Lorie: And so, that's a lock 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 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 Garren: Different part of the box, different type.

Rose Lorie: 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 is a legitimate code, but where on the box is it? And what is the lock code meant to indicate? The lock code is in case of a recall that it helps them track down or helps you as the person who owns it to you they'll say these are the lock codes affected in their consumer alert. It can be a tool to sort of sus 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 it's going to slide through, but it is something else that you can check.

Rosie Garren: Rose, thank you so much for joining us. This was really fun. It was. Thank you. 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 Wire Cutter website. That's it for us till next week. Thank you so much, so much so much for listening.

Rosie Garren: The Wire Cutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Garin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Mattie Maziello, and Nick Pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Loausano, Alicia Eup, Rowan Nisto, Katherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wire Cutter's deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Fman is Wire Cutter's editor and chief and I'm Rosie Garin. Thank you for listening

Rosie Garren: and we are going to come up with all of the possible CCU franchises. So, we've got Counterfeit Crimes Unit Beauty, Counterfeit Crimes Unit: Leather. Who's going to start in that season?

Rosie Garren: Yeah, we're gonna make billions.

Rosie Garren: Cat crimes unit leather.

Rosie Garren: That's what I'm saying.

Rosie Garren: Are you not watching that?