For 15 years, Elizabeth Spiridakis Olson used a matte lip pencil in a shade of red called Dragon Girl. In her view, it was “one of the great reds, and the perfect consistency.”
Ms. Spiridakis Olson, a freelance creative director in South Orange, N.J., used it almost daily. She kept one Dragon Girl lip pencil in her home office and another in her handbag. If she misplaced or lost them, it was no big deal. She could always buy more.
Then one day last year, Ms. Spiridakis Olson made a chilling discovery while shopping at Sephora: The store no longer carried her go-to liner.
In its place, NARS, the beauty company that made Dragon Girl, was now selling a similar product, Powermatte High Intensity Long Lasting Lip Pencil. It offered a different — and inferior, to Ms. Spiridakis Olson’s thinking — shade of red and consistency.
“I panicked,” Ms. Spiridakis Olson said.
On the NARS website, she found that Dragon Girl was available on what was billed as a final sale. “I bought as much as they would allow me,” she recalled.
Her stash should last her many years. “It’s so pigmented, you’re not reapplying it a ton,” Ms. Spiridakis Olson said. “Now, do I know the proper way to store this for optimal conditions? No. They’re under my sink.”
There’s a thriving gray-ish market for out-of-stock lip pencils and other discontinued products. Customers are hitting up eBay and other resale sites to find things like almond Dial soap, which has been out of circulation for years.
They are paying many times the original retail price for Benefit Hello Flawless Powder Foundation, which was discontinued in 2019. There is even an e-commerce site, Discontinued Beauty, whose motto is “keeping you connected to your favorite beauty products.”
Fans of discontinued products, from clothing to cars, gather on message boards to commiserate and share sourcing tips. Loyal users of Jason Powersmile toothpaste lamented on Reddit that they were no longer able to purchase a tube after the company exited the dentifrice business in December. Dawn’s recent decision to change the scent of its dish soap provoked a similar flurry of online kvetching and strategizing.
“We all have our thing, and it’s like a security blanket, and when it goes away, we freak out,” Beth Sobol, a freelance writer in Manhattan, said.
For Ms. Sobol, that thing was Pantene Nutrient Blends Miracle Moisture Boost Rose Water Petal Soft Hair Treatment, a hair softener available at her local drugstore that worked wonders despite its inexpensive price. In 2023, she noticed it was becoming harder to find: Pantene had replaced it with a similarly named conditioner in a tube that Ms. Sobol found less wondrous.
She began buying up every jar in her neighborhood, widening her search to drugstores in other boroughs of New York as the supplies dwindled. Then she started buying jars off eBay, Poshmark and third-party sellers through Walmart.
These days, Miracle Moisture Boost is out of stock everywhere. Sellers on eBay are charging $25 to $40 for something that retailed for around $9. Ms. Sobol still relies on it daily, having been unable to find something that works better.
“I found a woman who was selling them for $16,” she said. “I’m willing to pay that. But $30 plus shipping? I just have an issue paying that much for Pantene.”
She now has four jars, down from 20. If one jar lasts her three weeks, does that mean she’ll be out by spring?
“You’re making it sound like heroin: ‘You’re going to have to quit sometime,’” Ms. Sobol said. “I know it’s coming. I need to start getting on it.”
Michael Williams, who writes the fashion newsletter ACL, worries about an accessory that has disappeared — a padded laptop bag made by Filson. He and other style writers have celebrated it as the perfect travel briefcase, able to fit a camera or computer and be stashed easily under a plane seat. After Filson dropped the bag from its line, Mr. Williams began to hunt “them down everywhere before everyone figures out how great they are,” he said.
Alexander Aciman, an editor at Wirecutter, which is owned by The New York Times, finds himself trawling eBay for old bottles of a lavender-scented after-shave formerly made by Crabtree & Evelyn.
It was a favorite of his father’s, the writer André Aciman. A few years ago, Alexander found a dusty bottle at a boutique in Connecticut — his last whiff of the stuff.
“I have incredibly strong memories associated with that fragrance of early mornings in the ’90s, when my dad was teaching at Princeton,” he said. “At the time, he was wearing that scent because it reminded him of his childhood. I mainly try to find it so as not to lose the scent and preserve some kind of access to it.”
He added that his grandfather, Henri Aciman, had worn a lavender scent made by Yardley London.
For Catherine Pearson, the obscure object of desire is a particular car model: the Volvo 240 station wagon. She has owned three of the sturdy, nearly 16-foot-long wagons, which the Swedish carmaker stopped producing in 1993.
Ms. Pearson, a set designer and florist in Queens, finds it great for hauling. Later Volvo wagons, she said, “get less boxy as time goes on, which means you can’t get as much stuff in them.”
She bought her current Volvo after a long search on Facebook Marketplace. It has 180,000 miles on the speedometer. “I’m hopeful I can keep this one going so that I can be rich enough to convert it to electric,” Ms. Pearson said.
Those trying to keep themselves in supply of a hard-to-find product may take inspiration from Tab drinkers, whose loyalty to the diet soda is legend.
The Coca-Cola Company, which had been making the soft drink since 1963, finally put an end to Tab in 2020, after years of shortages and rumors of the product’s demise. Adam Burbach and Jenny Boyter, two members of the SaveTaBSoda Committee, saw the end coming and stocked up in advance.
Ms. Boyter had enough supply in her basement to last a year and a half, if she drank one Tab a day. Mr. Burbach purchased as many 36-can packs on Amazon as the online retailer and his good sense would allow, given expiration dates.
“I thought, ‘How many Tabs do I want in a day, and how long would they be good for?’” he said. “I figured a year.”
Today, Ms. Boyter is down to one 12-pack and six loose cans. She drinks the soda on her birthday or on holidays. “I had one on New Year’s Day,” she said. “Every year is better with Tab.”
Mr. Burbach’s stash is down to about 10 cans in his basement fridge. His joy at having a refreshing Tab is tempered with the realization that each can he consumes will bring him closer to his last.
“I haven’t drunk one for months,” he said. “I almost feel bad drinking it.”
Nevertheless, both hold out hope that Coca-Cola will bring back Tab, and they walk through grocery stores in wishful expectation.
“I went to Kroger today and went down the soda aisle, because that is a fantasy of mine,” said Ms. Boyter. “In my fantasy, I find Tab and then call Adam.”
