17
Dec
2013
By Calvin at 10:44 GMT, 12 years ago
I attended another excellent Designing out Crime Association meeting on Friday at Central Saint Martin’s College in King’s Cross.
Amongst the speakers were Michael Thwaites and Steve Hatfield, the security guys from Esteé Lauder. They spoke about the problem of counterfeit products and what their company was doing to counteract it.
The talk was full of facts and figures and I found myself scribbling furiously to get the main points down. First up was the scale of the problem: The value of counterfeit products is £800 Billion worldwide representing 7% of world trade! It is estimated that ninety per cent of counterfeit products are manufactured in China.
What some of you may find interesting is that genuine Esteé Lauder products and all their brands, including MAC, Aramis, Clinique, Tommy Hilfiger, La Mer and so on are only sold through their own shops or through authorised retailers such as certain pharmacies and department stores – which is the same for all leading manufacturers' brand products. In other words their products are not sold on-line (other than from the authorised retailers just mentioned) or at car boot sales or street markets or from a bloke with a suitcase along Oxford High Street.
But I hear some of you saying “Well my friend bought a couple of bottles from the perfume bloke at the boot sale just a couple of weeks ago, so that simply can’t be the case.” Well it seems that what your friend bought was a copy and a bad one at that; and one that could potentially do you some harm. To tempt the purchaser the seller might even have said it was nicked off the back of a lorry (we’ve all witnessed the humour of certain market sellers), but actually it was almost certainly a copy as Esteé Lauder’s security standards are extremely high and they lose very little product through theft.
We were then told about the dreadful harm that some of the counterfeit products have done to people, with rather graphic pictures of people’s allergic reactions. Some of these victims had been given the product by a friend who’d unwittingly bought the fake. Ingredients often found in beauty products include anti-freeze, horse urine and lead – lovely! Esteé Lauder know about this because the innocent (or not so innocent) user has complained to them thinking it’s their product. Esteé Lauder obviously take all these complaints very seriously and have the product carefully examined in their labs and at this point discover that the product in the container is not theirs.
So, if you’ve bought or been given a branded cosmetic product recently at a ridiculously low price, or the packaging doesn’t look quite right or it wasn’t bought from an official website or from a reputable retailer please don’t use it on yourself and certainly don’t give it to others. And please remember that if you buy fakes you’re helping organised crime, affecting the UK’s economy and putting local jobs at risk.
Want to know more about Counterfeiting? Visit the Cosmetic, Toiletry & Perfumery Association’s website – ‘The Facts About’ at http://www.thefactsabout.co.uk/content.aspx?pageid=151
Esteé Lauder’s Website: http://www.elcompanies.com/Pages/Homepage.aspx
Designing out Crime Association: http://www.doca.org.uk/ New members are welcomed – and it’s free to join!
