An incident at some Chanel stores early this week prompted the brand to recall some of its Christmas-themed beauty products.
A makeup artist at the perfume counter at the Primrose Hill Chanel store was asked to remove a mini digital wizardry brush made of fine glass, the Telegraph reports. The store was unable to say whether the wand was part of its “Magic Wand” range or of a different collection.
“We were all on edge,” one of the people involved in pulling the wand says. Chanel says the wand “was produced by a third party and does not match our product line. We have worked with the supplier to promptly rectify this matter. All other packaging in that department has been reviewed and retested.” The stylist at the Primrose Hill store claims she is no longer allowed to work there.
In a statement on Friday, Chanel said it was “taking this issue very seriously” and would be contacting the retailer to ensure the wand was discontinued. (It was not, in fact, removed and instead a new one was made available the following week.) However, by then the wand had already been available for a week on Amazon, on two separate “Chanel Magic Wand” sets that cost £229.99 ($300) and $250.99 ($350). There are also similar sets available from other online retailers, such as the popular Beautyalley.
One of the “Chanel Magic Wand” sets Photograph: Beautyalley
Beautyalley’s sets aren’t infrequent, but they are more expensive than the ones you see on Amazon and are sold by a dedicated makeup artist (it’s not clear how her brush ended up at Chanel, though). Last year Beautyalley also said it was withdrawing its “Chanel Magic Wand” – but the model’s signature makeup brush wasn’t included on any of its six remaining sets. When the company made headlines in October 2017, the designer Maison Margiela said of their work on its “magic wand”: “It was not part of our working-stylist design process.”
Chanel’s complete line of “Magic Wand” makeup brushes comes in four different sizes and range in price from £20 to £26 ($27-$29) and are not widely available online. After the incident, the trio of brushes in the Chanel Magic Wand set were made available only on sale on 3rdRowBeauty.com, where they could be purchased for $300.
“Chanel are spending a lot of money on trying to hire these fashionable posh people to put their shades in beauty shops, but it doesn’t make sense to me,” says a makeup artist who regularly visits Chanel stores. “They spend all this money on these people who are trying to pretend they are more interested in other types of beauty than we are. It’s not all about lighting and prep.”