Shipping Woes

Last month on Facebook, there was a little thing where if 100,000 people "liked" Model's Own brand nail polish by a certain date, they would put up a coupon code for 50% off as a thank you for all the likes. I'd been coveting their Beetlejuice polishes but with the exchange rate between dollars and pounds, I was too cheap to do anything about it.

But they got their 100,000 likes, and I jumped. The shipment FINALLY arrived at my house, but it required a signature and I apparently wasn't home (or my mailman didn't bother to knock, either way). I trucked myself off to the post office today to pick up my package, hurried back home, and ripped into the box. 

What happened? I'm so glad you asked. As soon as I began to cut the plastic outer bag, I smelled nail polish. That's never, ever, ever a good sign when opening a nail polish shipment. I gingerly pulled the box out of the bag:

The outer sleeve on the box had an appreciable bend in the center. So I slipped the sleeve off the box:

The box wouldn't even stay closed. The lid is bent in the center and the sidewall facing the camera is slightly mangled. So I opened the box and discovered this shocking lack of padded packing material:

That, my friends, is two crumpled up sheets of tissue paper. That was it. The full extent of padding. For glass bottles. You can see the inner box is also bent:

I let the polishes roll out into the outer box. The first three came out with no problem. Then two came out stuck together, followed by the last. I didn't take a picture of that, I was too concerned with the color called Indian Ocean, which looks like this:

The blue one in the center is the Indian Ocean. It was stuck to the bottle on the right side with a glob of thick, dried blue nail polish. So I took a peek inside the box:

Thankfully the bottle is wrapped in a shrink-wrapped seal so the majority of the polish stayed inside despite the crushed area of the bottle, complete with cracks running up to the neck of the bottle.

I've written to Models Own to ask for either a refund or a new bottle. Haven't heard back from them yet. I'll let you know how it goes.