Don’t Buy That Beauty Advent Calendar

I thought we hit peak Advent calendar in 2021 when that video of someone roasting Chanel’s $825 beauty Advent calendar went viral. But here we are, three years later, and the aggressively packaged giftables are still going strong. One of the most popular Advent calendars of 2024 is Anthropologie’s 24 Days of Beauty, which retails for $98 and supposedly has $304 worth of product. (It’s already sold out on the website, but people are reselling them for $175 and up on eBay.) I’ve also been seeing a lot of buzz for Target’s 12 Days of Beauty ($20) and the NYX Professional Makeup Advent calendar ($110), which looks like Kevin’s house from Home Alone and has 24 full-size products. But what value do these calendars really offer? And what about all that packaging waste?

I was talking about this with journalist Darian Symoné Harvin (she often writes about beauty in her Substack newsletter, Studio Symoné), and she pointed out that it’s hard to justify buying a calendar if you’re not sure you or your gift recipient will like all the brands or products included. “I think the better Advent calendars are focused on one type of product you know you’ll use: Is it all fragrance? All candles? Is it nails?” Get one of those, she says, and you know you won’t waste anything behind the little doors. “OPI has a set with 12 nail polishes, and this year, Manucurist [Paris] did an advent calendar that’s basically all the supplies that you need to do your nails. To me, that’s so much more functional,” she says. (The OPI X Wicked Mini Pack is $49.99, and the Manucurist Paris Advent Calendar is $139 for 24 full-size products.)

I wouldn’t, however, recommend a skin-care-focused Advent calendar. It takes at least a month to see the results of any new skin treatment, according to dermatologists, and the minis in those calendars are typically sized to last a week or less. I also think you’re asking for trouble when introducing a bunch of new face products into your routine just as the weather changes. Let’s say you try several new skin SKUs over the course of a week and your skin reacts — or, conversely, your skin looks amazing! You cannot know which product was responsible for the change.

If you must indulge in the Advent trend, I’d suggest a perfume sampler sooner. Scentbird’s Advent calendar ($65) has 12 one-and-a-half milliliter vials, including luxury blockbusters (Gucci Bloom, Prada Candy) and indie favorites like Juliette Has A Gun Not A Perfume, a soft musk that smells like clean sheets. For me, perfume is wearable art, and the value is in trying lots of new perfumes on your own time without a headache-inducing spritz-a-thon at the store.

Really, though, it’s impossible to calculate the savings when you buy an Advent calendar instead of purchasing everything inside it separately. Many of the minis in the sets aren’t sold at retail, making their “suggested value” meaningless. Allison Kent-Gunn, a content creator (@alisonturquoise) who works in sales for a packaging company, says it’s hard to estimate how much a beauty brand has spent on the packaging for these calendars. They’re limited-edition, so companies place smaller orders than usual, which means they’re paying more per item than you might think. She says a simple paper-based calendar box could cost a beauty brand up to a few dollars per unit. “But packaging for the calendars that are positioned as collectibles can get very pricey,” she says. “I’ve seen some of them go for 20, 30 dollars, even up to 50.” You better believe that cost is getting passed on to you! And if you or your gift recipient throw out that “keepsake chest,” then you’ve definitely wasted money.

There’s also the environmental impact to consider. You may reuse some of the nicer calendar sets as décor or storage, but most of the foil-stamped boxes and laminated cardboard will end up in the trash. And it’s not just the calendar housing that’s problematic; it’s the mini bottles. “Unfortunately, components that are under two-by-two inches often can’t be sorted properly at recycling facilities, so they’re going to be sent to the landfill just because they don’t meet size requirements for the sorting machinery,” Kent-Gunn says.

Sure, you can do some philosophical gymnastics to justify buying calendars anyway — “if I don’t buy it, someone else will” — but that argument only holds up for so long. Beauty brands keep making Advent calendars because people keep buying them and creating content featuring them. Change might be coming, though. “I feel like we are starting to see, at least in the comments section, more viewers calling out the waste associated with Advent calendars,” Kent-Gunn says. Still, she points out, even the negative comments count as engagement, which means as long as we keep watching, the creators will keep pushing out more of these videos and the cycle continues. Heck, I’m even guilty of perpetuating the trend by writing about it here!

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