Hello you there sir you fine gentlewoman, hello to you indeed.

I have nothing much of interest to write, except to say that I’m almost finished at school (my exams are in two weeks) and after that I shall go on some thrilling alcoholic binge of exactly 5 Bacardi Breezers and then perhaps I shall write some more or try and do some more telly, who knows.

It is a mystery.

I like being mysterious. In my mind I look like this:

xx

I think I blog instead of vomit. Like nausea the need to blog keeps me awake at night, making me toss and turn until I regurgitate my thoughts on screen in an attempt to at least try and make some sense of them. These days that need comes less and less as I revel in my descent into obscurity.

One of the hardest questions I get asked these days is ‘why are you here?’ With a CV that is filled with wonder, adventure and excitement, most people don’t expect to find me working in a random minimum wage job, which is exactly what I am doing. It’s a question that I can’t really answer concisely, so instead I shrug and wander off and let people… well, think whatever they want because I don’t really give a shit.

But this question, it’s been bugging me. I’m obviously ‘here’ by a conscious decision. In fact, in a weird way, I am a lot happier being here. Everything seems a lot more honest. Coming from a world that was the exact opposite, it’s refreshing. I enjoy being able to make friends that are normal (read: the right kind of mentally unstable). I like the fact that I get paid regularly, even if the amount is small, and while I don’t particularly like being poor I know that in the long run my hard work will be rewarded as that is what I am being judged on, not something arbitrary like the size of my nostrils or my cup size.

Being well known for certain things burnt me out, it messed with my self worth and made me miserable as it was just too hard to maintain. Having to constantly be aware of what I looked like, how much I weighed, who I hung around with, who my (then) boyfriend was cheating on me with, how many selfies I had taken that day, etc, etc, got really fucking boring, not to mention expensive. I got sick of the sight of my own face. I got sick of the sight of everyone’s faces to the point where I woke up one day, realised I was surrounded by shitty people and had a bit of a WTF moment.

So I did what anyone would do in my shoes: I told them all to go fuck themselves.

Within the course of a year I had told my so-called “best” friend, my flatmate, my agent and the magazine that I worked for to all go and fuck themselves, and while it didn’t exactly do me many immediate favours, it felt good to purge what were essentially poisonous people out of my life for good. The key words there being: for good. You see, the great thing about telling people to go fuck themselves is that it doesn’t just burn bridges - it cremates them to a tiny non-existant nub - so you can never go back. And right now I would rather contract lifelong Norovirus than go back to any of them so I definitely made the right decision there.

So there is that.

Then there is this myth of celebrity. Now, I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a ‘star’ or a celebrity, I was simply well known in certain niche arenas (aka ‘Facedown’). However, I was unconsciously making choices that had me heading along that path and interacting with quite a few celebrities, either via work or randomly in real life. I say unconscious, as in my long hard quest to make a name for myself I’d never really stopped and actually thought about what I was doing. It sounds weird and naive but I was so caught up in the moment and that particular world that I never realised the irony in my actions: that I was subconsciously working towards being a celebrity when it was the very thing that I despised. What a dickhead.

Obviously there was a fair amount of pushing involved too. Namely by my agents who lured me with the promise of big money contracts if I got famous. In fact, it was the (2 1/2 year long) promise of a gaming show on Channel 4 that kept me with them for so long, before I realised that it was all just lies designed to keep me happy and complacent, like many of the things they told me. The only reason I stayed was in the quest of this mythical money and because I felt that I couldn’t do anything else.

Yet the more I interviewed celebrities the more I saw how affected and abnormal they were. How the world they lived in wasn’t real. Obviously they were real living breathing people, no different physically to you or I, but something had happened to them inside. Something had subverted their worldview and made them, well, either really creepy or boring. On a smaller scale I had found for myself that any kind of adulation rots you from within. One only has to look at Ian Watkins to see an extreme example of that. Attention and fame is addictive and hard to live without so people will do anything to keep that thrill, that buzz, forever. It’s why you see washed up stars on reality shows and carpet adverts, and it is 100% of the reason why The Rolling Stones will never stop touring, like, ever.

You see, most celebrities derive their self-worth from what strangers think of them. They feed on it like vampires until it becomes them. It’s why their relationships don’t last. One person’s love could never be enough, not when they’ve had the love of thousands. The energy of a crowd is a tangible thing, a commodity to be consumed, and in the wrong hands it can be evil. Celebrities seem to either use this energy to fill a hole within themselves by using it to replace something they lack, or they exploit it to feed increasingly perverted desires, which I could go into… but it would probably get libellous.

Most of the myths we are fed about celebrities are lies. Fabrications to keep us distracted so the bankers and the politicians and the real people in power can carry on undisturbed while we coo and fuss over Kim Kardashian’s latest handbag/baby. They are there to take away our real aspirations (why work hard for a living when you can do nothing and ‘just be famous’), to help us lower our morals and make us consume more and more products that we don’t fucking need. The myths conveniently hide the reality that many celebrities are poor and living hand to mouth on unstable incomes, not to mention how really fucking unhappy a lot of them are. We, as the public, are lead to believe the opposite as that’s what keeps the celebrity machine in motion and pays the people who have invested in it (the banks and the sponsors and the publicists and the agents and the brands and the entourages). They want us to think that celebrities live this charmed life when the reality is really quite different. 

One example that sticks in my memory is the time I was at this large FPS franchise’s gaming launch party (which was mainly full of people who couldn’t give a shit and had never played a video game in their life), when I left early to find this commotion by what looked to be the back door of the venue. A scrum of paparazzis were gathered like a pile of sweaty bees, flashlights popping everywhere and surrounding this tiny, frail, bird-like guy who was rushing to get in to his car. The look of pure terror on his face and the way he hid in his car like a caged animal really affected me. I don’t particularly like Ashley Cole, but no human deserves to live like that, no matter how well they are paid. Sure, it’s a choice, people choose to be celebrities, but this lack of freedom we impose on them once they make that choice is probably not a part they willingly sign up for. Seeing him cowering like that I thought to myself: is this what I really wanted? No, that wasn’t what I wanted at all.

It was around that time that I withdrew and started seeing everything for what it was: counter-productive nonsense. I was never going to achieve anything notable working for some shitty lower level lads mag. I couldn’t walk into a job interview with a magazine cover, it wasn’t going to impress anyone. I wasn’t learning transferable skills, I wasn’t enlightening anyone, I was just pottering along in a bubble, addicted to attention like all the other self-obsessed idiots. Let me tell you, I wanted out of that fucking bubble like it smelt of hangover farts.

So I popped it, stepped outside, took a breath of fresh air and walked off. It’s actually done me the world of good. There are so many things that I don’t give a shit about anymore: fashion, clothes, shopping, magazines, parties, other people’s opinions… heck, even video games. Interests that I thought I had forgotten about have come back to me. I read more, I’ve started learning again, I knit and bake and make things. I take my self worth from myself and the people that I still care about, which is a very small list that comprises mostly of my close friends, my family, and my boyfriend. Yes my world is smaller now, but I chose to make it so. It was my decision. A decision that has been hard to live with as my ego cries and yearns for attention, but as the months go past that voice grows fainter and fainter. I realise it would have been easy for me to potter along and continue on that old path, gradually lowering all my morals until I was a 60-year-old husk, still trading on my fading looks in whatever way I could. Instead I chose to live better and give myself some credit. Sure it is hard, but all the things in life that are worth it always are.

I’m not going to lie, the past year has been draining. I’m not sure if this year is going to be any better but I have hope that things will improve as I feel like my motivations are purer: I want to work hard, make an honest living, build a home and start a family. If that means having to answer awkward questions by starting from the beginning in a minimum wage job then so be it. Maybe my ambitions these days are not so glamourous but trust me, what I’m working towards is a hell of a lot more precious than anything in the world I just came from.

I just wish other people could see that.

As someone who has been objectified for the past 10 or so years I can say with all honesty that it’s not that bad. As life events go it’s somewhere between a sunny day at Thorpe Park and root canal surgery on the pleasure/pain scale. It was a choice. Now that I am older it is my choice not to be. I pulled out from that world like a Catholic penis, and now… now I am different. I dress differently, hang out with different (read: nicer) people and don’t go out to the same places… but far be it for me to declare that everyone should do as I do. I don’t have that authority and neither should you.

Nothing offends me more than white knights (apart from maybe Jimmy Saville’s face and the smell of dead animal) or people who stand up earnestly on behalf of ‘others’ best interests when those others didn’t ask for help in the first place. Guys (and girls) high up on their white horse claiming to be womankind’s saviour when actually we are doing alright, thanks. It really does my head in. At the moment the world seems awash with PC types campaigning for the end of objectification, but unless they get rid of the whole of the publishing, entertainment, and advertising worlds, respectively, it seems a bit of a silly battle, and not one that everyone wants.

Objectification is a funny thing. Everyone is so set on its terrible social implications that no-one ever admits that sometimes it feels quite good. No-one wants to accept that some women like to be objectified, that they do it because they want to be. Even I liked it for a bit. It was a confidence boost, an ego massage, a moment of swagger. It felt good to be wanted… until I went off and found someone that I wanted to be with more and then it felt a bit icky. So I stopped. I don’t get my tits out anymore, not because I was told to or because of some moral high ground, but because I got to a point where I’d get them out and my mind was all like “Nahhhhh mate… this feels weird…” so I gave them to my boyfriend as a HBO exclusive. That’s not to say I wouldn’t like the choice to air the puppies on the (extremely unlikely) chance I’d want to do it again. Choice is a freedom that we all should have, even if it is just a minutely remote possibility.

It goes without saying that some women like being objectified and some women don’t, but I think just as the women who DON’T want to be objectified should have the choice not to be, women who DO want to be should have the choice to unleash their breasts on the world if they so desire, as long as it IS a choice and they are not being forced. One group cannot seek to cancel out the other as that is not true equality, it is the repression of a woman’s very valid desires. Some women want to be sexy and it is very puritanical of those against it to deny them that. In theory, women should be allowed to be whatever they want as long as it’s not like, the next Rose West (although she did have her merits - a dogged loyalty to knee socks being one of them).

My advice is to treat each person as an individual rather than try to repress and generalise. Just because one woman is offended by something doesn’t mean they all are. Allow us all our freedoms to be whoever we want to be, whether that’s a gamer, a stripper, a stay at home mum, an undertaker or a badger baiter… but do so without intruding on the freedoms of others. It’s a delicate balance, but one that is not corrected by one outspoken person speaking for us all.

I may not be glamour modelling’s biggest cheerleader (and have a complicated relationship with it at best) but I’d never advocate its removal from society all-together, which is what a lot of these things (anti-booth babes and anti-Page 3 bollocks) are conspiring to do. In many ways, this attitude that anything sexual a women might do ‘is degrading’ is just as backwards. It’s totally disregarding a side of womanhood that DOES EXIST and is not getting us anywhere in the process… all it’s doing is making a few self-righteous people feel good about themselves whilst they poo on a lot of other people’s parties (eww, scat-fest). A job is not demeaning or degrading if a woman actively pursues it and does it by choice. Remember that.

I happen to love tits, whether they be in the paper, at a games expo, or in a video game. They don’t offend me because being offended by tits is really fucking juvenile and stupid. If one can’t accept that giant tits are part of what makes the video games world go round, then what the hell are you doing playing video games?! Video games are meant to be fun, light-hearted and NOT BASED ON REAL LIFE WHATSOEVER. From Silent Hill’s nurse tits to Dead or Alive’s giant inflatable tits, via Lara Croft and that weird-looking chick from Bayonetta, unreal video-game tits have made gaming a pleasurable experience for me since as far as I can remember. This logic that the removal of tits from video games would make the industry ‘more acceptable’ is bollocks. As long as there are brat kids blowing each other’s heads off and calling each other ‘Thunder Fags’ on COD, gaming will never be acceptable.

And with that I’ll bid adieu and crawl back in my hole to ponder how boring games would be without tits, when they were literally the only good thing about being a games journalist.

Sim x

So… Page 3. As an outsider now I can point and laugh and blame as much as the next person, as doing so takes zero brain cells and is easy to to. After all, it make no odds to my life if Page 3 were banned, I have no investment in that world anymore. Except, in a way, I do. I would have to be a massive twunt to work in an industry for 8 years then just stand back and watch the people I worked with get picked on by a bunch of petitioners who literally know nothing about it and assume we’re all just a bunch of airhead idiots being damaged and exploited.

To me, Page 3 is a British institution greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t quite know how a Majorcan swimming pool, an innocuously pneumatic girl-next-door, and a pair of Primark pants co-conspire together to make something great, but they do. It’s an oddity, a quirk, something peculiar and very ‘ours’, like a seaside postcard or a Carry On film. As a part of our current sexual landscape of hardcore porn and S&M themed music videos it is about as harmless as an Andrex puppy, but some people don’t seem to think that way and are very afraid of lady-bits (or the ‘objectification’ of them), so have made a petition to try and get rid of it.

Which makes me all the more sad to see women like Jennifer Saunders, Caitlin Moran, and Lauren Laverne backing this petition. They are all women who should know better than to follow on from what looks like a knee-jerk reaction from an angry mob of Mums.net readers with a particularly inarticulate argument: “Tits are wrong!” “You wouldn’t see this on the 6 o’clock news!” blah blah blah… oh, bore off.

Feminism, truly, has a lot to answer for.

I have a problem with self-identifying feminists who use the feminist platform as a free pass to attack other women. To establish boundaries of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good women’ and ‘bad women’, ‘feminist’ and ‘unfeminist’… it all seems a bit juvenile and misogynistic and sends a message of “love all women, except those - those women are bad: they let themselves be objectified.” Surely, from a feminist viewpoint, we should all be equal? There shouldn’t be this backwards hierarchy perpetuated by women themselves, where we are all judged according to who is better at being a ‘proper’ woman. You see, women are perfectly capable of being misogynistic. In fact, these days it is more common to find women being misogynistic than men, which is a sad state of affairs.

This recent uproar against Page 3 is a classic example of women using feminism as an excuse for enforcing their own personal morals on everyone, by taking offence at something small and trying to give it a wider significance: “Page 3 is damaging to all women”. Quite clearly, it isn’t (it would be awfully hard for anything to be damaging to ‘ALL’ women), it just makes some women feel uncomfortable, which is causing a vocal few to throw their toys out the pram in an attempt to ban it. 

Page 3 as a societal being is a symptom, not a cause. Our current state of over-sexualisation was not caused by a bit of chip shop paper, it was caused by the sexual revolution in the 1960s. The Kinsey report, the birth control pill, various changes in legislation, hippies, the Rolling Stones… I won’t give you a history lesson, suffice to say that this particular floodgate was opened a long time ago and has been drip fed into many of us since birth. It infiltrates everything: advertising, news, and the whole of the entertainment industry. Declaring a tiny part of it morally bankrupt and trying to cut it out won’t change anything. One mole does not a cancer make. What really needs to change is people’s perceptions of others, and this petition’s judgmental banter is not doing anyone - male or female - any favours in that respect. 

But why all this furore? Tits are just tits, bits of skin, lumps of fat, sexual objects that also have a useful evolutionary function. Some are nice to look at, some aren’t, but so what? We should embrace ALL their uses. Why must we make these things that are natural and normal out to be so wrong and taboo and corruptive? Why must a topless picture always be paired (in ‘intelligent’ society) with the word ‘demeaning’, when it’s not? One person’s demeaning is another person’s empowering. One person might look down on cleaning as a demeaning job, yet for someone else it is a job that can empower and provide for their family. Take away Page 3 and you take away a lot of girls’ jobs… now, is that pro-women? Oh sorry, I forget, these girls ‘should’ be employed in ‘better’ jobs.

In a recession. Right… 

Why not leave Page 3 girls alone? They’ve not been rounded up and forced into what they do. Unlike sexual trafficking, which IS (actually really) damaging to women and should be of more concern to these petitioners, it was very much a conscious decision for them to get into. I’m sure most Page 3 girls enjoy what they do. For the most part they are not exploited and it can be a well-paid job. Just because Page 3 might not be something you would do or approve of doesn’t mean it should be banned outright, and it doesn’t mean it is necessarily wrong. People are entitled to have a choice. There are plenty of things I don’t approve of (martians, red M&M’s, Beautiful South and Dido fans…) but I wouldn’t call for them to get banned as that would make me a fascist dictator.

People rile against Page 3 because they don’t think the image of a topless woman belongs in a newspaper. “It’s not news” they insist. No, and neither is anything Peter Andre or the TOWIE kids get up to, but The Sun still publish all that crap on a daily basis. Anyone with half a brain can attest to the fact that the contents of The Sun is not news and never has been. It is a TABLOID newspaper full of gossip, hearsay, and conjecture. Yet with phone-tapping scandals and the recent Hillsborough revelations, you find a cross to bear with the tits?? The tits are about the most ethical thing in there. At least they are real. 

Another gripe is that Page 3 is too easily accessible by families and kids. Right. All those kids out there that read newspapers… who I have yet to find as most kids are surgically attached to their iPad/iPod watching Nicki Minaj videos and wouldn’t dream of even touching a book let alone a newspaper. Yet it’s these same families and kids who might regularly go to art galleries and museums that - guess what - are chocca block full of topless women (and men). “But oh…” they cry, “that’s art.” As are pictures of Kate Moss with her fanny out and anything ever published in a fashion magazine. Can anybody say double standards? Seeing as this particular petition seems very middle class, backed by supposedly liberal (yet deeply middle class) ring leaders (people whom I suspect have never even read The Sun), what we really have here is not feminism, or even concern for the well-being of women-kind. It’s snobbery. 

Let me explain; the problem with Page 3 is that it is low brow, it’s not classy enough for Tarquin and Tamara to even bear to see on their peripherals as they inadvertently flick past a pair of tits in Waitrose as they try to get their hands on their beloved copy of The Guardian. I can guarantee that this is the only time any of these people have seen Page 3. Either that or a glance in the garden as those filthy builders go on a break in between perfecting the wet room. The Sun is seen as a paper that poor people read, it belongs in the realm of the white van man, along with builder’s tea, uneducated opinions, and easily available women. All of which, of course, are stereotypes. Much like my parody of the ‘average Guardian reader’ above. Page 3 girls are seen as too willing, too present, and too goddamn smiley to be looked on with anything other than distain by the ‘average Guardian reader’. Unlike the cold, detached, women of fashion and art, Page 3 girls are seen to actively participate in their sexual objectification, which seems to be what makes them so bloody offensive. But what would you rather your children saw? It seems parents are shunning the smiling, natural, girl next door, in favour of what? Lady Gaga? Rihanna? Kim Kardashian? REALLY? Granted, we had a boost over the summer with the injection of some actual real-life proper role models into our lives (female athletes) but that didn’t stop Grazia and The Guardian alike trying to ‘sex them up’ in photo shoots. What message is that giving exactly? How is that any better?

So basically our priorities are fucked, EVERYTHING is over-sexualised, and in the grand scheme of things Page 3 is actually the most harmless thing on our landscape, which is probably why these women are attacking it as it must seem like an easy target, what with The Sun going down the shitter and all. So basically these petitioners are just opportunists who - like school bullies - pick on the weakest, which is super pathetic and - dare I say it - ultra unfeminist. Feminism should be about equality among women and women’s rights. Picking on and excluding an under-represented group of women and trying to shame them into submission is not progressive, it’s repressive. In this respect, how is what Moran and co doing not misogynistic? 

Tolerance, not censorship is what we need to go forward. I have a million ideas on how we can make things better, but you know, you’ll have to wait until next week when I’ve set up a petition about it. 

Haha. xxx

So, yeah. Subscription boxes. They’re a bit of a thing at the moment aren’t they? I have to admit I fell for the hype and subscribed to a couple, which is why I am writing this blog to highlight some of the issues I have had with this new fad. (LULZ at my rhyming skills.)

Now, if you are poor like me and can’t really afford expensive super creams to put on your face or organic vegetables to put in your belly then subscription services can seem like a really good idea. For a seemingly nominal amount you sign up for weekly or monthly surprise boxes to be sent to your house full of goodies. It’s pretty tempting seeing as these days nobody gets anything sent through their post other than bills and dogshit, so lots of people are signing up. I relented and I subscribed to two, Glossybox for beauty, and Able & Cole for fruit and vegetables (random). I like to cook a lot and only have tiny arms to carry things from the supermarket so the Able & Cole box made sense and so far, after a month, I am really happy with it.

The one I am not so happy with is Glossybox. My initial reasoning for subscribing to Glossybox all the way back in April or May was a combination of laziness (I can’t be bothered to traipse round beauty counters begging for scraps off orange-faced harpies) and curiosity. I wanted to see what was in those boxes. Plus, I have extremely sensitive skin so trying new products out before I bought them made sense, to make sure the ingredients didn’t turn me into a pus-fueled zit monster.

Glossybox play on the fact that their sample products are ‘luxury’, ‘niche’ and expensive. Sometimes they are. A lot of the time they are not, but of course - they don’t advertise this. Glossybox is not a transparent company, it is owned by Rocket Internet whose Wikipedia even suggests they are secretive and a bit dodge. I suggest you read it to get an idea of what kind of company we are dealing with here. Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I signed up and happily parted with my cash, seduced by their shiny website that promised great things. 

The first couple of boxes I received were okay, not amazing, but okay. I got some good products, and even bought a couple of them after the samples had run out. Every month there would be a couple of clangers that suggested that their beauty profile system (where you input your skin type, colouring and preferences) wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be (aka, it didn’t work) but I figured it was just teething issues. I would receive products for combination skin when I specified sensitive, and make-up in disgusting colours, etc, but usually the clangers were overshadowed by another product that was quite good. Not this month. The last box I received (and my last box ever coincidentally as I cancelled my subscription) was an absolute horror.

Sold as an ‘International Box’ to showcase various brands from around the world, it basically gave Glossybox the excuse to dump a load of tat on my doorstep. I received a horrendous own-brand lipstick, some lip balm that smelt like hospitals, a Japanese face oil that looked like it had been nabbed from the toiletries in a budget hotel, a whitening nail polish, and - the biggest clanger of all - a 1980s eyeshadow palette from Italy that looked like it would be more at home in a kid’s toybox (or the bin). Just look at it.

(picture taken from withaplomb so as not to waste my camera space on this filth)

As you can see the colours are horrible, the pigment is non-existent, it’s POISONOUS (reading on the back it contains Magnesium) and it was made in China which means it’s been tested on animals. If they had omitted the palette the box would have been so so, but its inclusion represented the utter disregard that Glossybox has for its subscribers. They were not even attempting to uphold their end of the ‘luxury item’ bargain - anyone could see that this item was tat and they were fools to include it. As the quality of the boxes had been slipping for a while I quickly realised that I had been wasting my money on this company and unsubscribed.

Disgruntled, I began to do a bit of investigating. As well as finding out about them being owned by Rocket Internet, I found this article, an interview with their CEO on a business website. She is 24 years old with no business experience and comes from a banking background. She mentions how “A premium box is on the way in October with high end brands, available only to an exclusive set of customers. The price point will be higher and it will operate like more of a club.” A-Ha! So that’s why the quality of the boxes are slipping, it’s because they’re not satisfied with the £250,000 a month they get from their loyal, regular subscribers. They want you to pay MORE for them. Hence the pound-shop tat. What a crock of shit. The article also boasts that in less than a year Glossybox have turned a profit, which is unusually fast for a start-up business. Why is that? Because they are ripping off their customers.

Glossybox obviously have some kind of deal wherein they get all their contents at a huge discount, if not for free. After all, the brands they use are getting valuable data out of it from the Glossybox customer feedback (after you have received a sample you have the option of reviewing it for extra points towards a free box - a system that customers have also been experiencing problems with). As you know customer data is something brands usually have to go to specialist agencies for and can be quite an expensive undertaking, so having their brands blasted into 25,000 homes must seem like a god send to make-up companies and the like. I know I’d be throwing my shit at these subscription boxes like Gorillas in a zoo if it were up to me and I were the head of say, Clarins. 

With regards to turnover, I’d estimate that with 25,000 subscribers paying £12.95 a month that makes a monthly pre-tax turnover of £323,750. Assuming the box costs about £2 to produce (including box, packaging, and samples) and that shipping for each box is around £2, that leaves £223,750. Minus monthly wages for their 24 staff (I’m estimating £48,000, an average of £2000 a month each) and not counting for rent of their premises and additional costs, they are still clearing a profit of over £150,000. A MONTH. That’s a lot of money for a lavishly wrapped turd.

The only strange thing I found is that it was hard to find anything negative about Glossybox online. Other than on their Facebook, you really have to search for it. This blog might help to explain why. Glossybox send free boxes to bloggers and journalists (arguably with better products in them) to blanket the internet with positive reviews. The problem is that they are not representative of the average customer’s experience seeing as the bloggers don’t have to pay for the box and are getting preferential treatment. 

Upon checking their Facebook page I found that a lot of other customers, hundreds even, felt the same way as I did. They felt let down and disgusted by a company that consistently ignored their complaints, preferring only to respond to positive messages. On the occasion that you did get a response from their “customer services” (who in my eyes should be sacked) it was generic and vague, saying they would “report your comments to the brand team” with no remorse or talk of compensation. As yet, Glossybox have not made a formal statement apologising for the quality of the last box, nor have they responded to the hundreds of customers unsubscribing in droves. In fact, when I tried to advise fellow disgruntled customers of their consumer rights with links on how to complain to Trading Standards, I was promptly blocked from their Facebook and my comments were deleted, which shows they ARE aware, but are refusing to do anything about it.

Either way I have reported them to Westminster Trading Standards as they clearly fall foul of their basic guidelines and I suggest you do too if you’ve received a box that you are unhappy with. You can go via the Citizens Advice Bureau website who provide a handy form with advice on how to complain. They are taking their subscribers for a ride and it’s not on.

Not all subscription services are bad. To go back to my other subscription service, the reason Able & Cole makes sense is because it’s quantifiable. You sign up for fresh organic produce sent to your door on a certain day for cheaper than you would get at a supermarket and that is exactly what you get. It comes straight from the farmer in minimal reusable/recyclable packaging and is generally good-o all round, not to mention ethical. The problem with Glossybox is that it is not quantifiable and it is not ethical. They basically collate together samples - things that are available for free anyway - into a fancy box and charge you £12.95 for the privilege.

“But oh”, you say, “it’s only a tenner!”. Really? At last check I’d spent £98.65 with Glossybox, for a service that I am not entirely happy with, if not appalled by towards the end. They are selling a subscription service, not one off boxes, and an elitist one at that. It IS expensive in the long run and you ARE better off enduring the embarrassment of counters, requesting a few samples and buying the full size products with the £90 odd that you save from NOT subscribing. That is the facts of it. Of course, this doesn’t pander to our need to receive something exciting in the mail, but I can’t help thinking we would be better off doing something like this ourselves - making one off goodie boxes for each other or going direct to a beauty brand that we like - rather than letting an unscrupulous company helmed by a 24-year-old ex-banker profit from our desire to receive surprises in the mail. 

For example, last year I made a goodie box for my friend Chelsea’s birthday and it felt really good making and finding stuff to go in it. She’s American so I put loads of British sweets and oddities along with felt toys and crocheted things, and half the fun was in putting it all together. Giving is just as good as receiving. It’s a shame Glossybox don’t adhere more to that mindset.

As I said, not all subscription services are bad, but Glossybox are bad - very bad indeed.