The ULTA-mite Disappointment
- Lydia Walters
- Oct 2, 2014
- 3 min read
In my mind, and in many other beauty addicts mind’s, applying makeup is an almost spiritual experience: you watch your face transform into something entirely different. Your features are drawn out and exaggerated—beautified. I often wake up early just to spend up to an hour painting my face with various cosmetics. As a result, I’m like a kid in a candy store when I walk into someplace like Sephora, where every kind of high-end makeup awaits my eager hands.
Upon hearing that an ULTA was opening in Pinole, I was ecstatic. I had never been to one, and I had heard so many great things about its products and service, browsed its website, pictured what the inside would look like. I counted down the days until its opening. When I finally got there, I stepped inside almost breathlessly, mentally listing everything I was excited to see. I planned to ask the employees about job openings as well, it was so close and seemed so perfect. I walked in and…
…I was disappointed. One wall was high-end products, the back was stocked with hair products, and drugstore makeup was wedged into several short aisles in the front corner. There was a display of perfume in a circle of shelves in the front. A couple counters for the makeup artists. Such description sounds like it could be amazing, but it failed to meet my (admittedly very high) expectations.
At Sephora, I can’t walk ten feet without an employee asking me if I am finding everything alright and pointing out particularly good products. At Ulta, despite the fact that I was one of about three customers in the store, the employees kept to themselves, talking and giggling, and only offering their help if I walked straight past them.
Among the hair products in the back were cheap headbands, hair ties and tacky extensions. The shelves that held these were particularly disorganized. Plastic clips and metal-tipped hair ties had fallen and lay in a tangled heap on the bottom shelf, with more littered around the floor. There was a cart sitting behind that shelf, loaded with boxes, looking like it was trying to hide and hadn’t expected to be found.
Though I walked along the high-end wall several times, I couldn’t find much makeup there. It was all skin care; most of the store was hair and skin care. While those are good and useful products, they’re not intriguing. In fact, they’re kind of mundane. Eventually I found the makeup section, a little group of shelves grouped off by themselves, and spent some time walking along the few short shelves. It was all drugstore.
While I love using drugstore products, I was looking forward to swatching expensive lipsticks and eyeshadows on my arms with the samplers Ulta so generously provides. There was a great variety of brands, like NYX and Palladio, that are difficult to find at places like Rite-Aid and Walgreens, but all of them are abundant at Target.
And, in the end, that is my suggestion: go to Target. It’s even in the same shopping center, and its makeup doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. But if you want proper makeup and the most fantastic shopping experience of your life, go to Sephora. And if you want an over-priced curling iron, expensive perfume, or a cheap stripper’s hair extensions, go to Ulta.
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