The receiver freaks out of course. The receiver in this case being me. I was finally able to find out from the folks at ebonyline that they did in fact have the X-pression Ultra braid in my gray and black tresses so I placed an order after some randomness because the M51 is not on the website (which is down as of a few hours ago) right now. Well we sorted it out, item gets packaged out to ship and then nothing cause USPS is sucking gigantic monkey balls right now. I randomly checked the shipping status before work this morning and it went from pre-shipment to at the sorting depot in town with no information in the middle. It also says the box won't arrive until tomorrow, ok fine nothing to worry about because hair is still done up. I checked delivery for an item shipped and said hmm let's see if it's at least made it to the right part of the city and yeah it had--my front porch. Thankfully this is a non teaching day so I grabbed the box and realized it wasn't nearly as big as I expected it to be considering I had ordered enough packs of hair to get me through the rest of my planned installs this year. That's probably sounding a little crazy BUT I like to be prepared and not waiting until the last minute to try to order things because stuff tends to be out of stock when I want it. There is still the possibility that I won't be able to find it when I need it this year in case I need more hair during each install than I did this first run through. Regardless I'm concerned that they didn't send as much hair as I ordered so I check the packing slip and nope the numbers match so then I look at the hair. The hair itself looks the same BUT the packaging is totally different. You'll see in the photos that follow. New package is made in Togo, old package is made in Bangladesh (super funny considering it's the one that says it's the African Collection). The hair is packed differently, old package being wider so the hair appears to be thinner and new package is more compact so it feels kinda fluffy in the package but the texture is the same, the color is the same and the giant Xpression across the front seems to be identical. However, I was still wigged out and started looking across the internet to figure out what had happened and if I should be concerned. Most sites were not helpful like even a little bit. Outre is who was credited with the new packaging but their official site doesn't have an M51 listed. And remember ebonyline was down so I couldn't remember the brand they said they would send in addition to Sensationnel depending on color chosen. So I went clicking around all over X-pression braid haven and finally stumbled on THIS SITE which included the following text:
You will receive either OUTRE X-pression Ultra Braid or SENSATIONNEL X-pression Ultra Braid depending on our stock.They are exact same products in different packagings so please don't be alarmed when you receive two different looking packs!
LOL so my panic decreased but I just wanted to share my super crazy freak out moment. How goes your hair care week?