I Tried To Save Some Girls I Didn’t Know From A Pyramid Scheme, But Couldn’t Figure Out How To Do It

By Isabelle Carasso

Shampoo & Champagne

A woman in a hot pink blazer – we’ll call Hannah – hands me a mimosa in a petite plastic cup that barely holds any liquid. We’re standing in her mom’s backyard with about ten other women at an event dubbed: “Shampoo & Champagne.” Tables are filled with shampoo, conditioner, skin-care products, flat irons, curling wands; all products of Modern Nature – Monat for short, a company which ‘empowers’ young women to sell their products independently. 

I am obsessed with them.

My Monat odyssey began a year ago when Tracy – an acquaintance from college – started posting increasingly bizarre content on Instagram. Initially, I wrote it off as usual pandemic-fueled absurdity. One morning she held up a banana to her ear and joked she got a new phone. Then that night she drew a Sharpie mustache on her face and wiped it off with a cleansing balm to show its effectiveness. It was genuinely very funny.

The more she posted, the more insatiable my appetite was for her content. So, I did what anyone would do: I followed all the other girls in her cohort – technically they have the same upline, so I followed their upline’s downline, until day in and day out, I was watching them try to recruit and sell shampoo in the hopes of becoming Monat Millionaires. It was the hottest reality show I’d ever seen. And it felt like it was just for me.

It was hard to look away, but the more attached to them I got, the lonelier I felt. “Should I let them know it’s a pyramid scheme? Do they already know and not care?”  I calculated how much each girl would need to sell to make a living wage. On a 15% commission from clients, they would need to have 320 customers buying about $100 of product a month – or about 10 sales a day – to make a modest income of about $800 a week from commissions. Unfortunately, about $800 is what most sellers in Monat make a year, per Monat’s official Income Disclosure Statement from 2020. 

But I bet they knew this.

Finally, after a year of watching from afar, I signed up to attend one of their recruiting zooms, eager and nervous to see if they’d address the “pyramid” of it all, but I didn’t ask any questions in the chat for fear of being banned. They started out each Zoom the same way. “Before you can start the business, you need to know your why: why Monat, why now, why you.”  

I’d been passively bobbing down this river of Monat until it floated me here. To this backyard in Ontario, California on an afternoon in December. To get to the real reason all these girls stayed in a company where they were making next to nothing.

Hannah glides around the party …futzing with tables full of flat irons, curling wands, mini-fridges, bristle brush Christmas trees, pink balloons, as well as the table full of Monat products – shampoo, conditioner, and skincare. 

As I scan the tables of products and see other girls walking in and putting on pink Santa Hats – we’re a couple weeks away from Christmas – I think about how these women will never know that they are the most fun people I’ve ever followed online. My absolute favorite influencers.

 And now, as this is one of the first social situations I’ve been in since the beginning of Covid, my new best friends. 

As the girls mingle and greet each other, I drink my mimosa in one sip. Not because it’s small, but because there is no champagne in it, just orange juice. I watch the other girls, infectious with energy, chug their coupes, get extra giggly, and say, “I’m feeling it already!” With their fake liquid confidence and festive pink Santa hats they ask me questions like:

“Are you a VIP?”

                            “Who do you know here?”

                                                     “Who brought you today?”

     “Whose girl are you?”

I tell them the foolproof answer I thought of on the hour-long drive over here, “I went to college with Tracy and am interested in learning more about Monat!” They look uncomfortable as they tell me Tracy recently left Monat to join another “company” that sells leggings. But I smile, and we leave it at that. They are so blinded by the idea of adding a new person to their downline that they don’t think to question me further, which is a relief because I don’t have a great answer for why I’ve been following them for a year online.

I gravitate toward a girl wearing a sweater, jeans, and glasses. This is Amy. I stand by her side so I don’t look too out of place, as I’m also in a sweater and jeans, contrasting the large majority of the girls, all a bit more bedazzled. “What do you do outside of Monat?” She tells me that she’s a social worker but recently left to be her mom’s caretaker. Realizing that’s a bit of a downer, she adds, “I used to cheer in high school and was in a sorority in college so I love being part of a group of girls again!” She giggles after everything she says. 

I ask, “How does everyone know each other?” And she responds, “We’re all under Penelope’s Christmas Tree.” Then she giggles again. What a festive way to explain a downline. 

Penelope is a short girl with big hair who commands the room when she speaks. She wears a faux snakeskin blazer and pops into conversations to make sure everyone’s having fun. She wriggles her way into my conversation with Amy to say, “You’re so beautiful, you look like you should be in a painting on the Titanic!” Her dream is to be a standup comedian and she posts a lot about how she’s using Monat financially (recruiting bonuses) and emotionally (social media inspo posts) to make it happen. Everything she says is witty – whether it’s a comeback or a pithy, off-kilter observation. It’s a shame she can’t see what’s in front of her. 

The Game

Penelope stands on a chair and announces, “We're going up two by two Noah's Arc style to twerk these ping pong balls out of Kleenex boxes!” Girls listen to their upline, pairing off and fastening empty Kleenex boxes around their waists, twerking ping-pong balls out of them to the music Penelope blasts. It’s a bachelorette party for no one.

I don’t want to play the game. Neither does the only other person who hasn’t joined in yett: Bailey. She looks about sixteen with blue braces, the incorrectly flat-ironed hair of a highschooler, and a neck tattoo of a name in cursive. Bailey turns to a middle-aged woman. 

“I don’t want to…” 

The woman shouts back, undeterred, “Go do it, baby!” This is Bailey’s mom.

After firmly declining upwards of ten times, I sense the group won’t take no for an answer. This is mandatory fun. And it’s also the only activity at the party besides the also-mandatory photo  and video-taking, where we say how great the event was, eulogizing it in real-time. 

Penelope passes us the Kleenex boxes and waits for us to begin. So we do. 

Hotboxing

After the game, Penelope asks me, “Do you want to check on something with me outside?” I can feel Hannah’s hesitation; the silent conversation the two of them are having with their eyes. Finally, Hannah smirks at Penelope, “Okay, scandalize her.”

Sarah unlocks her five-seater for seven of us and we hop in. Sarah has doe eyes, is statuesquely tall, and speaks slowly while she glacially rolls a blunt. She shares how she went through a rough divorce last year and what life is like as a single mother. The more we talk, the more I remember – we were both on a Zoom Penelope hosted called “Opportunity is Calling.” She took the meeting from her car. This car, to be exact. 

Sarah passes the blunt and a lighter to Christine, who sits shotgun. Christine is a short woman with multiple arm tattoos, the biggest a mandala where the ball hits your forearm in volleyball. She commiserates with Sarah about hating her day job as she hits the blunt. I ask her where she works and she says, “As a receptionist at an aerospace company.” I nod, impressed. Then she adds, “But Monat is way more legit.” I don’t know if she throws that in because she believes it, or because she’s trying to recruit me.  

Christine passes the blunt to Larissa, who I recognize from an Instagram story Penelope posted months ago. The video went like this: Penelope walking around Larissa’s apartment, laughing at how many Monat products Larissa stuffed in bookcases, kitchen cabinets, and on tables.  Buying this many products when you’re in a pyramid scheme is called “front-loading,” where an independent contractor – in this case, Larissa – buys products to qualify for ranks or to hit group bonuses due to pressure from their upline if they don’t make enough sales from their clients.

Larissa passes the blunt to Bailey, who sits on her mom’s lap. “Did you sign up together?” Bailey is mid-hit so her mom responds on her behalf, “I signed up first, and then I had her join under me.” Bailey exhales a cloud of smoke into my face and passes the blunt to her mom. All I can muster up is, “So cool.”

Goodbye

Later on, back in the yard and smelling of the Victoria’s Secret body spray Sarah doused us in to hide the stench of herb and ash, Hannah asks me, “Have you cried yet?” She has a hopeful look in her eye, So I tell her, “Not yet, but we had fun!”

Amy walks over, “I feel like you’re already part of the group!” She giggles, adding that she hopes I join so we can do this again soon. I look at her huge smile and start eulogizing the day too.

“Today was so much fun.”

She asks me, “Do you know your why?” But before I have time to bullshit an answer, Penelope shouts, “Nobody leave! We need a group pic!” 

Saved by the photo, I pose with the group in front of some Monat balloons, standing next to Larissa and Amy, inching my head down to reduce my visibility. Penelope and Christine sorority squat in front of us; Bailey and her mom hug to the side; Sarah, Hannah, and dozens of women I didn’t get to talk to round out the group.

I smile for the camera and think about aerospace, receptionists, twerking, cabinets of shampoo, and the idea that against all odds, today, I found community. The world can be so sad and so weird and so lonely. But I missed it. And these girls brought me back.  

After the photo, we say our goodbyes. And as Amy and I hug, I ask her, “What’s your why?” 

She thinks for a moment, then says confidently, without her usual giggle “I think it just gives me hope.” 

“That’s awesome,” I say. And I mean it.

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ISABELLE CARASSO is a writer and comedian originally from Orange County. She writes about the strange things people do when they're lonely, often led by manic, obsessive, queer women like herself. She's worked as support staff in writers' rooms on Freeform's The Watchful Eye, AMC's The Walking Dead, and Hulu's The Act. She's developed a pilot with AMC, won best short film at Santa Barbara International Film Festival's 10-10-10 Competition, worked as a Page at NBC, and had a knock-knock joke published in the LA Times when she was 4 (iconic).

Art by Malavika Rao.

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