Generally good skin care products at reasonable prices; good response & dispatch time, & careful mail order packaging. Mostly effective are their very natural based products with no colouring. I love their Ovelle Silcock's Base, & emollient ointment, for my eczema flareups. Good opportunities for special offers, & free gifts of full size products for a threshold spend. I'd like to try their shampoos & conditioners next. So far so good, however, their product review system isn't as good as the rest; not everything is rosy here. There is a distinct lack of product reviews on their website & they are all 5 star & positive + you can only review by invitation, & via the Judge.me 3rd party. This ends up being far from transparent as Judge.me emails the reviewer to verify & then if it's not a 5 star & wholly positive review then Elave staff may email respondents to argue with them, & point out why their product is as it is. They did this with me - I was asked to review only 2 of their own Elave brand products I'd purchased - the other 2 were free gifts but I've not been given an opportunity to review them. There is no review function on the site itself. The 2 they asked me about I wasn't 100% happy with but I still pointed out benefits. They actually argued with me over 1, admittedly very politely, but in private, & neither review appeared on their site. I decided to revise one a week or so later, in the light of their response over the other, & so withdrew that, but now the link to review it produces an error message.
I consider this whole experience a sign that this is a potentially dishonest company who are rather desperate for sales at any cost - i.e. the expense of displeasing their actual customers - as I could have bought more products, i.e. the hair shampoos & others probably as presents - the gift sets & combos are good & at good prices, but I'm seriously hesitating, entirely over this review issue - their means of filtering out any negative points. No product suits everyone.
There is no redress with them either as they simply don't reply once they've argued their point - indicating that they think I'm wrong to hold my 3 star opinion. Elave needs to get a grip on reality - having so few reviews, & none of even 3 stars, is most suspicious & now I know why.
I wasn't given any opportunity to revise my review to correct typos, + an error I made with one as I mixed up the metal & plastic tubes of eye hand cream & eye cream, nor even to include, "...This is my honest personal opinion from actual use over a period of time, but I'm sure others will love it, as other reviews show".
Did Elave think that I wouldn't check whether or not they'd published my evaluation? Did they not think I'd feel a bit peeved as I'd taken the time to give a full honest opinion only to be ignored? If so, they clearly think that censoring reviews for their own spin is worth it. They could have published & then given a reply, couldn't they? Readers of this may wish to check out the 1 star Judge.me reviews. I'll be adding to those from this experience.
