Bitch Slap Cosmetics is Stealing from Other Companies
I wish I were making this up.
Sometime in the last couple days, it was spotted that Kathy, the owner of Bitch Slap Cosmetics, was using stolen photos for the product shots of “her” pigments.
Recognize any of them? Unfortunately, almost all of those shots were stolen from Shiro Cosmetics.
As you can see, some are very badly Photoshopped to change the colors, but many of them were used as-is. The really sad part is that Caitlin of Shiro creates her products herself, and works hard to do it, while Bitchslap sells just a bunch of Lady Burd stuff.
To be honest, I can’t comprehend how Kathy thought she could get away with stealing images from someone else, when typically companies are outed pretty quickly for image theft. I can’t comprehend how Kathy thought that stealing someone else’s images was okay to do. Either way, this earns a big “do not shop here” warning from me; if she has no qualms about theft, who knows what else she’s been lying about.
A Girl and Her Shadows 
Apparently she’s sold items that are not safe for use near the eyes, and kind of forgot to warn her customers about that (shittastic due diligence, there…) So I’m not entirely surprised that she’d pull something like this.
From what I understand, she’s done the same as Ruthless with those Lady Burd Paint Wheels, promoting them as eyeshadow, not saying on the website that they aren’t eye safe, etc.
I also matched the same 11 Shiro shades that were stolen/color-shopped to represent 17 of BS’s 19 single-pot pigments. I don’t want to spam my tl;dr comment that I left on this blog, but I touched on a number of issues in addition to the stolen photos:
http://make-uprehab.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitchslapped-by-bitchslap-cosmetics.html
(Just FYI, if you keep your PC sound on full-blast, like I do so I don’t have to wear my hearing aides all the time, you might want to mute it, due to the loud auto-play music on the blog.)
I wanted to let you know that I *really* appreciate you & @toxidlotus posting the screenshots when you did, as I have been having right-click mouse button trouble, but hopefully a friend will have a working mouse to loan me tomorrow.
Now, I don’t know if the sudden replacement of the photos on BS this morning is a result of Shiro’s Cease & Desist letter to their web host, or the calling out of BS in public & posting screenshot proof, or a combination of the two, or maybe even for another completely unrelated reason. But it sure does seem like an awfully big co-ink-ee-dink that not even 2 days ago, BS told Shiro that Shiro’s photos didn’t belong to Shiro, so BS was not going to remove them. But now, the stolen pictures have suddenly been replaced on all the BS singe-pot pigments, including the 2 that we couldn’t determine if they were Shiro’s, if they were stolen from another company, or if they may have been BS’s own 2 images, but if they were the latter, why replace them too? People have speculated about from whom BS may have stolen the 3-pot “tower” pictures, but those pics have not changed, so they either do belong to BS, or another possible victim company has just not discovered it yet.
Since the pics have been removed, which is what Shiro had said they wanted, my gut tells me that they may not pursue the matter any further. However, I did still want to again thank you, & @toxidlotus, for helping archive the proof of BS’s copyright infringement on Shiro’s property, so if Shiro does choose to pursue it further, they at least have this visual evidence to corroborate any complaint they might choose to file, but if they don’t, this info is still here to help guide other indie newbs in their journey to decide which companies actually deserve their money.
Certainly! When I saw what was happening, I had to archive it and get the word out, because I am so not down with some rinkydink reseller company ripping off and stealing from a genuinely-run indie business.
As far as I know, BSC took the photos down because her webhost sent her a notice that she needed to remove them immediately or her account would be suspended – bye bye website! But I know that Kathy doesn’t appreciate the bad press, either, because I got spammed with over 300 thumbs down on YouTube last night, between the 25th and 50th views on my video about her stealing (seriously, at view 26 I only had 1 thumb down, then I go back and see 51 views and 318 thumbs down).
Hopefully Shiro won’t have to worry about this anymore, but at least she has a bunch of witnesses and multiple sources of proof if she does have to do anything else.
That’s weird, I didn’t know it was even possible to have more votes than views on YT. I thought as soon as you opened the page & the video started, it would register as a view before you could get the chance to vote it down. Do you have to watch a video all the way through for it to count as a view? I voted it up.
I think it registers a view halfway through or something, I’m not sure.
Was looking on the BS FB page, & I thought they had a habit of deleting “negative” (read: legitimate complaints) posts, so I was surprised to see all of this is still posted after 2+ days:
I think that group actually doesn’t have ANY admins – that’s why everything’s still up!
I was looking at their website by chance that one MUA led to another MUA page, and he happened to be on their “team”. Anyway their 60 palette looks IDENTICAL to BH cosmetics except…wait…BH sells it in 120 colors. BS cosmetics only sells you half of it. The colors are more concentrated (saturated) on the BS page and turned upside but compare it with Bh 120 palette 2nd edition. Hmm….
BH Cosmetics looks to be a reseller to me – private label cosmetics, nothing unique. You can get those palettes (ones from both BS and from BH) directly from Celia Makeup via eBay for less, and they’ll be fresher product, too.