Beware- Companies may be using your selifes for profit!

Last week natural hair vlogger, Alexandria Nicole, shared a photo from a clothing site company, dresslily.com, and how they used her image without her consent. Essentially, Dress Lily used her image to sell a Short Curly Synthetic wig. The problem is that she isn’t wearing a wig, it’s her NATURAL HAIR!

Alexandria reached out the the company and asked them to remove the image, but instead of removing image, they photoshopped someone else’s face onto the photo.

A photo posted by alexandria. (@missalexandrianicole) on Oct 4, 2016 at 4:51am PDT

Look at how crazy this looks! Needless to say this image and Alexandria’s story have been going viral.

However, after further investigation I started to look at the site and I realized that most of their images appear to be stolen. How do I know? Well, on @VoiceOfHair I have featured a number of the hairstyles they have on their website and many of the styles they have on the site are not wigs either!

So this begs the question, what do you do when your image is being used to sell someone else’s product, without your approval?

Here are a few things you can take to get the company to take down your image:

Send them an email with the photo in question and let them know that you want your complete image removed (not just the face, but the entire photo).
Be sure to let them know that you will pursue legal recourse if they don’t comply.
Be sure to keep documentation on when you contacted them, screenshots of the website and any other information that could help your case.
Lastly, you can contact a lawyer and pursue compensation. However, realize that recovering damages from the other party can be a lengthy and expensive process.

This is a case of copyright infringement and could carry big fines if prosecuted! My suggestion is that you may want to watermark your photos so that people can’t steal them easily.

Going forward, you should also check out DressLily.com and their affiliated sites (SammyDress.com and RoseWholeSale.com) to make sure they’re not using your photos.

As we scrolled through their wig section we came across a number of images from Instagram as well as a few other photos we KNOW have been photo shopped by them.

Here are a few other photoshopped images by this company.

Here’s a photo of @xoxojenise wearing her natural hair in a bob and below is the screenshot from Dress Lily of her style photoshopped.

Instagram Image via @xoxojenise

Stolen Image from Instagram by Wig Company

This is a screenshot from Dress Lily of a photoshopped image from Instagram

Here is another example of a style by @mrsladypriester and posted to Instagram. Below, is the photoshopped image by Dress Lily.

Instagram Image via @mrsladypreister

Another screenshot from Dress Lily of a photoshopped image from Instagram

Here’s an example of hairstyle done by @sorayahstyles.

Screenshot from Dress Lily’s site using image via @sorayahstyles

And another example of hairstyle done by @elegantmidge.

Instagram Image via @elegantmidge

There are many more examples of this site using stolen images, but it would take all day to find them all, unfortunately.

By doing a quick Google search you can see that this company has a poor reputation for not providing products that appear like the images on their site. I hope that people will no longer be fooled when shopping for wigs from this company!

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Brandelyn Green

Brandelyn Green is the Founder of VoiceOfHair, a platform to help women of color find the best hair care products, regimens and hairstyles! Since starting VoiceOfHair in 2014 she has grown the social media platform to over 1MM+ on Instagram and Facebook. As a natural who is also a salon goer, she wanted to create a platform where people could find the best products, hairstylists, advice and trends.