Chanel faces widespread backlash over ‘tragic’ $825 advent calendar, which includes stickers and empty dust bag

Chanel is facing widespread backlash over its $825 advent calendar, which included stickers, sample-size products, an empty dust bag and a flipbook.

This holiday season, the French luxury fashion house celebrated 100 years since the launch of its Chanel No 5 perfume with the advent calendar, which was designed in the bottle shape of the iconic scent.

According to the website, inside the calendar, which the brand described as “a calendar unlike any other,” there are 27 boxes numbered five to 31, “each of which contains a full-sized fragrance or makeup product, a miniature or another surprise marked with Gabrielle Chanel’s lucky number”.

However, the advent calendar has since gone viral on social media after TikTok users filmed their disappointment upon finding mostly inexpensive trinkets inside the numbered boxes.

On TikTok, one user named Elise, who goes by the username @eliseharmon, has documented her entire experience opening the advent calendar, with her first video, showing her opening the box numbered nine because it looked “promising,” only to find stickers, viewed more than 14.6m times.

In the comments, users were horrified by the Chanel-inspired stickers, with one viewer writing: “The audacity of stickers,” while another person said: “I wasn’t going to buy it before but now I’m not even considering.”

“It’s so cute, if it was free,” someone else added.

The advent calendar’s gifts continued to disappoint both Elise and her viewers as she filmed herself opening the remaining boxes in subsequent videos, with the TikTok user expressing her shock after she opened one box to unveil an empty Chanel dust bag - and nothing else.

“Okay number eight was really calling my name until I opened it. This?! I can’t make this up. It’s just this bag,” Elise said as she filmed herself holding up the small dust bag. “It’s just a dust bag.”

In response to the video, one viewer claimed that the luxury company had taken “whatever random trash they had that had Chanel on it” and put it in the calendar.

“Stickers then a dust bag. This is getting worse every time. What’s next? Tissue paper that says Chanel?” someone else asked.

After telling her followers that they will “prevail” with the opening of the advent calendar, Elise then opened another box, in which she found a “little baby body cream,” which she said she is “pretty sure is enough cream for my left arm”.

The video also saw Elise open a Chanel-inspired paper flipbook, prompting her to laugh.

In the subsequent TikTok videos, Elise filmed herself opening the remaining calendar boxes, which included gifts such as a black bracelet, which she said was giving “plastic bottle-cap,” a sample-sized bottle of perfume, money clip, a mirror, a pin, a paperweight and a red lipstick.

After opening the box labelled 18, only to find Chanel temporary tattoos, Elise jokingly claimed that she was “done”.

A previous review by The Independent of Chanel’s first-ever advent calendar revealed that, of the 27 boxes, just nine of them are beauty products, while the remaining 18 are small Chanel-themed trinkets. Of the nine beauty products, six of them are considered full-size, however, one Chanel No 5 bottle “is technically a full-size, but at 35ml, it’s the smallest bottle Chanel stocks”.

In a video uploaded over the weekend, Elise revealed that Chanel had “blocked” her on TikTok.

“Chanel just blocked me,” she revealed while laughing in disbelief. “They blocked me! What’s not clicking Chanel? Something’s wrong.”

The disappointment over the advent calendar has since moved to Instagram, where social media users have flooded Chanel’s comment section with negative reviews of the gifts, while others have taken the opportunity to urge the fashion brand to address the controversy.

“You’re not gonna run from the calendar,” one person commented on a post uploaded on Monday, while another said: “Address the calendar.”

Someone else added: “So, what’s happening with the whole calendar stuff?”

As of now, Chanel has not released a statement regarding the backlash over the calendar.

The Independent has contacted Chanel for comment.

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