Are you in the correct frame of mind to accept potentially harmful information? A Dior advent calendar costs $4,200. It is delivered with white-glove service. There’s much more where it came from. Particularly on TikTok.
Luxury advent calendars are becoming more popular, with options from Vogue ($456), Jo Malone ($495), Neiman Marcus ($225), Pandora ($486.50), Yves Saint Laurent ($400), Swarovski ($1,300), and almost any other high-end brand you can think of. This may cause you to boil with fury, bubble with interest, or run online to find out for yourself. Or, like we did in 2021 with Chanel’s infamously bad $825 calendar, you might chastise corporations that completely botch their Christmas products.
Those gut emotions are why so many TikTok and YouTube video artists are investing in these costly advent calendars.
“I really did spend over $20,000 on advent calendars,” Mary Berry, who has been filming daily TikTok unpacking videos of luxury advent calendars, said. She had approximately 4,000 followers before she began uploading advent calendar stuff; today, she’s approaching 100,000.
Online window browsing and advent calendar films both satisfy the same need. It’s like loading your virtual cart with virtual products, only to never check out and pay for them. When we see what is behind each door, we experience a thrill of adrenaline as spectators. We could look for these calendars online and discover a comprehensive list of all the things within if we didn’t want to wait, rather than viewing along with these daily films. But it spoils the enjoyment, so we keep returning to see the next film.
Berry has earned around $1,500 from TikTok’s Creator Fund, which only covers a portion of her expenditures on advent calendars. However, as the creator of Cosmos Labs, a company that produces cosmetics for companies, she saw her investment as a marketing cost.
“I couldn’t put my finger on why I thought I should be doing it, but it just felt like the thing to do—but now I’ve gotten clients from it, like actual beauty brands, because they see that I know what the beauty trends are,” Berry said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We’ve gotten legitimate business out of it, which is crazy, because for us, business isn’t like, ‘Oh, we sold a mascara,’ it’s like, ‘We sold 100,000 face creams.'”
Even for producers who aren’t building their own beauty companies, the cash from these films may pay for advent calendars.
Swell Entertainment’s Amanda Golka has been uploading daily TikToks in which she unlocks each door of the Vogue advent calendar. She informed Eltrys that her fans had been demanding advent calendar material for the previous several years, but that by the time December came around, it would be too late to purchase the calendars, as they may sell out months before the holiday season.
She eventually got her hands on Vogue’s $456 calendar this year. She informed Eltrys that the calendar had practically paid for itself after only a few days of publishing her daily unpacking TikToks.
TikTok was practically worthless for monetization in the past since creators received just a few cents per thousand views as part of the Creator Fund. Creators who produce movies lasting longer than one minute are now eligible to earn much more money under the new Creativity Program Beta. Given the changes, advent calendar videos may be more profitable this year than ever before.
There are no overtly religious people creating these TikToks. The (online) elephant in the room is that advent calendars are an homage to the Christian idea of advent, which depicts the four weeks before Christmas. Of course, a list of Kylie Cosmetics lip glosses has nothing to do with Jesus. However, religion and philosophy professor Chris Stedman feels that these everyday rituals still have some significance and purpose.
Stedman has studied the significance of the internet on people’s spiritual lives, particularly as religious membership in the United States has plummeted. Young people may not attend church as often as their grandparents, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in learning about the world around them.
“If you’re not plugged into institutions that give you structured ways to reflect on questions of meaning and purpose, you’ll still be doing that in the spaces where you’re spending time,” Stedman said in an interview with TechCrunch. “TikTok is one of those spaces where you’re spending a lot of time.”
It may seem to be a wholly non-spiritual act to purchase an exorbitantly priced advent calendar and then seek to recuperate the expense by creating movies about what’s inside each day. And when most of these designers open their new Mac lipstick, they’re probably not thinking about the birth of Christ. However, they are developing a daily routine in place of religious rituals like prayer, which other people may turn to.
“We have this very modern idea that religion is just kind of another thing that we can consume,” he remarked. “You may go shopping and acquire a little religion from your astrological app, play Tarot, wear a rosary… Religion may be all about creating your own personal sense of meaning rather than being a group activity in which you participate.”
TikTok praises habits, whether it’s a comprehensive evening beauty regimen or selecting a Tarot card every morning. These routine-based trends and ideas tend to spread like wildfire. Even taking a daily “hot girl walk” may help us impose order and significance in our lives, as can unlocking the next door on an advent calendar.
Even though we believe these greater forces aren’t shaping us, Stedman told TechCrunch that they actually are. “These advent calendars may seem meaningless at first glance, yet they are. It’s simply that the relevance is, you know, consumerist ideals.”
