High Alert: Discontinuation of Sephora Liner #209

Some say love, it is a river
that drowns the tender reed.
Some say love, it is a razor,
that leaves your soul to bleed.
Some say love, it is a hunger,
an ever aching need.
I say love, it is a flower
and you, its only seed.
-"The Rose" by Bette Midler

A few days ago I lost my Sephora #209 pencil liner after a drunken night out, so I headed to the Sephora in Soho to get a new one. Well, turns out that the entire 209 row was cleared out, including the tester which I thought was weird but figured maybe it was featured in Lucky magazine or something as the number one most shamazing liner of all time for green eyes which I have used EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR THE PAST 4 YEARS. So today I go to the Sephora in Union Square and AGAIN the liner is completely sold out, so I asked the sales person what the hell was going on. She looked in the computer and saw that they were still available online, so she called two other Sephoras in the city and they too, were sold out and at this point I was pretty much having a goddamn heart attack, so the sales person calls the Sephora Emergency Hotline and puts me on the phone with the emergency technician.

I asked the technician what the deal was with the 209 liner, and she revealed that because Sephora has such a wide variety of liners, this one was being "discontinued" in order to "streamline" the collection and package it differently. I asked her if this meant that the exact 209 color, i.e., this exact blend of pebbles and kohl, would be coming back but with different packaging and a new name like Dusty Road and would be $3 more, and or if it was just being eradicated from the face of the earth for all time and she said it was being discontinued and couldn't tell me whether it would ever reappear. I then told her that I had tried to find this liner at no less than 4 Sephoras and they were SOLD OUT because obviously people NEED this liner to go on living and Sephora was making a grave and rookie error by eliminating this and I would call my Senator and tell him what was going on.

She then said that there were 150 209s left in the Sephora factory and that I could place a special order, so I ordered 20 for immediate delivery, and then hung up the phone and had a panic attack that I should have ordered more, so I called Megan to ask if she thought that 20 was too few for the rest of my life, and by her calculations 20 will last me ten years, but "hopefully I would find a replacement by then." I then asked Megan whether, if she walked into a Duane Reade one day and they were out of Physicians Formula Gentle Cover Stick (682 Light) and then called the company and found out that they were shutting down production on this product, she would just say "oh well" and then just start using some orange clown paint from MAC or Lorac and pretend everything was normal, or whether she would immediately rent a u-haul, drive down to Louisiana, buy however many cases of 682 lights they had left and then call it a day. She confirmed it was the latter.