The day was Friday, November 1st, 2019, the time was 10 am. This was no ordinary day; this was the day that changed everything in the beauty community. Iconic beauty guru and self-made millionaire Jeffree Star announced his new make-up collection with famous Youtuber, Shane Dawson on September 24th of this year. None of their fans were expecting such a large collaboration from Star since his last collaboration with beauty guru Patrick Star was not that monumental career-wise. Shane Dawson has been on YouTube for around 10 years and has been criticized for his past controversial videos by companies and fellow members on the site. A couple of years back Dawson changed his style of videos completely. He went from filming sketches and food videos to cinematic masterpieces and web documentary series. Personally, I have been watching Shane Dawson from the beginning, I was around eight years old when I saw my first parody video from him, and I’ve been hooked ever since!
Jeffree and Shane made a docuseries last year called The Secret World of Jeffree Star, in which Shane took a dive into Star’s everyday life and to get an inside of Stars’ journey to success. The Series was a hit and there was speculation after the documentary was completed that Dawson and Star would Collab with Star’s makeup brand. Well, the rumors were true, and this year we were introduced to the Conspiracy Pallet. The collection includes six signature liquid velour lipsticks in a variety of colors, four makeup bags, two pigs shaped mirrors in pink and black, a black tracksuit, two pig-shaped purses, a clear lip balm, a clear lip gloss called “The Gloss” or “Shane Glossin”, a nine shade pallet called the “Mini Controversy”, and finally, the eighteen shade pallet called “Conspiracy”. This collection made my wig fly to Mars! I fell out of my seat upon gazing at its glorious colors. I knew I had to have it.
The release date was Friday, November 1st of this year also known as one of the best days of my life. I luckily didn’t have a class that day, so I loaded the website on my laptop at 9 am and I played the waiting game. Finally, the time came, it was 10 am and the gates of heaven opened, excepted, not everything was there. Only the Conspiracy pallet and a handful of lipsticks were on the site. I found this odd, but I was on a mission. I went to click on the pallet, and I was greeted by a horrific sight, “Due to unexpected technical problems, jeffreestarcosmetics.com is temporarily unavailable. Please check back in a few minutes – we’ll be up and running in no time!”, all I have to say is I have never clicked a refresh button so fast. After what felt like 100 clicks, I was back in. Everything I would click on would cause my page to crash. In a panicked state, I began to lose hope. Eventually, the pallet made it into my cart! It took me ten minutes to load the virtual line for checkout after several crashes, all of which I thought I was destined to lose my cart.
I made it to the checkout, I entered my card number and mailing address as I heard my bank account crying in the background. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, and then… my page crashed. I had to get back and line and sit through another painstaking 20 minutes. Eventually, I made it back and everything seemed normal. I entered everything and clicked to complete my purchase. The site was loading with a screen that said thank you for your purchase, I heard my online banking go off on my phone and I began to cry… then the site crashed before I got my receipt. I didn’t care I just knew I got my sticky figures on a pallet I waited so long for. I called my family and friends and rejoiced. I waited all day for my conformation email to come, but it never came. I emailed JFC to see where my order was. The next day I received an email stating that my order didn’t go through, but I wasn’t alone, this happened to so many people. When my order was processing the website completely crashed canceling thousands of orders like mine.
Shopify, the site that Jeffree Star Cosmetics utilizes for its website, began experiencing technical difficulties right from the start of the launch. The site couldn’t handle millions of people on the site and thus created issues with the site loading pages and processing purchases. Although this is tragic to the fans who didn’t get a pallet, we can’t ignore how happy everyone is for Shane and Jeffree.
This was monumental and they completely sold out within a couple of hours, something that JFC has never experienced. I couldn’t help but feel incredibly proud of Shane and Jeffree, and I can’t wait to see what they do in the future. But for now, I’m going to get on that waitlist!