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| - Officially, I prefer Sephora to Ulta on all fronts, especially consistency, and when their worlds collide, I choose Sephora. However, Sephora doesn't carry as many premium hair products and due to the ubiquity of "fake" alerts on said hair products on Amazon, I often find myself at Ulta. As a preface, until moving to Charlotte, I've never been to an Ulta (after having frequented them all over S. California) that litters their floor with customer reps who know even less than I do about their hair products. I'm giving THIS Ulta 2 stars for their reps who lack product knowledge and for their stock (or lack thereof).
TIP: The great thing about Ulta is that if you're willing to buy 2 hair products, you get one free, which does draw me back.
Even girly girls need expert guidance. I am hands-down, the epitome of high-maintenance girly girl and I have the makeup and hair products to prove it. But even with years of consumerism under my belt, I still need some guidance every now and again because the beauty product world is inundated with a variety of different products offered by different brands, all purporting to do the same or similar things. Enter beauty product experts whose sole job is to guide you through your purchasing journey so that you're making informed purchasing decisions. Sephora is better at this because they have reps in each department who can seamlessly navigate through the maze of products and lead you to the ones that will yield the outcome that you want (I return things less at Sephora at the behest of these experts than I do at Ulta).
Other Ultas have steered me in the right direction. One of the gems that I discovered thanks to an Ulta rep is Redkin Pillow-Proof ("RPP"), which is a pre-heat treatment cream that I apply to my hair as a heat protectant and also doubles to expedite the blow drying process. When I was nearly running out, I recently went back but was considering a similar product for my newly color-treated hair. My RPP has the great faster blow dry feature but the color protectant only said that it was a thermal protector -- no expedited blow dry feature. I already get the thermal protector feature in my Purealogy leave-in conditioner and in my Sexy Hair 450 Headset. So what's the difference? Do I need the thermal protector specially made for color treated hair? Should I still buy RPP for its faster blow drying feature as well?
The Ulta reps have no clue and worse, make stuff up. Carrying the several different products in tow, I looked around for a rep. I found one aimlessly meandering down the aisles and asked her my slew of questions. The first thing she did was asked me to hand over the products so that she could read the labels! WTH? Honey, I CAN read multiple languages -- my 4 degrees will attest to that. At that point, I really just wanted to demand the products back, wing them, and return whatever I don't like later. However, she continued to explain to me exactly what she had just read without even bothering to answer my question about the delineation between the products. Really?! I walked away clearly annoyed, back to the shelves to see if I could discern anything further from another brand. The first rep had enlisted another rep to help me. This second rep gave me a little bit of vague, overly broad guidance but when I prodded her about whether she had used any of it, she sheepishly admitted no. Ugh.
The shelves are not freshly stocked. I have been to this Ulta three times and on all occasions, I have noticed that some of the merchandise has been sitting on the shelves for a long time by the look of their faded labels. Worse, I wanted to buy a Tigi deep conditioner and one of the two they had in stock looked like it had been tampered with (it was not a tester) -- eww.
Will I return to this Ulta? Probably because it's the closest one to me and has a Bath & Body Works and Harris Teeter in the same complex, so I can kill 3 birds with one stone. Will I ever ask a rep for advice again? Definitely not. I try to avoid waste by limiting my purchase of products I'm unfamiliar with and returning them but if this store manager isn't willing to adhere to the company benchmark of adequate staffing, I, too, will deviate from my standard practice and take advantage of their return policy to my heart's content.
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