Maybe Ebay Isn't The Best Place To Buy Perfume

We got taken. Snowed. Fooled. Ripped off. You name it.

Plain and simple.

That got us to thinking.....Maybe Ebay isn't the best place to buy perfume.

And this is our beauty tip today: When it comes to a special and costly beauty product like fragrance, it might be best to purchase it in a real department store.

Another little lesson here: If it sounds too good to be true, well, it probably is.

Let's examine what happened. Don't get us wrong----we love Ebay! We have been both a satified buyer and seller. A few weeks before Christmas, we set out to buy some fragrance, namely, Estee Lauder's Beautiful. It's a favorite of ours. We have included the appealing scent in our perfume repertoire for about 10 years now. Believe us. We know the scent of Beautiful like the back of our hand.

We were so excited to find Beautiful all over the Ebay website. We were especially beside ourselves when we found one seller who was peddling the fragrance in a big 2 1/2 oz. bottle for only the auction starting price of $24.99. Plus $5.99 shipping. A total of $30.98. A 'real' bottle of Beautiful in a 2 1/2 oz. bottle would run us about $70 or more.

We were lucky to get our hands on two big bottles of Beautiful for only $61.96. Sealed and wrapped in the original box.

The seller had a high positive feedback rating, about 285. But there was one buyer who was really upset with what he called, 'a fake, bogus bottle of Acqua di Gio Pour Homme fragrance' he had purchased on Ebay from this seller. Other buyers had simply given the thumbs up to the seller, because they had not opened the nicely shrink-wrapped bottles of fragrance they had bought from this alleged phoney seller. Most were going to give their fragrance to friends and loved ones for Christmas and Hanukkah.

Well, we got curious when the two bottles arrived. We removed the packaging, just to settle our nerves. When we opened the first box, the scent coming from the bottle was not that of Estee Lauder's Beautiful. We spritzed some on us. Yuck!!! This was certainly not our beloved scent! We were stunned. We had been swindled.

We got back on to Ebay immediately, and saw that our dear seller was no longer a registered Ebay seller. Poof----he was gone!

Now we are working with PayPal to try and retrieve our losses.

Look, fragrance is expensive. It never goes on sale, at least not that low. Wearing perfume is a luxury. And we have learned our lesson. It pays to shop in a real department store for real fragrance.

We should have heeded the angry warnings from the ripped off soul who had purchased the sexy Armani Acqua di Gio fragrance. He was right---fake, bogus, all the way.