THE BIG BEAUTY CON

The walls of Nikki’s rumpus room are lined with boxes. Piled high, they sit untouched, collecting dust, filled with unsold Tupperware containers and unopened Younique and Arbonne beauty products. They’re a constant reminder of Nikki’s mistake: her failed attempt at conquering modern-day direct selling or multi-level marketing (MLM). “I could fill a standard bedroom top to bottom with all of the excess stock I’ve got,” says Nikki, shaking her head and looking around at the piles of wasted product in her modest home “in the sticks” of rural Victoria, where she lives with her husband and three teenage kids. “Every day I see these boxes and boxes and boxes, and it’s hard. I really struggle with it.”

Nikki, 35, first heard about the MLM make-up scheme Younique in 2013. The wife of her husband’s friend messaged her out of the blue on Facebook with “an exciting opportunity to join an amazing company and make money from home”. At the time, Nikki was living in a housing commission property as a full-time carer to her husband, who’d suffered a spinal injury at work, and she couldn’t afford the $129 sign-up fee. The wife of her husband’s friend paid it and said all she had to do was sell make-up on Facebook from home.

“I was really naive. We were struggling financially, barely making it week to week, and I thought I was going to have a ‘high-end business’,” she says. But