Beauty influencer Jill Clark has put Mecca on blast in a searing five-minute video in which she brands the beauty giant’s new ’50-Cent Face’ campaign as a ‘shame job.’
In her video, which has been viewed 684,000 times as of Friday, Jill blasted the campaign as ‘the holy grail of all Mecca Max rip offs.’
Mecca Max is the Australian beauty retailer’s popular in-house line of cosmetics.
The campaign, launched in November last year, promotes the affordability of Mecca Max and claims customers can achieve a full face of makeup for less than 50 cents per day – with ‘spare change in your car console, at the bottom of the bag or wedged in-between your couch cushions’.
‘Now, I was already pi**ed off at this campaign, but it’s the disclaimer on it that led to my discovery,’ Jill said.
The disclaimer on Mecca’s website says that cost-per-wear is based on an ‘average daily recommended usage amount’.
‘Mecca, how exactly did you quantify this?’ Jill fumed. ‘Because the title of your article is “We’ve Done The Maths“. Well so did I, and I’m going to show you what I found.’
First up was the brand’s Off Duty Serum Skin Tint, which sells for $32, with a cost per wear of $0.09, according to Mecca.
Based on those numbers, Jill says that would mean there are 356 uses in the entire 30ml bottle.
‘Now, according to your disclaimer of this being based off daily recommended usage, for 356 uses in this bottle, that would equate to one single use being 0.084ml.’
The 26-year-old, who has a professional background in logistics, then used a 1ml syringe to demonstrate how much product Mecca is directing customers to use for their ‘full face’.
‘The amount of product that paid influencers used to promote this campaign is arguably much more than 0.084ml,’ Jill told Daily Mail Australia as she held up the microscopic blob of make up.
‘That’s false advertising.’
Mecca Max confirmed they did use paid influencers to create the campaign and that while some of those influencers used scales to measure the amount of product they used, others only followed ‘general guidance.’
‘The f***ed up part is not even the amount of product, it’s the fact that this has a six month expiration,’ Jill continued.
‘Which means that at 356 uses, even if you wore this every single day, it would still expire before you had a chance to validate the 9 cent cost per wear.’
Next, she measured Mecca Max’s Off Duty Blush Stick, with retails for $20 and has 6.5 grams of product.
Mecca listed the cost per wear as $0.03, meaning the stick can supposedly be used 667 times before it runs out, with each use being 0.009g.
‘That unit is so small that I can’t even show you what that looks like,’ Jill said.
‘What I can tell you is this product has an expiration of 18 months (548 days) which means once again, this would expire before you even had a chance to validate Mecca’s cost per wear.’
‘I used to purchase these religiously and not once did this last me longer than three months.’
In a statement to Daily Mail, Mecca claimed that all the products used in the campaign have a ‘period after opening date’ (PAO), which is ‘essentially a ‘best before’ date after opening – not an expiry date’.
‘MECCA MAX’s PAO dates are conservative, and the expiry will depend on how the product is stored,’ a Mecca Max spokesperson said.
They added that while the PAO isn’t an expiry, the products ‘might start to become a little bit less effective’.
In her final example, Jill took the $26 Whip Lash Tubing Mascara, which contains 8ml of product. At Mecca’s $0.26 cost per wear, Jill said that would equate to 100 uses in the tube, using 0.08ml of mascara each time.
‘Let’s be so for real, there is not a chance in hell you are getting one hundred uses out of this. This would be drier than the Sahara Desert if you tried to use it one hundred times,’ she said.
‘Mecca, I would really like you to show us exactly what 0.08ml of mascara looks like on the eyelashes.’
In 1800 comments made on Jill’s TikTok so far, Aussies praised the influencer for her attention to detail and said they were breaking out the popcorn to wait for Mecca’s response.
‘Now, THIS is journalism,’ one user wrote.
‘Jillie, I fear you absolutely ATE with this,’ said another.
‘The marketing team would hate you right now – love this.’
‘Thank you for taking the time to raise awareness of this! I stopped shopping at Mecca over a year ago when I noticed my powder increased in price by more than $15 in one year,’ said another.
A Mecca Max spokesperson said that six of the brand’s ‘internal product experts’ were asked to create an everyday makeup looks and used precision scales to measure the amount of make up they used – then ‘divided them by the product price.’
‘We know everyone uses products differently depending on their preferences and skin type, which is why we took the average amount,’ they said.
This isn’t the first time Jill has publicly locked horns with Mecca’s publicity team.
The Sydney-based make up enthusiast went viral last May with a video comparing Mecca Max products to name-brand alternatives, as she claimed they contained ‘literally half’ the amount of makeup.
In response, Mecca said Jill had been ‘quite selective’ with the products she chose to measure in her video, and that they had higher price points because of their ‘superior formula and/or packaging.’
‘If I’ve been selective on the products I’ve chosen, I would argue they’ve been selective on the information they have disclosed with this campaign and the way they do their marketing,’ she told Daily Mail Australia on Friday.
‘Mecca have been the zeitgeist of the Australian beauty community for so long, that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of checks and balances going on there.’
‘It’s like they think we are stupid. I hope as consumers this pi**es you off just as much as it pi**es me off.’
What’s more, she said most of the influencers who worked on the Mecca campaign used ‘four to five times’ more product than what was advertised.
Jill has been named a member of the Sephora Squad, but told Daily Mail Australia the brand affiliation to Mecca’s largest competitor has no bearing on these videos.
‘I have never been paid by Sephora and they unequivocally do not pay me in any way to make this kind of content,’ she told Daily Mail Australia, noting that the European cosmetic company had only contacted her after the videos blew up.
‘My goal is never to stop people from shopping at a certain retailer because of these things, but it’s more to bring an awareness to the situation. As consumers, more often than not, we don’t look behind the curtain.’
Melbournian Jo Horgan started Mecca Cosmetica in 1997 to fill a Sephora-sized hole in the undeserved Australian beauty market. She cherrypicked a handful of the hottest products that weren’t available in Australia and signed them under exclusive distribution contracts.
Today, Mecca has more than 100 bricks-and-mortar stores across Australia and New Zealand and the company’s most recently recorded annual revenue was $688.9 million, as of December 2021.
