The worst Christmas 'gifts for her' 2023
Buckle up
It’s the most wonderful season of all - the time when brands everywhere collectively lose their shit and produce the sort of bizarre, patronising gifts for women that would see them cancelled at any other time of the year.
I’m all for an economical gift. A practical gift. A gift that makes me smell like I’ve consumed nothing but bath bombs and After Eights for a fortnight. But I have a red line and it’s everything that comes below (with apologies to Richard Osman, who is merely collateral damage in the picture above).
Somehow - perhaps because they manage to get lost in the avalanche of festive offers and present-buying overwhelm - these crimes against women slip through the net.
No longer. Here are some of the worst I’ve seen so far this year. Please tell me in the comments if you’ve spotted worse.
Champneys 20 Minute Mindfulness Candles
My sister and I have been obsessed with Champneys ever since they did a £10,000 voucher giveaway on last year’s series of I’m a Celebrity. Sounds like an amazing prize, but is actually a soul-crushing burden - you had to use the voucher by a certain date and we worked out that you’d need to quit your job and spend four days of every week at Champneys, having back-to-back treatments for between two and three months solid, in order to get through the £10k in time.
In that spirit of enforced pampering, come the Champneys 20 Minute Mindfulness Candles, £5 from Boots and on their ‘gifts for her’ list. Fifteen identical sticks of plain cream wax that each demand 20 minutes of your time for ‘reading, praying, journaling, quieting the mind or helping you focus on a particular task.’ Can you imagine that blurb on a gift for men? This five hours of guilt-ridden-because-they-were-a-gift candle-burning will apparently help you to ‘be mindful of your inner peace’ when really they’re more likely to invoke your inner bitch.
Superdrug Wellbeing Large Cascading Rocks Fountain
Babe, are you OK? You’ve barely touched your Wellbeing Large Cascading Rocks Fountain.