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When Monique looks back on the night she decided to join Mary Kay, she remembers being hungry. She was 36 in 2013, fresh out of the United States Air Force after 16 years, and living in Tallahassee, Florida, where she knew almost no one. She was sleeping 15 hours a day in her small, hot apartment, subsisting off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, spending more money on food for her 90-pound bulldog than on herself. Her only source of income were her retirement checks from the military, just $1,200 a month. Barely enough to cover rent. Monique — who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy — knew she needed to find work, soon, but every lead she chased turned out to be a dead end.
Then an acquaintance introduced her to a Mary Kay beauty consultant named Linette. Monique had heard of Mary Kay but she didn’t really understand what it was — she just knew Linette always had on a full face of makeup. Monique, on the other hand, barely even wore lipstick. She felt like Linette’s opposite: a tall, broad-shouldered, Black military tomboy where Linette was short and white and always wore a skirt suit.
Nevertheless, she accepted Linette’s invitation to a party at a place called the Pink Cadi Shack, where local Mary Kay ladies gathered, located in a drab, nondescript office park in a suburb east of Tallahassee. The walls were painted in Mary Kay’s signature blush pink and black colors and adorned with quotes from Mary Kay Ash, who had founded the company in 1963. “You begin that journey toward success by following two rules: No 1. Get started. No. 2. Don’t Quit,” one read. Photos of the petite Ash, with her kind smile and large blond bouffant, looking like a combination of Dolly Parton and Nancy Reagan hung nearby. Crucially, there was pizza at the party, piles of pies spread out over the kitchen, free for the taking. Monique’s stomach rumbled.
Most of the women at the Pink Cadi Shack were, like Linette, decked out in a heavy layer of makeup and wearing blazers with matching skirts. Especially glamorous was one consultant named Rose, with a short, spunky haircut, long shiny nails, a diamond cocktail ring and a high voice. Rose explained that Mary Kay consultants were saleswomen. They bought makeup and skin-care products from the company at a discount and sold them to customers. But the real Mary Kay opportunity was that the saleswomen could make an income off the women they brought in, women working in what was called their “downline.” The bigger the downline, the more you got paid. Rose, like Linette, was an independent sales director, a very high rank in the company, which was why she and Linette wore special plaid skirt suits. Rose had hundreds of women in her downline, and Rose was their “upline.”
Rose told the room that Mary Kay was the reason she had the ring, the nails, and a “free” car paid for by the company. The money had changed her life after her husband divorced her and left her with nothing. Now she was drinking Champagne on yachts, traveling on paid vacations, winning iPads and jewelry and even a fur coat. Even though Rose sold Mary Kay cosmetics, she explained that, because she was an independent contractor, she owned her own business. She worked for herself. She showed how a new beauty consultant could make $2,500 in just one month.
Monique went back to her apartment that night feeling full and optimistic for the first time in months. She had been wondering who she was going to be, and Mary Kay had given her an answer. Her life up to this point had been full of hard edges, and here was a soft, pink place to land. She signed up for the $99 Mary Kay starter kit, a package containing brochures and product samples all new consultants are required to buy. Monique charged the kit to her credit card, around $118 with tax and shipping. She decided that her goal would be that $2,500. That’s all she would try to make, at first. It would more than double her income.
Just shy of ten years and thousands and thousands of her own dollars later, I met Monique for the first time on a video call. She was sitting in a room in her house, still in Tallahassee, surrounded by Mary Kay products, boxes arranged in precarious stacks in her closets and along her walls like the skyline of a pink cardboard city. At that point, she was so desperate to get rid of the bottles and compacts she was giving them away. She couldn’t even use the makeup herself anymore. It had started to give her hives, her face breaking out in red splotches when anything Mary Kay hit her skin. “And I kid you not,” she said, shaking her head. “I never saw that $2,500 commission check. Never did.”
Monique had no idea when she paid to join Mary Kay that she was just the latest desperate American roped into a “business model” called multilevel marketing, or MLM, which has been around for nearly 80 years. The same model used to be called a “profits pyramid.” Though it was invented by men in 1945, of the 6.7 million Americans who currently participate (likely a vast undercount), 75 percent are women. The story that the MLM industry tells about itself is that its participants are the modern inheritors of the traveling salesman: instead of going door-to-door, they trawl the aisles of Target and the carpool line, and go live on Facebook and Instagram, offering everything from makeup, vitamins, supplements, weight loss shakes, nail polish, clothing, and shampoo to insurance, real estate, water filters, books, wine, sex toys, and cryptocurrency investment advice.
Mary Kay is one of the oldest and most well-known MLMs, but there are hundreds of others, like Amway, Nu Skin, Shaklee, and Cutco, including some that are profitable enough to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange like Herbalife; Warren Buffett owns one called Pampered Chef. President Donald Trump has been the face of at least two MLMs. The industry claims to bring in around $40 billion in sales every year.
Except there are very little “sales” being made at all in MLM, at least to customers. The only sales that matter are the ones from the multilevel companies to their participants, what they buy. Which is why multilevel marketing may constitute one of the most devastating, long-running scams in modern history. As Monique discovered, if you’re a woman in MLM, it is almost impossible to make money selling products. The real product being sold is you.
As a new Mary Kay consultant, Monique put on a full face of makeup every morning, just like her upline Linette told her to. She never knew who she was going to run into for a “warm chat,” which is what Mary Kay calls the sales warm-up. Linette told Monique to head out into suburban Tallahassee looking for ideal Mary Kay customers: soccer moms, housewives at places like Barnes & Noble, Target, or the mall.
She was highly motivated to find customers. A few weeks into her Mary Kay business, after spending $118 on her starter kit, Linette had encouraged her to place her first major product order. Keeping inventory wasn’t mandatory, Linette said, but the most successful consultants typically started by spending $1,800, an amount called a “star consultant” order. “You can’t sell from an empty wagon,” Linette warned. Monique did what she advised, charging it to her credit card, almost $2,200 with tax and shipping.
That might seem like a lot of money to spend before she had even sold a product, but in Mary Kay, Monique’s order wasn’t considered a purchase. In company terminology, her $1,800 wholesale order was called “production,” an amount used to calculate a consultant’s “personal retail sales.” Mary Kay assumed that Monique, who bought the products at a 50 percent discount, would sell them for around double the price. So the $1,800 was immediately recorded as $3,600 in “personal retail sales” by Mary Kay, no matter if the products ever left Monique’s living room, which, for reasons not unique to Monique, many of them never did. The higher Monique’s production, the higher commission went to her upline, and her upline’s uplines, and on and on. And every three months, Monique was required to place another production order if she wanted to stay active. So she needed to start moving her Mary Kay.
But she soon learned how difficult that would be. On a good day, Monique would find maybe 20 women to approach in the aisles of Target. Maybe eight, on a better day, would give her their names and numbers, and on an excellent day, maybe two or three would respond when she wrote them a cheery note inviting them to the Pink Cadi Shack. After all that, on the absolute best day, Monique might make one sale. To achieve this required sifting through a barrage of nos (“Each one gets you closer to your first yes,” her upline said). She had scripts for every objection. If a potential customer can’t afford a product, could she use a credit card? If her husband wouldn’t let her make an expensive purchase, could she put it on a “husband unawareness plan,” and spread it out over a few separate charges?
Her upline Linette had what seemed like a picture-perfect life: She was always bragging about family vacations to Disney World and renovations on her house. When Monique asked for advice, she encouraged her to host another party, to give more free facials. “You’ll have a breakthrough,” Linette told her. “God is going to bless your efforts.”
Every month at the Pink Cadi Shack in Tallahassee, there would be a party for the consultants who had moved up the ranks in Mary Kay. Once a beauty consultant had three active distributors in her downline, she hit something called Red Jacket status and was celebrated with a ceremony where she received an official red Mary Kay blazer. Uplines said only the top 6 percent of the company ever got to Red Jacket. Monique would watch Linette and the other directors roll out a red carpet and present the new Red Jackets with a bouquet of red carnations. Then they would go around the room and say one reason for being in the Mary Kay business, their “why”: “Family.” “God.” “My children.” At every party Monique thought to herself, I can’t wait to be there. She was craving the recognition, the chance to feel glamorous and special.
Finally, in the spring of 2015, Monique hit Red Jacket, after recruiting two friends from the military and one woman on a warm chat in Target. For her ceremony, Monique wore sky-high heels with a dramatic zebra print and red piping, matching her new red blazer. (She had to pay for the cost of the jacket, but got a $50 rebate from Mary Kay.) Now, at the Red Jacket parties, Monique was one of the leaders in the room, the one to say her “why.” She perfected her story: that she was out of the military and she didn’t want to do what others told her anymore. Mary Kay was affording her not just a chance to pay her bills, but to have a nice lifestyle and sense of confidence.
Behind the scenes, Mary Kay boxes piled up in Monique’s apartment. Now she was dipping into her only savings, $20,000, to place her star consultant orders. Her benefits from the government had gone up by a few thousand dollars, but nearly everything was going back out to Mary Kay. But Linette kept encouraging her that she would make it all back if she kept moving up.
One particularly humiliating day, Monique was low on gas and ran completely out just as she was about to pull into a gas station in her run-down Chevy Tahoe. A group of guys hanging out in front helped to push her car all the way to the pump. One of them noticed she was all dolled up and in her Red Jacket, with her Mary Kay pin and bumper sticker: She’ll never forget when he said, laughing, “You better get that Pink Cadillac soon, huh?”
In 2018, Monique decided she was sick of going to Mary Kay Seminar, the annual company convention in Dallas, and sitting on the sidelines. Seminar was still the best part of Mary Kay, especially Awards night, the pageantlike part of the convention when consultants are recognized for their success. But for the past three years she had sat in her formal gown watching the women onstage from the discomfort of her plastic folding chair. She vowed that she would make Princess Court of Sales, a distinction bestowed to the consultants who “sell” at least $20,000 worth of Mary Kay during the company’s fiscal year, from July to June. It meant she would have to spend around $10,000 wholesale.
The end of June was a mad dash as Monique scrambled to make “sales,” which meant buying products. She desperately posted on Facebook, trying to get friends to order through her. But inevitably she had to make up the difference herself. Linette encouraged her daily with voice notes on Voxer, the Mary Kay messaging app. Sometime after midnight on June 30, Linette sent Monique a congratulations text: She had made it.
In July, when it came time for Seminar, Monique picked out a peach-colored off-the-shoulder dress to wear during the special ceremony for the Princess Court. She still had to sit in the same folding chair in the convention center with her team, but when the time came, she and her fellow Princesses headed backstage to assemble for their walk across the stage. She was paired with a brunette consultant who suggested to Monique that they should hug when they got to the middle. “Maybe we’ll get on the Jumbotron!” the brunette suggested, referring to the large screens that flanked the stage. Monique accepted the plan.
But it all happened so quickly. She and her partner hugged, but they didn’t make it on the screen. A man in a tuxedo helped her off the stage. And that was it. “It was just a little taste,” Monique remembered. But it was not enough. She wanted more.
God finally seemed to bless Monique’s efforts more than five whole years into Mary Kay, when she recruited a girl named Harmony. Harmony’s husband was in construction and made good money. She quickly recruited seven people — but not all of them wanted to actually become Mary Kay consultants. For several, Harmony just set up consultant accounts under their names and Social Security numbers and paid for their orders herself. Monique was worried that the company would see that all these new recruits were using the same financial information, but no one ever said a word.
Suddenly Harmony’s industriousness propelled Monique into eligibility for an elite status: Sales Director in Qualification, or DIQ. With more than eight consultants under her, Monique could now enter her DIQ period, what women in Mary Kay call the “hamster wheel.” The requirements for a DIQ are incredibly arduous: For three months, each of her personal recruits has to spend $4,000. Her downline must number at least 24 consultants who spent $13,500 collectively. Only $3,000 of this total can come from her. If she misses any of these goals, she fails her qualification, and the clock starts over.
It’s common for a consultant to get on and off the DIQ hamster wheel for years before she ever becomes a sales director. But it not only produces enormous pressure on her; it forces her to pass that pressure downward. By orienting the qualifications to her whole downline, the
consultant pushing to become a director has to push others. She has to find other women willing to do exactly what she has been doing: hustling constantly, doing whatever creative math she can to make minimum commitments, recruiting massively. Duplicate herself.
Monique called everyone she knew to tell them she needed their help. She sent Facebook messages to friends she had served with overseas and hadn’t spoken to in years. When her recruits couldn’t or wouldn’t order enough, she simply charged Mary Kay orders for her downline to her own credit card. The company never cared. As Monique pushed, Linette, her upline, used her as a shining example of the Mary Kay Way at recruiting meetings, saying Monique had used her earnings to buy her own two-bedroom house on a quiet street in Tallahassee, with room for a Mary Kay office, despite knowing that Monique had gotten her mortgage with a VA loan.
Monique finally became an independent sales director in November 2019. She had spent more than $50,000 on her Mary Kay business over the last nearly six years — though at the time she had no idea it was that much. Mary Kay had warped her sense of the normal inputs that go into balancing a checkbook, let alone running a business. She thought of all the products sitting in her spare room not as purchases, but as future sales. She ignored the unpaid bills and credit-card debt in favor of focusing on the horizon, which Linette and everyone else in Mary Kay promised would be bright if she just kept going.
Soon after becoming an official sales director, Monique got to visit the Mary Kay corporate headquarters in the suburb of Addison, about 15 minutes from downtown Dallas. “This was probably the best part of all of it,” Monique told me later about walking through the doors of the lobby. As she entered, Mary Kay employees came to the windows and balconies of every floor above the lobby’s central atrium, cheering, clapping, and shaking gold and pink Mary Kay pom-poms for the new directors. “Great job,” the employees said as Monique walked by. “Congratulations!” She took a video on her phone as she walked through, her camera shaking. You can hear her sobbing in the background of the footage. “Oh my God,” she repeats, over and over. She had never been shown so much love all at once. “Thirteen floors of people and they’re all just cheering for you.”
Six months after Monique became an independent sales director, she was still struggling to maintain her new rank. Now she needed her team to buy $4,500 worth of Mary Kay products every quarter. She was playing a constant game: Which bills could she avoid? How long could she go without paying her mortgage?
Then, in March 2020, the merry-go-round stopped. Florida issued a stay-at-home order in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fragile house of cards that was Monique’s Mary Kay “business” fell apart. None of her downline had extra money coming in, and the handful of
customers Monique had in Tallahassee stopped buying Mary Kay products. “I’ll do what I can,” her team members told her. But most of them had second jobs and many of them had been laid off. It wasn’t enough.
Monique found it incredibly difficult to pressure even her newer recruits. Her upline Linette told her to encourage her downline to “invest” their stimulus payments into their Mary Kay businesses. “And I’m just, like, ‘Tara is a single mom and she’s got two kids living at a trailer park,’” Monique told me. “Like, are we serious? We want Tara to buy $1,200 worth of products?”
Monique continued to place orders under her recruits’ names with her own credit card. I’ll just sell it, I’ll just sell it, she told herself as the boxes filled up her second bedroom. But she knew it wasn’t sustainable. The debt was rising like quicksand. Ever since the night she made sales director, she had heard a tiny voice in her head saying, You know you’ll have to quit, right? It was getting louder.
With the women unable to gather at the Pink Cadi Shack, Linette and her uplines tried to keep all their consultants motivated with Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting. They sent a list of “Positive affirmations for a great attitude in just 21 days.” Monique tried repeating them to herself every day:
“I love my Mary Kay business!”
“I am a booking machine!”
“I have at least ten appointments on my books at all times!”
“Everyone I meet wants to know why I am so happy!”
At her annual physical Monique found she had gained weight. Her blood pressure was up. The stress caused her to withdraw even further from friends as she carried the burden of her Mary Kay business. By May, Mary Kay had called Monique and told her she’d missed production again. This was the third month straight, so they were taking her directorship.
A year after losing her status as sales director, Monique was in the limbo that many beauty consultants find themselves in at one time, or at many times, in the life of their Mary Kay business. She was still ordering products every so often to remain active. She had three recruits left. But she had fallen back down to a mere Red Jacket. If she wanted to become a director again, she would have to start the qualification process all over. She would have to make so many orders, get so many new recruits. Instead, she just limped along.
In May 2022, Monique finally scheduled a much-needed hysterectomy surgery. She let her upline Linette know that she was going to be out of commission for the next few weeks. Nevertheless, after she had the surgery and was recovering in bed in the hospital room, Linette texted her: Did she see Marilyn, one her few remaining customers, needs an order? There was no preamble about being sorry to bother her. No asking her about how she was doing.
“That was it,” Monique says. The sting of Linette’s text, a woman she had known by this point for more than eight years and considered a friend, tapped something deep inside. The dead, inert feeling she had been carrying around, hidden behind her beatific Mary Kay face, was replaced by blazing anger. Monique’s time, her money, her body, she decided, was worth more than whatever Mary Kay had turned her into, an automaton chasing tiny checks, pushing lipsticks. The voice that had been nagging at her started screaming. On an afternoon in May a few days after her surgery, Monique blocked Linette’s phone number.
After Monique quit Mary Kay, she still hadn’t really left Mary Kay — or it hadn’t left her. Every morning, affirmations and instructions rang in her ears. Meanwhile, the various Facebook groups and Voxer chats that had once pinged throughout her every day were silent. Women she had thought of as friends had stopped speaking to her. Her account hadn’t technically been closed out yet; it takes one year after her last order for a consultant to officially go to what they call Mary Kay Heaven.
When Monique was struggling in the company during the pandemic, she had heard about another Mary Kay consultant named Jessica. Jessica was a top sales director with wide-set blue eyes, thick brown hair, and a perfect white smile. But for all her success, she had left Mary Kay in January 2020. Jessica didn’t mention Mary Kay by name, but she began posting about her old networking marketing job — about how she never had time for her husband and children, about how she “lost herself” and had to “bend to fit” the company’s culture. She had wrested her time back in order to spend time with her kids and herself. Her messages about self-care and happiness resonated with Monique. I am so lost, because all I do is Mary Kay from sunup to sundown, she thought.
Jessica had started her own virtual coaching company, and she was primarily working with Mary Kay beauty consultants. In 2020, Monique had signed up for her program: $12,000 for a year of group coaching sessions, which Monique had been allowed to pay in monthly installments.
The modules covered things like “visioneering,” Jessica’s term for manifestation, and something called EFT (emotional freedom technique) tapping. EFT involved gently but firmly hitting your body at various points with your index and middle fingers, to restore energy channels disrupted by negative emotions. Jessica taught a tapping session for “Money Responsibility,” which Monique was supposed to do twice a day for two weeks, repeating mantras like, “I appreciate how money shows up for me today” and “Money flows to me with ease, knowing I will help it expand.” This was how she was going to improve her business.
Jessica also sent Monique to her friend Ross, a financial coach who worked with Mary Kay consultants and other MLM distributors. She said he would help her reduce her credit-card debt and help her sell all the Mary Kay products sitting in her house. Monique paid Ross $3,000 first for a few weeks of coaching, then another $5,000 for more coaching he said would help take her to the next level.
Monique says that at first Ross helped her with basic financial skills she didn’t have: how to really read a credit-card statement, how to balance her checkbook. But once she left Mary Kay in 2022, he pitched her on a year’s worth of coaching in a new program, one that would help her figure out what her “million-dollar business” was going to be. She would finally be a real entrepreneur. The program cost $18,000. Ross recommended a company that gave Monique a loan to pay for it.
Most of the businesses Ross and his team encouraged her to explore were other types of coaching. Monique had decided that she wanted to start a support group for women veterans like her. But she kept balking at the price Ross and his fellow coaches in the program were urging her to charge: $1,200. Monique had been up front with the group about her experience in Mary Kay and how it devastated her own bank account — how was she going to find vulnerable veteran women and ask them to pay so much, and for what? Her advice? “How can I dare get in front of these veteran women talking about, ‘Hey, I battled this and I battled that. I ain’t got no training, but let me be your leader here. Pay me a gazillion bucks.’” Monique said. How would it help them?
Ross eventually enlisted another former Mary Kay distributor named Chelsea, whose focus was social media, to work with Monique. They taught her how to apply for a new kind of home-equity loan to come up with more money for a new program, but she was turned down. That’s when Monique started noticing how many active and former Mary Kay women were working with Ross, Jessica, and Chelsea. During one virtual meeting, Ross said that a million dollars in business had come from Jessica’s referrals alone. She realized that the coaches were passing her and other Mary Kay participants around in a kind of loop. She started to feel exactly like she had in Mary Kay, when her upline Linette was telling her to “go out and find another you.” You paid for coaching, the coaches told her. So you can find another veteran woman who can pay for coaching — though she had yet to find a real client, do any kind of coaching at all, or build any kind of real business. Despite this, the coaches were using her in promotional posts on Instagram and calling her a business owner.
Actually, the coaches told her, charging those exorbitant prices meant she knew what she was worth. She was setting her value in the world. The unspoken implication was that if she wasn’t willing to find another her, someone to pay, and charge them thousands for advice, she wasn’t worth very much at all.
I don’t want to use people,” Monique says now, a decade since she signed up for the Mary Kay opportunity after eating pizza at the Pink Cadi Shack. She still isn’t exactly sure how much she spent on Mary Kay beauty products, but based on her minimum orders, she estimated it was over $75,000. That wasn’t including money she spent on Seminar tickets, on throwing events for her downline, and on other products from the company like her business cards and jackets. She guesses that she never made more than $5,000 total in retail sales and in commissions from Mary Kay from her team. Her largest check from the company was $1,100.
Monique ended up doing what she always said in her “why” speech she never wanted to do again: She was working for someone else. She took a job in an insurance office. Monique hated the idea that she was no longer her own boss. Still, she had more time for herself than when she was in Mary Kay. It felt like freedom. No more daily check-ins from uplines or coaches, no more books, no more podcasts — unless she chose them herself. She was shredding the piles of papers and notebooks she had kept, their pages of mantras and affirmations reduced to ribbons.
Every so often Monique gets a message from another woman on Facebook or LinkedIn about an opportunity she “has to share.” Sometimes, she feels the pull of “this time it’ll be different” or “it only takes one miracle moment.” So far, she has politely declined them all.
Excerpted from LITTLE BOSSES EVERYWHERE: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America by Bridget Read. Copyright 2025 by Bridget Read. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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