The other day I got reeled in by a sales assistant in our shopping mall, wanting to show me how some Benefits products applied. I agreed to just some eye ones, since I'm very cautious about what goes on my face. I have just woken up with a nice puffy eye, and a fairly red eyelid. I've had a cold compress on it for a while but I suppose now i just have to let it recover on its own.
I was told Eye Con was supposed to feel like a tingling sensation, when I said it felt more like a burn/itch, I was told that was okay too!

I can safely say I won't be returning to any Benefits counters

Now I have to stay in and wait for my eye to deflate! What a waste of a day off

Anyone else have any bad experiences/horror stories with certain cosmetics companies?

Burning and itching is never acceptable for makeup!!!!
Bare essentials and pure minerals makeup breaks me out with insane pimples!!! it was awful--My best friend works for mary Kay and I can wear their powdered makeup just fine. When I asked her about it, she said bare essentials and pure minerals add something to their makeup to give it that pretty pearly sheen.
Now I stick with MK. I have really sensitive skin, and MK makeup works great for me ( I swear I don't sell their stuff, lol)

Don't worry, you're not missing out too much with BeneFit! I find the brand really gimmicky and annoying and a lot of the products don't live up to the hype for me.

Is your eye okay?

The worst counters/stores IMO are MAC. Oh my God, I feel like I'm back in highschool at MAC. When you get a good SA they're amazing, but for the most part they are horrible! MAC is also overrated IMO!

I am so far out of the loop about high-end department store cosmetics that I initially mistook the "BeneFit" in the title for a dog food (BeneFul).

I hope your eye de-puffs soon--that is just awful! I wonder what was in the stuff that gave you such a reaction? Sunday's right, sounds like the brand is more hype than substance.

I like my Lancome foundation, but for everything else, I've found great drugstore equivalents. (Wet 'N' Wild's ColorIcons palettes are almost exact duplicates of some ridiculously expensive, but pretty MAC shadows like Fig 1, Shadowy Lady, and Beauty Marked--AND they are just as densely pigmented!) I've yet to find the high-end eye stuff to be worth the usurious prices that the high-end brands charge.

I feel for you. I am a makeup junkie. But my life has been complicated by dealing with a heckuva lanolin allergy, which makes me very careful around all cosmetic lines as a general principle. Do you know how many of those pencils & sticks contain some kind of lanolin derivative to make them go on more smoothly? And how many times I've bought a product for a while, only to discover that they have changed the formula and I can no longer use it? And how sometimes even different colors of a product may have slightly different formulas? Also, products that claim to be hypoallergenic often aren't. And costliness is no guarantee. Some drugstore makeup is safer for me than very good lines. Even Physicians Formula, my old standby, has a few products that I can't use. So now that you know you have some kind of allergy, be careful out there. Those chirpy pretty made-up salesgirls can be stunningly ignorant of the ingredients in the stuff they're earning their commissions on.

Most of the puffiness in my eye is gone, just I'm left with almost burned looking skin on my eyelid. It also seems to have irritated my cheeks a little, since I noticed them going incredibly red and puffy at work. But I ran to Boots and got some Benadryl-Seems to have taken the redness away. Still, they're a bit rough/blotchy feeling.

I have had 1 other allergic reaction ages ago, which was from a very innocent looking, pea sized dollop of facial serum. My cheeks were so so swollen, and my skin looked like it had been washed in acid. Since then I've been incredibly conscious about what I use, but I never really considered my eyes would be a problem. Lessons learned! It's just annoying when you want to experiment with products. I've always found make up/skin care products are a nice pick me up when I'm having a rotten day, but I do feel very limited nowadays just from the worry that something might cause a reaction!

Makes you wonder what else they're putting in these products really though, and how they could ever be beneficial to our skin!

Too bad there aren't more entirely natural products around. Even the paraben free/sls free etc still come with a massive list of ingredients that I can't pronounce.

"Natural" doesn't mean hypoallergenic, safer for skin, or less likely to cause irritation. In fact, the term "natural" isn't regulated by the FDA at all--something could be called "natural" that came right from a test tube. (For that matter, there's no legal definition of the term "hypoallergenic," either, and companies can use it anywhere they like.)

If you have allergy issues, it's a good idea to find out which thing's causing it; chances are it's a natural ingredient like lanolin or essential oils rather than inorganic materials like silicone derivatives. That's not to say synthetics won't disagree with your skin, but irritation isn't the same as an allergic reaction; inert inorganic stuff is highly unlikely to cause allergies.

The term "organic" IS regulated, but organic cosmetics also spoil more easily and can become repositories for pimple-causing bacteria, so they need to be stored more carefully and replaced more often. Also, if you have a known allergy to strawberries or lemons, you may find that organic cosmetics containing them trigger the same release of histamines that eating them would. (I found this out the hard way when an all-natural lip balm gave me Lisa Rinna lips for two days. Yikes!)

Forgive me for kinda going off on a tangent. It's just something I know a bit about because I'd written some articles on the subject and was downright shocked to find some of this stuff out as I was doing my research. I thought it might be of interest to y'all, too.