Kim Kardashian’s $148 SKIMS Advent Calendar Gets Roasted After Viral Unboxing Hits 34 Million Views

Kim Kardashian has sold just about everything at this point. Shapewear that actually fits. Loungewear people live in. A beauty empire, a legal career in progress, a reality show that refuses to quit. But her latest holiday offering might be the first one where the internet collectively looked at the price tag, looked inside the box, and said: wait, seriously?

The SKIMS Accessories Advent Calendar retails for $148. Twelve little doors, twelve little surprises, one very festive box. Sounds harmless enough. Then a TikTok creator bought one, filmed herself opening every single pocket on camera, and watched the video explode past 34 million views. And with every door she opened, her face said what thousands of commenters would soon type out loud.

By the end of the clip, the verdict was in. The internet had decided the calendar was a joke — and not the funny kind.

The Unboxing That Started It All

It started the way so many viral moments do: one person, one camera, one purchase they probably already suspected they might regret.

The TikTok creator sat down with the SKIMS Accessories Advent Calendar and opened it door by door, all twelve days in a single sitting. No dramatic music. No sponsorship disclaimer. Just a woman, a box, and a growing sense of disbelief.

Behind the first few doors: a scrunchie. A keychain. A hair clip. Behind the next few: bra straps. A comb. A foam squishy — the kind of thing you might find at the bottom of a party favor bag. She kept opening. Her expression kept flattening. The viewers, meanwhile, kept watching. And watching. And watching.

At last count, the video had racked up more than 34 million views, with thousands of comments piling up underneath. For a product that was supposed to be a cute little holiday countdown, that’s a lot of attention — just not the kind a brand dreams about.

Here’s the thing, though. Nobody forced the calendar to go viral for the wrong reasons. The creator didn’t stage anything or exaggerate. She just opened the box and let the contents speak for themselves. And what they said, apparently, was: you paid $148 for this?

What’s Actually Inside the $148 Box?

To be fair to SKIMS — and fairness matters here, because the brand does have a point — the product is labeled, right there on the website, as an accessories advent calendar. Not a shapewear advent calendar. Not a loungewear advent calendar. Accessories.

The official description reads like a holiday card: “A dozen reasons to celebrate. Count down to the holidays with this SKIMS accessories advent calendar, featuring twelve days of fun surprises. From hair accessories to keychains and more, unwrap a mix of playful items and everyday favorites. All packaged in a festive advent calendar box.”

So nobody was promised a bodysuit behind door number seven. The box says what it is. The problem is that what it is — hair clips, scrunchies, a comb, bra straps, a foam squishy — doesn’t exactly scream $148 to most people. Do the math the way the commenters did, and you’re looking at maybe $20 worth of stuff, generously, in a very nice box.

That’s the gap at the heart of this whole mess. Not deception, exactly. More like a mismatch between the SKIMS name and the stuff in the box. People don’t buy SKIMS because they need a scrunchie. They buy it because the brand means something — quality, fit, that particular Kardashian polish. A foam squishy doesn’t carry that polish. It carries, well, foam.

And when the price tag is $148, the contents need to justify themselves. A dozen tiny accessories, however cute, were never going to clear that bar for most shoppers.

The Comments Section Had No Mercy

If the unboxing video was the spark, the comments section was the wildfire.

“$150 is WILD for maaaaybe $20 worth of stuff,” one person wrote, in a comment that quickly racked up likes. Another compared the whole haul to “TEMU” junk — the kind of thing you’d expect to pay a couple of dollars for, not triple digits.

Then came the jokes, and honestly, the jokes were the best part. One commenter called it a “box full of pranks.” Another wrote, “So basically everything that falls between my car seats.” Both comments passed a million likes each, which tells you everything about how the internet felt.

“This is all the stuff I just threw out when decluttering my nightstand,” someone else added. Ouch. Accurate, maybe, but ouch.

Not everyone piled on, to be fair. A few people thanked the creator for taking the hit so they didn’t have to. “They played in your face girl but you just saved so many people money,” one user wrote. And that’s a real point. The video did a genuine service: it showed people exactly what they’d be getting before they spent the money themselves.

Still, the overall tone was brutal. Not cruel, exactly — more like the collective eye-roll of millions of people who have all, at some point, bought something overpriced and felt a little foolish about it. The calendar became a stand-in for every bad holiday purchase, every overhyped drop, every time a famous name made a basic product cost ten times what it should.

SKIMS Has Done This Before — and It Usually Works

Here’s what makes this story interesting rather than just funny: SKIMS almost never misses.

Kim built the brand from a shapewear line into a full-blown fashion empire, and she did it by understanding exactly what her customers want — comfort that looks good, basics that feel a little bit special, and the kind of brand loyalty most companies would kill for. SKIMS drops sell out. The pop-ups draw lines around the block. The brand has become one of the biggest success stories in celebrity business, full stop.

So a $148 advent calendar full of hair clips isn’t the story of a brand in trouble. It’s the story of a brand that got a little too confident about what its name alone can sell. And honestly? That happens to everyone eventually. The bigger the brand, the easier it is to assume the logo does the heavy lifting.

There’s also a real question underneath the jokes about whether advent calendars, as a category, have gotten out of hand. Beauty advent calendars now routinely cost hundreds of dollars. Luxury brands sell them for $500, $800, even more. The whole point used to be a little chocolate behind a cardboard door. Now it’s a status object with a price tag to match. SKIMS isn’t the only brand playing that game — it’s just the one that got caught this week with a foam squishy in its hand.

And let’s not pretend the calendar won’t sell. It probably will. The video has 34 million views. That’s 34 million people who now know the calendar exists. Some of them are laughing. But some of them are also thinking, you know what, I kind of want to see what’s behind those doors myself. Controversy is still attention, and attention is still the currency Kim Kardashian has spent her entire career minting.

The Real Lesson Is About the Price of a Name

Strip away the jokes and the scrunchies and the foam squishy, and this is really a story about value — and who gets to decide it.

Kim Kardashian’s name adds value to things. That’s not an opinion, it’s a business fact. A plain black bodysuit costs more when it says SKIMS on the tag, and millions of customers happily pay it, because the product earns it. The fit is good. The fabric is good. The brand delivers.

But a name can only carry so much. When the product behind the name is a comb and a keychain, the name starts to look less like a guarantee and more like a markup. And customers — especially the ones scrolling TikTok at midnight with their wallets half-open — are very good at spotting the difference.

That’s the risk of the holiday season in general. Every brand wants a piece of the gift-buying frenzy, and advent calendars are the perfect vehicle: small, giftable, photogenic, and easy to price at whatever the market will bear. But the market, as this week proved, has a way of answering back. Loudly. In the comments. With a million likes.

Will SKIMS adjust the price? Will next year’s calendar come with something a little more substantial behind door number twelve? Nobody knows yet. The brand hasn’t commented on the backlash, and honestly, it might not need to. The calendar is sold as an accessories box, the description is accurate, and the people who want it will buy it anyway.

But for the rest of us, the video remains — 34 million views and counting — a perfect little holiday cautionary tale. Before you spend $148 on a mystery box, maybe wait for someone else to open it first. Somebody on TikTok almost certainly will. And if what comes out is a scrunchie and a foam squishy, you’ll be glad you waited.

Kim Kardashian, for her part, has survived far worse than a roasted advent calendar. A $148 box of hair accessories is not going to dent an empire. But it is a reminder — to every celebrity brand, not just hers — that the internet can smell a bad deal from a mile away. And when it does, it doesn’t whisper. It posts.

Source: Just Jared