The Downside of Indies: Mentality Polish and "Sensitivity"

Buying from indie cosmetics companies can feel really noble and gratifying. I think supporting small, independent businesses rather than massive corporations is a good thing. Also, indie companies tend to put out some more interesting products than mainstream companies, since they are only making small batches and don't have to try to appeal to the broadest audience possible.

The downside is that, when something goes wrong, a small business might not have the infrastructure or resources to fix it. That's what seems to be happening with Mentality Polish, who sold some products this spring that caused what they call "sensitivity" for a number of their customers. People's nails have been lifting from the beds and it's all pretty gross and painful-looking. A major company would do a proper recall at this point (or would have been able to do extensive testing of their products beforehand to avoid these results in the first place). In the case of this indie nail polish company, they seem to have started out trying to replace the products of the people who got in touch with them, but ran out of money to do so and are no longer making amends (and posting on social media about "bullies" - not enough eye rolls for that). They also didn't communicate the issue to all of their customers, so there are likely people out there having bad reactions without knowing why. You can find out more about the issue and the company's response in this post from The Mercurial Magpie (warning: graphic photos of injured nails).

I'm posting this tonight in case you bought anything from Mentality during the problem window (April-June 2015; see above link for details) and also just as a word of caution about dealing with independent cosmetic manufacturers. I'm curious about people's thoughts on indie cosmetics in general. Do you think they are likely to be more or less reliable than mega-corps?