When you think of Chanel, you think of luxury.
Fine leathers, gorgeous tweeds, and those classic double C’s all come to mind when we think about Chanel . It’s classy, it’s timeless, it’s the highest quality you can get for your money… right?
Nope. Not anymore, anyway. One TikTok user found out the hard way that money no longer equals quality at Chanel — and Chanel is big mad about it.
So, here’s the famed calendar:
Shaped like the iconic N°5 perfume bottle, the 2021 Chanel Advent calendar was briefly available for a whopping $825 on Chanel’s website. As with all things limited edition (and luxury), it quickly sold out. You can see some of the full-size products included in the calendar in the image above.
Many people chose to buy it without looking at the contents.
You know, since it’s an advent calendar. That’s the point of it, right? And since it’s Chanel, customers were sure that their limited edition prize would be chock full of goodies that would be worth their money.
That’s exactly what TikTok user @elise__harmon thought when she picked up her calendar in store, anyway.
She decided to open it on TikTok.
“Am I crazy? Absolutely. But I’ve never seen a Chanel advent calendar, so let’s see if it’s worth the hype,” she explained as she opened it up. She noted that the calendar starts at 5, for Chanel N°5.
The first thing she revealed: stickers.
“This has to be a joke. This is a joke! Stickers?”
She ended the TikTok with the reveal of a hand cream, which she was pleased with.
After her first TikTok went mega-viral — it has 16.3-million views at the time of publishing — she decided to open the rest of the boxes. The next item: a dust bag that usually comes free with the purchase of Chanel’s beauty products.
It got worse from there.
One box contained a sample-size version of their hand cream in an unmarked pot. $825 for an unbranded sample? Alrighty.
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She also opened up… a flipbook. Yup, a flipbook, where the only thing inside it was a line art drawing of the perfume bottle.
“Okay, yup. I’m done.”
She did end up getting a Chanel lipstick — in the miniature size. No full-size lipsticks for you, Chanel customers!
She also got another sheet of stickers. Yup, another one. In fact, 5 of the days contained stickers.
“This is just a paperweight…”
The next boxes contained a money clip, a string and plastic bracelet of the Chanel logo, a full-size nail polish (the only exciting score, let’s be real), and a ceramic paperweight of the bottle. Chanel’s site says it’s meant to be sprayed with the perfume to provide ambiance to whatever room you place it in.
Elise’s videos blew up.
Millions of people watched her open keychains, mini perfumes, and a plastic Chanel snow globe. Chanel was roasted in the TikTok comments, so much so that the company wound up apologizing for the calendar.
Chanel knows they messed up.
“Chanel thought it would please some of its customers by offering this type of product,” Chanel president Bruno Pavlovsky told Women’s Wear Daily. “Evidently, we see that you have to be careful and therefore, in future, we will certainly be much more cautious.”
Boy, I’ll say.
