Mary Kay Cosmetics bills itself a woman’s ticket to a pink Cadillac, but it’s really a quasi-pyramid scheme in which aspiring sellers are pressured into buying expensive inventory on their Mary Kay credit cards and recruiting their friends to do likewise. Few sellers make a decent living, and many plunge themselves into debt.

Virginia Sole-Smith reported on the pink, shimmery menace for Harper’s with support from the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

[Photo credit: kwalk628, Creative Commons.]