Well, brokes… We’ve done it again. We’ve officially been marked safe from yet another luxury scam that’s out of our tax bracket.
If your TikTok FYP has yet to recover from the Bing Bong of it all, let me catch you up to speed: Chanel is celebrating the 100th birthday of the N°5 fragrance by getting people to spend $825 on an advent calendar. Lest you believe that a month’s worth of luxury goods for under a grand is a good deal, I regret to inform you that the contents of the advent calendar are equivalent to anything you may find if you were to reach into the depths of your closet and root through the purse dirt of the Michael Kors crossbody you haven’t touched since 2014. (Let me guess… a pantyliner, a crusty hair elastic, and a fossilized stick of Trident gum? You are not alone.)
In a series of videos, TikTok user Elise Harmon treated the world to an unboxing of Chanel’s festive disappointment, which begins with the number 5 because it’s 2021 and branding always beats logic. Although the calendar had a few kinda-useful items in it—like hand lotion, a red lipstick, and a small perfume sample—most of the little boxes that filled up the enormous perfume-shaped packaging were the kinds of things you wouldn’t necessarily be upset over losing if your vacuum cleaner accidentally sucked them up. Sticker sheets, wax seals, and little pieces of random materials shaped like Chanel motifs left Harmon feeling like the advent calendar was a waste of money, and it doesn’t seem like she’s the only one.
TikTok users are having a field day with the calendar, including a creator named Bryan who loosely broke down the value of all of the products in a video, and another named Savannah who went viral for pointing out that the $195 calendar from MAC Cosmetics was a much better buy. There are, however, a few people who just keep unboxing the calendar each day as their comments sections fill up with people dragging the product. User Nicki Cheng agreed that although she doesn’t “think it’s valued to $825,” she’s “still having fun unboxing it,” while Fionn also found the price to be ridiculous, but in a TikTok, said she would “spend anything for packaging,” and has continued to defend her financial decisions in her comments section. I have personally never related less to a sentiment in my entire life, and do not think I would enjoy blowing $825 just to spend 25 days opening boxes full of items that I can’t even tell if I should recycle or trash. But, hey! To each their own!
The Chanel Advent Calendar mess doesn’t end at the unboxing videos. Harmon is in a very Real Housewives-esque squabble with Chanel at the moment, after claiming that they’ve blocked her. In a statement to PEOPLE, a representative from Chanel said, “The recent claim of a person being blocked by Chanel on TikTok is inaccurate. We have never blocked access to the Chanel TikTok page to anyone, because it is not an active account and no content has ever been published.” You can’t tell me this response doesn’t sound like it was manufactured by a woman sitting next to Andy Cohen on a velvet couch (or at the very least, Mariah Carey when asked about her relationship with J.Lo).
Harmon also ended up receiving quite a bit of backlash from TikTok users who pointed out that the contents of the Chanel Advent Calendar were clearly described on the brand’s website, and that she shouldn’t have been so shocked to discover the contents of each box. (I would just like to take a moment to point out that the literal point of an advent calendar is to receive a surprise, but by all means, continue to spend your limited time on this Earth defending a luxury brand by yelling at a stranger through the comments of a video app.) In a video, Harmon explained that she purchased the item in-store, where, she said, “there is no description” of the contents. Harmon also kind of hit the nail on the head when she said, “When you’re buying from a brand like Chanel that is coveted and known for quality and luxury and you receive something that’s like, gum ball status and free things that they had given away months prior… it’s questionable.”
Still, the calendar is sold out and is now being resold for even more money on websites like eBay. God bless consumerism!
Image: Laura Chouette / Unsplash
