The purpose of our Reviews Guidelines is to describe processes and legal requirements related to products ratings and reviews (“Reviews”) posted by consumers on our website and to demonstrate the reasonable and proportionate steps taken to ensure that product reviews are coming from consumers who have actually used and purchased our products.

We strongly believe that reviews are a key step for consumers when purchasing products from our website. We are committed to ensure that reviews are coming from authentic consumers and that such reviews provide fairness and transparency to consumers and website visitors.

1. What does it mean for you?

All reviews are subject to MAC Cosmetics's Terms and Conditions. Without limiting the contents of the foregoing:

Reviews will not be posted if (i) any of the content is illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, infringes the intellectual property rights of any party, contains software viruses, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings or any form of spam, or (ii) you impersonate any person or entity, or otherwise mislead as to the origin of any review.

Feedback or issues unrelated to MAC Cosmetics goods or services will not be posted. Submitting a review is not a formal complaint channel, and MAC Cosmetics is unable to respond directly to you on this platform. If you have a concern, please contact MAC Cosmetics Customer Service and a member of MAC Cosmetics's team will be happy to assist you.

MAC Cosmetics may also use your email address or other contact information to communicate with you regarding your review. For additional details, see the MAC Cosmetics Privacy Policy

2. How do we verify reviews

To verify that product reviews are coming from real consumers, it is required that consumers check a box to confirm that they have purchased, used or tested the product being reviewed.

Other means of verification can include content moderation services to ensure authenticity without compromising quality or control:

1. Advanced Fraud Prevention: Through fraud detection technology, we are able to validate content as authentic, weed out duplicate reviews, prevent inappropriate brand/retailer promotions, protect our brand against slander/foul language/offensive images or videos, and keep any other fraudulent content off of our website.

2. Two-Level Moderation: An automated filtering process is used to catch any authenticity issues, from inappropriate or illegal content to any sensitive information. In addition, our team of human moderators adds another layer of moderation to ensure that all reviews are legitimate, appropriate, and non-contradictory.

3. Routing and Alerts: moderators will escalate specific matters to a higher level of attention content that contains for instance customer service issues, safety concerns, or mentions of erroneous website information, in order to continually improve the products we offer and the experience our consumers' expect.

3. How we provide transparency of the reviews

We are committed to publishing all reviews, positive and negative, and to not buying reviews. However, when a Review does not meet these Review Guidelines, it will not be posted.

3,1 Disclosures and Badging:

In case of sponsored or incentivized reviews, a visual element is added on the review so consumers are aware when a given review has been posted following any kind of endorsement, sponsorship or incentive. Such disclosures will be shown directly in the review itself either by adding a specific written indication or a specific badge.

In order to ensure the transparency of the reviews, we provide different types of disclosures: these disclosures will indicate if and when reviews have been sponsored or incentivized (for instance when a consumer has received free products or any other types of incentives, or when reviews are coming from other people who have a direct relationship with us such as staff, influencers and etc.).

Generally, reviews coming from our staff are not authorized and when this is the case, such reviews are flagged by means of specific disclosures as described above.

3,2 Review display:

On a product page, several layers of information related to reviews are available.

A review snippet provides a simple visualization of a product’s review content, right at the top of the product page.

In addition, a review snapshot is provided with all the details of the products’ review, including average star rating, review content and rating distribution.

Product reviews on our website are generally displayed by the most recent published review first. However, reviews can be sorted by: Most recent, Most Helpful, Lowest Rated, Highest Rated, Oldest, and Reviews with Images.

A breakdown of how many reviews have been written for each star rating is also displayed. Reviews can also be filtered by score to show only the highest rated reviews or the lowest rated reviews or any specific star rating, as you see fit. This is to ensure that consumers can have a fair and transparent access to all reviews, positive and negative.

3,3. Review score calculation:

The overall score of a product review is displayed near the review. This score is calculated based on the actual average of all reviews posted for a given product divided by the number of reviews posted for that given product.

In most cases, the overall score is displayed as an overall star value (from 0 to 5 stars) or average rating decimal (from 0 to 5). This is based on the average of all ratings divided by the number of reviews (e.g. you may see a score of 4 stars or 4,3 stars).