Twelve little doors, a $148 price tag, and behind them: hair ties, bobby pins, and a squishy toy. The internet opened it and did not like what it found.
The California billionaire’s shapewear empire is taking a beating over its holiday drop, per Page Six, after unboxing videos of the Skims Accessories Advent Calendar went viral and turned a festive countdown into a referendum on what $148 should buy.
The calendar launched October 29 as part of the brand’s holiday collection, and on paper it sounded like a treat: 12 days of surprises from one of the most hyped labels in fashion. Then shoppers started opening the doors. Inside, per reports on the unboxings, were hair ties, satin scrunchies, bobby pins, hair clips, keychains, and a Skims-branded squishy toy, many of them simply wrapped in tissue paper and tucked into the compartments.
Pricey advent calendars are nothing new; beauty brands routinely charge hundreds for theirs and still sell out. The difference, critics argued, is what waits behind the doors. The math did the rest. At $148, the countdown works out to more than $12 per door, and for a brand built on bodysuits and loungewear, a box of hair accessories struck many buyers as an odd flex. One viral unboxing alone reportedly passed 34 million views, which means a lot of people watched someone pay $148 for scrunchies. The unboxings became a genre of their own: each door opened on camera, each new hair tie greeted with a longer, more disbelieving pause.
The timing sharpened the sting, with holiday spending season opening on a wave of price anxiety. The calendar also arrived wearing the most famous last name in reality television, attached to a fortune Forbes has pegged in the billions, a detail critics mentioned repeatedly.
Neither Skims nor Kardashian has responded publicly, and maybe they do not need to. In France, the calendar sold out within a week of launch, its buy button swapped for a waitlist, per French retail site Toutes Les Box.
The Comments Did Not Hold Back
Under the most-watched unboxing, the top comments drew like counts most celebrities never see on their own posts. “box full of pranks,” read one, liked 1.9 million times. “So basically everything that falls between my car seats,” read another, at 1.7 million. “skims and not a single article of clothing,” added a third, past 1.1 million. The math crowd chimed in: “$150 is WILD for maaaaybe $20 worth of stuff.” And one viewer, 350,000 likes behind her, went further: “This should be lawsuit worthy and I’m not joking????? At all..“
Defenders were scarce, but the few who showed up had a point, and they made it loudly. As one put it: “it specifically says it’s an ACCESSORIES calendar.“
Twelve doors, one price tag, and millions of people roasting it. Some of them, apparently, bought it anyway.
