Beauty advent calendars for 2025 started popping up about a month ago. First as online pre-orders for the more niche ones, then in-store for the mass-market brands. They are now taking more and more shelf-space each day.
Personally, I think it is too soon and too much. A few years ago, when it was a newer thing, Esteé Lauder, The Body Shop, Clinique and Kiehl’s had really good advent calendars. They were great value (though I always bought mine on deep discount after Christmas) and I could use at least 80% of the products. There were at least three full sizes of popular products. When every brand out there jumped on the bandwagon, ‘filler’ products became more normal – cotton pads and cotton buds, stickers, cotton pouches for your cotton pads, orange sticks (more on that tomorrow) for your nails – and the popular products were mini-sized. Previous calendars had always had one or two very nice products in full sizes.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle a couple of years ago when three companies were reported to the Consumer Agency for inflating the value of their advent calendars in their advertising. Other brands experienced a very high rate of returns. Some influencer tried to capitalise on the beauty calendar trend by buying white label products (more on that tomorrow) from China and just putting their brand name on it.
Last year I noticed that there was an unusually high number of advent calendars in the sales bins, right up to the Easter sale. The companies had either over-ordered or over-estimated demand.
I wonder what the situation will look like this year?
