Hoping Their Makeup Takes a Powder

By late morning on a weekday, 368 messages have been posted since midnight on the swap board at MakeupAlley.com. Each represents a beauty product that one of the site’s members has tried and grown tired of and is ready to trade for someone else’s castoff cosmetics. Chirpy sales pitches and brand-specific wish lists echo with longing, disappointment and regret.

“Sixty percent left. Perfect for someone who wants to try out the color before purchasing,” a new entry writes of the MAC lipstick she has just listed in hopes of getting her hands on “anything!!!” by La Mer or a Nars blush in Orgasm or Sin. From Australia comes a report of an Urban Decay eye shadow: “Great condition, no dips.”

A board veteran based in Florida, meanwhile, has spent 1 1/2 hours painstakingly putting 37 lotions, powders, glosses and lacquers up for grabs. Her unwanted booty includes a Bobbi Brown eyeliner (“I just couldn’t get this to work for me”), and a Lorac blush powder she estimates she has used four times. “I purchased this about three months ago and realized I have another blush that looks identical,” she confesses. Within hours, she is flooded with offers.

Welcome to the world of cosmetics swappers. Despite the well-advertised health hazards--such as pinkeye or herpes--associated with sharing makeup, at least a half-dozen Web sites are set up for anyone to exchange--”recycle” is the preferred term in swap-speak--their “gently used” (read: secondhand) toiletries. At Makeup Alley alone, more than 80,000 items are available for barter at any given time--each a separate listing--and hundreds of swap-related messages are exchanged every day.

“These women are die-hard beauty aficionados. They always want to try something new. Swapping makes it economical,” said Makeup Alley founder Hara Glick, 33, who lives in Manhattan. Along with a product review page and beauty chat boards, the swap board is one of Glick’s 3-year-old site’s most popular features. “It’s a really nice, one-on-one interaction with another person who also has a love of makeup and beauty,” she said.

Melissa Kinder, 27, of Anaheim, admits she was initially hesitant to try swapping when she stumbled across one of the first sites devoted to the practice, Mikki’s Swap Page, seven years ago. “I was like, ‘Hmmm, is it sanitary? How do you know you aren’t going to get ripped off? Why won’t you just buy it yourself?’ ” Kinder said.

After befriending several women on the site and finding they knew as much about makeup as she did, Kinder decided to take the plunge with some trendy nail polish she had been coveting. “At some point, you’ve got to trust that the people you are swapping with are careful with their stuff too,” she said. Several successful swaps later, she was a convert, preferring to trade away her unwanted items rather than “deal with the hassles of returning them.” Inspired by Mikki’s Swap site, which Kinder has since taken over, she has now founded her own beauty site, BeautyBuzz.com.

Nevertheless, to minimize the ick factor inherent in their hobby, experienced swappers engage in elaborate pre- and post-swap decontamination rituals. They slice lipstick tips with razor blades and swab them with alcohol. They scrape off the top layers of eye shadows and blushes. Puffs, brushes and sponges that come with compacts are either hand-washed or replaced. Many swappers also save the original packaging from their products so if they wind up in turnaround, they can be advertised as “SIB” (Still in Box).

“Let’s face it, how many people pay $50 for a foundation, use it twice, get fickle and then decide they want to try something else? With swapping, you are able to take that $50 and trade it for $50 worth of something else you haven’t tried,” said Teri Castell, 41, a Makeup Alley regular who also operates a site called Goo4Swap.com, which includes an online “journal” chronicling the best and worst of her swapping experiences.

The cosmetics industry, however, takes a dim view of swapping. “It’s not hygienic, and it has the potential to be quite dangerous,” said Irene Malbin, a spokeswoman for the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Assn., a trade group based in Washington, D.C. “When you are sharing cosmetics, you have no idea how many people have used this product that you are now going to put on your skin or, if you are talking about lipstick, ingest. You don’t know if they had clean hands when they were using it. You don’t know when it was opened. You don’t know where it’s been.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates cosmetics, frequently warns consumers against makeup sharing under any conditions, despite the fact that preservatives in the products are said to destroy bacteria introduced through normal use.

But Glick believes opponents of swapping overstate the dangers. Swapping, she said, is “much more sanitary than going into a department store and using one of those testers that’s been tried by 100 women during the day.”

The risks associated with swapping, however, go beyond contracting pinkeye from an infected mascara wand. Although Makeup Alley members award one another feedback “tokens” grading the quality of their swaps, the self-policing system isn’t foolproof. Anyone who has been swapping for a while has a story about being “swaplifted”--getting shorted on the return half of a swap. Swapping swindles are so common that an electronic bulletin board called Swap Tawk was established where burned swappers can post names and e-mail addresses of wrongdoers. A separate “Problem Swappers Page” includes instructions on how to file mail fraud charges.

Swapping has another downside too. Although most women initially see it as a way to pare impulse buys, last season’s “must-have” shades and other mistakes from their beauty arsenals, many find they end up with even more products, their appetites fueled by others’ raves about the latest lines and colors. Swappers call this the “lemming effect.”

As with many activities that didn’t exist before the advent of the Internet, makeup swapping started as an underground movement known only to a handful of cyberspace pioneers. One of the first sites, the now-defunct Mikki’s Swap Page, was the brainchild of an 18-year-old Texan who charged users a $9 annual fee to list their products. (Most of today’s sites are supported by advertisers and are free to users.)

In its early days, swapping was especially popular with fashion-minded residents of small towns without access to products in the latest magazines, Kinder said. With the advent of e-commerce beauty sites, some of that motivation was lost but swapping continued to thrive as a virtual garage sale for the kind of women who think nothing of dropping $300 on a trip to Sephora.

“Swapping gives people the comfort to be able to try things they normally wouldn’t try and to be able to not feel totally guilty if they don’t like it,” said Stevie Wilson, 41, a Long Beach writer and event coordinator who swaps through Makeup Alley and an Internet newsgroup called alt.fashion.

Like any other virtual community, the society of swappers has its own slang and etiquette to discourage dilettantes. “Lippie” is short for lipstick, and “e/s” refers to eye shadow. “GWP” stands for “gift with purchase” and refers to a promotion sample. Popular product lines have acronyms--”PX” for Prescriptives, and “MUFE” for Makeup Forever.

Misrepresenting a product’s condition--describing a half-full tube of lipstick as “barely used,” for instance--can get someone labeled as a bad swapper, as can offering a handful of Maybelline eye pencils or Wet ‘n Wild lipsticks in exchange for a pricey Yves St. Laurent makeup palette. And though a swap may officially involve only one item, swappers are almost universally expected to toss in samples, products they were unable to unload, or other extras along with their shipments, lest they appear stingy.

“What starts out as one or two items ends up as a whole box of stuff. It can be like Christmas, kind of gross,” swapper Wilson said.

Although many swappers happily share stories of the friendships they’ve established online, to some extent these bonds are forged on mutual shame. Shannon Gaverick said she rarely tells non-swapping friends about the extent of her makeup habit. “People think it’s, ‘Eewww, How can you swap for other people’s lipstick?’ ” she said.

One L.A.-based swapper agreed to talk about her experiences only if she were guaranteed anonymity. “I’m a full-time law student and really don’t want to be known in my community as a makeup swapper,” she said.

Women’s relationships with the beauty industry, of course, have always been fraught with irony. And swapping is no exception. According to veteran swappers, if they put a dollar value on the time they spend posting, bubble-wrapping and mailing their old cosmetics, not to mention scouting the swap board for things they want in return, it would probably be cheaper to go out and buy something straight from a department store counter.

Then again, no one--including the most devoted of swappers--is arguing that this is an activity that makes a whole lot of sense.

“We swappers are all sort of gluttons,” Castell said. “It’s quite a selective hobby because it’s a hobby of luxury. It’s not a necessary thing, but it’s fun.”