Hi Goddesses
When it comes to looking at what's dominated my polish year and caused me the most stress, there is only one "winner" - Royal Bloody Mail.
A quick recap - in January of this year, RM decided it was illegal to send certain goods internationally, of which one was nail polish. Sending guns to Iraq? Fine. Send polish to US chum? Clearly more dangerous than terrorism.
Not being one to obey rules I think are shit, I continued to send polishes Stateside, only to be greeted, one by one, by a steady flow of letters advising that my parcel had been intercepted and destroyed. And that's when I really got pissed off - by all means decline to send it, but DON'T KILL THE POLISH!! Send it back to me!!!! Sigh.
Then in July, they applied the same rules to the UK. You can now only send 4 polishes, and you have to declare they are "dangerous goods". What, more dangerous than anthrax? Yeh.
So, other than pissing me off, what impact has this had? Well quite a lot, actually. Let's start with the impact on poor little me. I'm a giver. I loved sending surprise packages to friends, getting Barry M for them, and being part of the most awesome birthday polish swap group ever. Now? I can't do any of that. So I can't send my best friend a polish on her birthday, I can't get prime UK goods for my besties, and I can't hold the Giveaways I used to, cos if I send it, you're unlikely to get it.
Also, blog sales are now out of the question. I can now only sell my polishes in the UK, and even then, only 4 at a time. No massive grab bags. Also, the UK polish market is different, and most won't pay silly money for a LE polish. Good on them, shame on me - now I can't get rid of them!
And then there's the global effect. Overnight, brands like a-England and Illamasqua realised they had a massive problem. Royal Mail introduced the change with pretty much no notice, and top brands were caught out when overnight, they were turned away from their post offices.
Now imagine. You're a UK business, in the middle of a recession. More than half your sales are exports. And what does Royal Mail do? Bans all those exports without a thought for your business model, the stock you've built up, OR (and this is the key one for me), the money you've been bringing into the recession-hit economy, and the people you employ.
Thankfully, Adina and Co found ways round it, but seriously, the whole thing just pisses me off. Most polishes aren't even flammable these days, and I don't know about you, but I don't remember the last time a plane crashed because of a bottle of polish. I'm being flippant, of course, but if you can carry a bottle of polish in your carry on luggage, why the hell can't it be bubble wrapped in the cargo hold?
And finally, my real issue. In this world of terrorism and war, we're really THAT BOTHERED about polish? It's ok to ship plutonium, weapons, bombs and deadly chemicals, but not 15ml of pure undistilled magic?
Get a life Royal Mail, get a life. Or better yet, get a manicure. If you can. Cos you know, it's harder to send polish these days ......
