Mascara Mandy is back with more horror stories from the beauty hall. From accidentally trashing a designer handbag to an awkward slip of the tongue, get your cringes at the ready.

1. Mascara Mandy and the Celine handbag splatter

“It was my first week as a retail artist at a well known brand and I was really eager to impress. It was around Christmas time so it was crazy busy and sort of overwhelming. For the first couple of days I had to shadow another artist who was showing me all the tricks of the trade. I picked it up pretty quickly and was delighted to get down to business painting faces when a tall, gorgeous woman with the most expensive looking handbag I’ve ever laid eyes on asked me to help her with a colour match.

“I sat her down at the station and had a mini consultation (as I had been taught) and she carried on telling me about how her boyfriend was playing for Newcastle United. When I heard this and realised she was the first customer I had without being shadowed, I suddenly became frazzled and knocked over the palette I had poured foundations on, all over her Celine handbag. She let out a screech and everyone turned around and stared at me while she was manically trying to clean her foundation covered bag with a wipe and cleansers. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up. My nickname among the team became butter fingers and I never lived it down.”

2. Mascara Mandy and the case of the eye gunk 

“Due to the fact that I work on a cosmetics counter, my entire festive season just blurs into one big, busy sales period. Because it’s so hectic at that time of year, I tend to not really remember specific customers – but there’s one woman from 2014 who I’ll never forget. She was going to her work Christmas party and had came to us to get her makeup done. I was assigned to this customer and she said that she wanted to have a glittery smokey eye. When I got up close and began to take the woman’s everyday makeup off, I just saw this huge mascara bogey in her tear duct. It was absolutely huge and just stared at me throughout the lady’s entire makeover.”

3. Mascara Mandy and the mispronunciation

“I used to work in the beauty hall of a well known department store. During one shift when I was just checking to see that everything on the shop floor looked good, an old lady came up to me and asked if I could help her find a specific product that she was eager to purchase. I asked her what she was after, and she asked for a “YSL Touche Maclit”. I tried my best to stifle my laughter, took her over to the counter and shade matched her to the correct YSL Touche Eclat. This is a story that I always break out at work parties.”

4.  Mascara Mandy and the shoplifter 

“At my old job, there was a girl in her mid twenties who would come in every Thursday at about 3PM. The company that I worked for at the time didn’t stick their samples down to the counter stands, so you could easily pick up a product. Every time she visited, we’d notice gaps in our eyeshadow display. After about six weeks of this suspicious activity, my manager approached the customer and asked if she could see inside her bag. The girl pulled a small makeup bag out of her satchel and without a single word tipped it upside down and ran away. Basically her entire makeup bag had been full of our sample products, eyeshadows, lipsticks, blusher, foundation – the whole lot. She’d stolen a full face worth of products! Needless to say, we never saw her again.”