When you walk into Ulta Beauty, you will see one color: Orange. The entire store is intense with a signature orange and white color scheme, with bright white lights and stark white shelves that surround the inside. The alluring environment draws customers into purchasing one of their luxurious products that are perfectly coordinated on the walls. Ulta Beauty is a relatively new business, yet they are exceptionally prosperous. When the popularity of cosmetics first began to expand, they used this to their advantage to get more and more makeup/skincare addict customers. In the beginning, there was never many options to go to to buy makeup. There was Sephora, MAC Cosmetics, and your local drug store…and that was it. Ulta decided to add some competition to this small industry. The company was formed in 1990 and became well-known in 2015. Ulta Beauty may be known for their cosmetics, but that is just the bare minimum of what they offer. They have every product you could think of, some including skincare, haircare, and even holiday gift packages. Another perk of Ulta, it is conveniently right off of Route 50 and next to other popular stores like Walmart, Petsmart, and Dunkin Donuts. You could easily grab a coffee, maybe some food for your dog, all while being in close proximity to your next favorite makeup product!

There are some negative aspects of every business, of course. In my personal experience, and those of my close friends as well, we’ve agreed that the employees can tend to be very condescending. For some background, my close friends and I regularly shop at Ulta and always encounter this. I usually attend the store with no makeup on whatsoever, because it’s normally on a day that I am running errands. And because of this, the way they spoke to me made me feel like they assumed I was an amateur and I didn’t know anything about shopping for makeup. This was really unpleasant for me, because it’s not reasonable to assume every person who shops at Ulta should be amazingly talented at doing makeup or informed about the makeup they’re buying. However, when I started researching why this might be, I started to feel less repulsed by their behavior when I realized it was most likely a marketing ploy. It makes the customers feel the need to prove themselves, and buy more products out of spite of the rude employees. Although I do not agree with this method of commission, I realized it was brilliant on their part. It does decrease the satisfaction of shopping there sometimes, but in the end, the employees still help you if you need it and a lot of them are actually really nice. Sometimes you may get a bad apple though, but that happens in virtually every business. All things considered, Ulta Beauty sets itself apart from other beauty supply stores by selling drugstore makeup as well as high end makeup. They make their products available to all incomes in this way. It is a really satisfying place to shop and buy gifts and new items to treat yourself or someone else with. It is overall makes me really happy to shop there and I love to get excited to try the new products when I get home.

Authors Bio:

Tessa was born in Canandaigua, New York, then moved to Loudoun County in 2003. She is a senior in high school that plays volleyball year-round, and participates in many activities Loudoun County has to offer with her friends and family. Which you may have guessed, she shops at Ulta regularly and spends a lot of money there. She loves doing her, and others’ makeup on her free time and has a lot of background knowledge on the cosmetic industry. She plans to work at Ulta when she turns 18 and possibly start a makeup company of her own someday.