Ulta Beauty World is an event that will occur for the second time in 2026. While initially met with mass excitement and adoration, the tables have turned for Ulta and controversy has stirred.
Ulta Beauty World was held in Austin last year for the first time and was a huge beauty convention. Ulta Beauty World gifted their customers a huge bag full of makeup, with a value up to $2000, and customers also got to walk through a beauty exhibit and get more free samples from hundreds of brands. Many influencers attended last year, including TikTok’s top beauty creator, Mikayla Nogueira, who promoted the event and showed her audience the amount of products she got for free as well as encouraged her audience to attend the event next time.
The issue with Ulta choosing to sponsor TikTok’s top beauty creator Nogueira is glaringly tone deaf due to her millions of followers. Nogueira was able to easily spread the word about Ulta Beauty World with just a few videos. Ulta Beauty World was marketed as a non-exclusive open to the public event, but the sponsorship ended up being overkill when the event was too marketed.
The controversy occurred when Ulta Beauty World tickets went live on Jan. 21 and approximately 3 million people were in the queue, trying to get tickets to an event with only 3000 available tickets. First of all, Ulta had previously said that there wouldn’t be a queue. Why lie to your customers? Secondly, the number of available tickets was not revealed beforehand, much to the public’s outrage. The marketing had portrayed Ulta Beauty World as a big, open to the public event. Safe to say that Ulta’s intense marketing campaigns and varying sponsorships had been overkill. Instead of revealing the misconceptions and microscopic ticket amount available, Ulta Beauty played in their consumer’s face and allowed millions of people to not only get their hopes up, not only wait in the queue for hours, but to also potentially take off work in hopes of getting tickets. In addition, Ulta also allowed influencers to mass buy tickets instead of the general public getting a fair chance.
The other side of this situation is the influencers. Many influencers received sponsored tickets beforehand, directly from Ulta. But on Jan. 21, many influencers– even Ulta endorsed ambassadors– paid to represent Ulta’s brands and beliefs as a whole– were in the queue and seemingly able to get tickets upon tickets, more than the average person could. Which leaves consumers with the question: How? How did so many influencers get tickets even when the chances were so slim? How did Ulta allow their ambassadors to get more tickets greedily? And why did Ulta not reveal the exclusivity of the event instead of letting everyone get their hopes up and being let down? Does Ulta not care about their consumers? Does Ulta not care about being transparent and telling their consumers the truth?
Which leaves consumers disappointed and angry with Ulta. The brand has yet to release a statement to the uproar on TikTok and other social media platforms. With all that occurred, consumers are considering boycotting Ulta Beauty.
Some may say: it’s not that serious. But Ulta Beauty deliberately led their customers on, clout-chased, let the popularity and virality of their event overtake their transparency and clarity with their consumers, and biased influencers instead of regular consumers or the working class. The consumers of Ulta Beauty are the reason it exists and forms profit at all. Until Ulta Beauty apologizes– which they won’t– looks like we will be shopping at Sephora.
