“Why You Probably Shouldn’t Shop the Sephora Sale (But Maybe Read My Five Recs First Before You Decide Not To).”

This is a fun new genre of headline I’ve been seeing for the latest Sephora Sale. Honestly, I admire the gymnastics. It’s telling, right? It is getting harder to sell to people so you must get extra creative these says. There are a lot of pitches in disguise. If you won’t listen to someone telling you to buy then maybe you’ll listen to someone telling you not to buy right up until the part where they tell you what to buy.

I’m not feeling creative though. So here’s mine for the week: The Sephora Sale Is A Giant Ass Yawn.

That’s it. I wrote about this a sale or two ago and it was paywalled, but since today is the first day of the Sephora Spending, er, Savings Event, I’ve taken the paywall down to remind you:

Happy Saving!

Read more

A lot of them were more about how people live than what they own. I am not surprised that real wealth and luxury look more like spending money on time, comfort, health, and improving the things you already own.

We have plenty of evidence that the good life isn’t really about stuff, even the people doing the recommending and selling seem to know that! Being sold to all day still works on us anyway.

Don’t get it twisted though, there were still A LOT of products mentioned. I will get into that today.

I pulled together the products and brands that came up the most, then compared them with what Total Rec readers have said is worth the splurge in the past.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed below are not MY recommendations and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Total Rec. I am simply reporting what I found, so please don’t come for me over a C*rtier T*nk.

Read more

People from every corner of the internet made these videos, from personal finance bros to health nuts to gamers to Amazon Storefront moms and ShopMy fashion influencers.

Naturally, I was most interested in the fashion influencers, because they recommend so many products. By my totally unscientific, probably wrong math, some of the most prominent fashion creators recommend at least 3 to 4 products a day. I got to that number by counting Instagram Stories: start tracking day by day and you’ll notice you’re being pointed toward at least 1 to 5 things to buy, nearly every single day. Then there are the newsletters, where you can easily count 30 products in a single email, with some people sending a few times a week.

My hack math gets us to more than 1,500 products that could be suggested by a single person in a year. And that’s conservative because I’m not counting gift guide season :)

Maybe a more accurate way to say this is that these folks get access to an almost absurd amount of stuff. The biggest fashion creators can unbox thousands of dollars of clothes, shoes, and beauty products in a single week, only to do it all over again the next. There are very few consumers on earth better acquainted with the sheer volume of stuff available to buy.

This is why I was so intrigued. With that volume alone, picking just a few things feels like an almost impossible task. But also one that, with this much practice, they should be pretty good at, right?

So I went kinda nuts and started saving every example I could find across Instagram, TikTok, and even Substack, where the trend eventually made its way. I watched hundreds of them. Again, my sample was not remotely scientific. My methodology was watching and taking notes in an Excel sheet until I started to feel physically ill, which is how I knew the research phase had reached completion.

I was telling my friend Matthew about this embarrassingly lo fi, super inefficient process. He is a data scientist, and offered to take all the links from my Excel sheet and sort the product mentions properly, so I could actually rank how often each item came up.

So out of all of that, what does this side of the internet actually believe is worth the money? Is there consistency with the things you are so often told to buy?

Now I definitely expected the Chanel and Clé de Peau. I guessed specific bags, shoes, coats, and beauty products would come up again and again.

But when I started digging into the answers, I also noticed something else. Similar answers were coming up over and over, but a surprising number of them weren’t actually “things” at all.

And suddenly it made sense why so few people were performing the now standard link humiliation ritual, the one where you comment something like “MONETIZE ME PLZ” below, and the world gets to watch you publicly beg for a link to a $468 barn jacket. (I tried commenting recently and felt like I needed to shower in bleach afterward.)

Because mixed in with all the bags and shoes and $468 barn jackets were plenty of recommendations you couldn’t actually link to at all.

Of those answers, these were the ones that came up most:

Read more

A while ago, on a hot summer day, a writer I really admire asked me to share some of my fall essentials for an upcoming newsletter. I got the message while walking outside and wiping an impressive sweat stache off my face. It was not exactly the coziest fall moment. My mind went blank because most of my cooler weather clothes are still packed away and far from my mind.

I replied that the mornings have only started to cool off a bit here on the East Coast. Normally, I light a candle in the morning when I wake up, but lately, I’ve swapped my usual Citronnelle Diptyque (it smells like Lemon Pez) for something a little earthier.

Now, I’m burning piñon incense I picked up last time I was in New Mexico. I love the warm, piney scent that fills the air in the villages and towns there during fall. It always brings me back to crisp, sunny days with red and yellow trees. It also reminds me of a dear friend who l…

Read more

I’ve been very tired lately, between a relentless summer cold and piles of work. My brain only has room for essential tasks and the joy necessary to stay sane.

I won’t bore you with the tasks, but here is some of the joyful stuff.

Read more

There were only a couple of things I thought I wanted. I didn’t intentionally decide not to buy them. I just kept not buying them until something else presented itself.

Read more

Last year, I downloaded the Phia extension after a bizarre DM exchange with Phoebe Gates, who asked me to promote Phia to my readers and offered $7,500 in exchange for a certain amount of clicks. The number felt unrealistic, and the whole exchange was so sketchy that I started to suspect I was talking to a bot or a virtual assistant three time zones away. So I asked her if 2+2 was 5 and why her dad had stopped updating his Goodreads (I’d been following what Bill was reading for a while).

“She” didn’t even bat an eye at my kooky queries, which made it feel even weirder. I downloaded the plugin to check it out and I told her I wasn’t interested.

Being the dummy I am, I left the extension installed for a year and forgot about it. Then, in late 2025, it came out that Phia had been collecting information from every page its users visited, potentially including banking and emails. I promptly deleted the extension. This was, obviously, already an enormous f up on Phia’s part.

But then Phia was accused of skimming affiliate commissions across the web, and apparently that was what it took for everyone to start asking whether the whole operation might be a little sketchy.

Phia is an app that promises to help you shop smarter. I’ve tried plenty of these cashback browser extensions and price tracking widgets. Even the ones that market themselves as anti-consumerist, like Phia with its secondhand shopping angle, only succeed when you keep clicking. They profit when you shop more, not less.

The best trick that works for me costs nothing and requires no download. I used it the other day when I saw the new Rosie Assoulin x Target collab being pushed at me as a “need.”

Read more

What do these three things have in common?

No, it’s not that I find them too expensive, or that they were plucked fresh from the ShopMy link playbook: objects sold with the same promise that, after four interest-free payments, you can finally become a cool girl, or a hot girl, or whatever kind of “girl” grown ass women are currently being told to aspire to be.

And no, the answer is not that they all look like things I want when I’m feeling bloated.

It’s that outside Western luxury, these are ordinary things with other names.

Below: the names these items already had + some background + where to find them, often for a lot less $. As always, there are no affiliate links and nothing here is sponsored.

Read more

It had been a while since I’d been there. Despite a lifetime of hearing people call it “Ocean Sh*tty,” I have a soft spot for the old beach motels, frozen custard, and the thousands of tshirts for sale, flapping in the ocean breeze.

I can’t see those shirts without thinking about my mother. She came to Ocean City as a teenager in 1970 and spent the summer sharing a cramped house with six other girls, splitting her time between a pizza shop and a boardwalk t shirt store where she ironed custom lettering onto shirts. I love one photo from that summer: she’s standing outside a tiny house in the dunes in a brown corduroy bikini. It was, as she puts it, a time when everyone was trying to look “counterculture naked.”

The year she worked there, she remembers the Playboy bunny shirt being the most popular. Smiley faces were starting to pop up on everything and psyche…

Read more

Decades later, I found myself buying a $59 technological equivalent of the key to the liquor cabinet: The Brick, a device designed to stop you from using your phone.

Today, after a little over six months of use, I’m going to tell you whether it’s actually any good.

Behind the paywall, I’ll share what happened after the honeymoon phase wore off, what type of phone user should consider The Brick, who should save their money, what other long term Brick users told me, some free alternatives, and where I got a Brick for under $20 instead of $59.

Why (And How) I Bought The Brick

Read more

The device lets you block apps on your phone until you physically walk over and tap your phone against it. It has become popular among people trying to digitally opt out and has taken on the label of “a status symbol for the aspirationally offline”.

Before you buy one, I think it’s worth asking yourself some questions.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Buy the Brick

1. Are you reading this on your phone?

2. Do you use it too much?

3. Was that an immediate yes?

4. Have you ever spent more than 60 minutes on your phone researching ways to spend less time on your phone?

5. Did that journey lead you to a list of books like Stolen Focus, Digital Minimalism, or Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now?

6. Did you read them?

7. On your phone?

8. Have you watched this video showing where all our time goes now compared to 100 years ago? Spoiler: less sex, f…

Read more

The people informing me of these flaws also have answers. The only thing is their solutions usually cost $48 plus shipping.

Every so often I ask readers and friends to review the things the internet convinced them to buy. These are not influencers or people pushing products. They're just regular people who got targeted and took the bait.

Today we are talking to Liz, a yoga and Pilates teacher who isn't affiliated with any brands. Here's what she's tried.

MELLO CLIPS ($25 each)

Read more

Recently I’ve been more curious about interesting people wearing clothes than people whose main thing is being interested in clothes. Lately this has looked like musicians at concerts, psychoanalysts deep in their game, writers in memoirs, or strange old women in novels.

Here’s some stuff I’ve done/seen/read lately that falls into that category.

Read more

Meanwhile, the internet keeps trying to convince me that every modern discomfort can be solved with a luxury product.

This week: designer water.

This is not the kind of newsletter where I tell you to buy the thing. It’s the newsletter where I help you develop x-ray vision for the absurdity of all this. Laughing at it is honestly a pretty decent coping mechanism.

Last year I wrote about how to get the free version of things I was being advertised:

I’m doing it again, one item at a time. First up…

LOONEN WATER ($6 per bottle) or THE EARTH (ZERO-ish DOLLARS)

WHY I KEEP SEEING IT: I used to own a Berkey Water System, which apparently sentenced me to a lifetime of podcast ads about what’s new “in the water space.” Hot wellness influencers are calling it the best and purest water on earth. Elle ran a piece on it. I had to investigate.

I am still unlearning a lot of harmful misinformation I picked up from my Catholic school education, including the belief that the founder of water was God. Apparently it is actually a venture capitalist trying to rid the home of microplastics.

That’s basically the origin story of Loonen. Founder Clara Sieg has said she became obsessed with finding the purest possible water while trying to conceive, couldn’t find a brand she trusted, and decided to make her own.

This pricey water ($36 bucks for 6 bottles) hasn’t even been around for a six months. So how did it get so popular so fast?

When you research these things, you have to go where the real answers live. Ditch the polished founder interviews and the PR fluff. You must descend into the deepest and most disturbed crevice of the dark web: LinkedIn.

Read more

A friend said this to me recently while we were talking about watching new television shows. “There’s no middle class on TV.” She can’t handle the designer clothes, the perfectly lit homes, the $3,000 faucets over waterfall kitchen islands. She can’t stomach watching people take vacations at boutique resorts that cost more per night than her monthly rent. Lately, she’s been watching reruns of Roseanne.

Read more

If you missed it, I reviewed the viral Ruti On The Loose Work pants last week. You can read it here:

While researching them and going through reader reviews, one thing kept coming up over and over: there is a very close Old Navy version of them.

I’ve never been totally sold on “dupes.” Not just from some moral high ground, but because most people making that claim haven’t tried both.They are making an assumption based on a fantasy of what the original might be like.

I’m not someone who defaults to cheap fast fashion, but in the context of the Ruti conversation, these came up so often I couldn’t ignore them. I ordered them along with the Ruti and spent time comparing both. Below are side by side photos of me in the pants and my full verdict.

I’ve also included a few reader recommended alternatives and one pair I’d never heard of before finding it myself.

Read more

I heard a ding and immediately lunged for my bag. When I opened my texts, here’s what I saw:

“You have got to be freaking kidding me!” I said. “It’s Ruti.”

My friend stared at me blankly. “Um….and who is Ruti?!”

I explained Ruti is just a clothing brand. Their viral pants have followed me around the internet for months, maybe even years at this point. They are $249 a pair and have a cult following. Ads that don't look like ads have told me they will absolutely change my life. The message is clearly working… they landed in the top 100 most bought products of 2025 on ShopMy.

Of course, I needed to buy these pants. Partly because I love a good pair of pants and was willing to be open minded, but also because I have a bit of a history with very hyped, expensive pants. If you remember my High Sport days, you get it.

So I bought them to review for you. I took photos and asked readers to share their experiences.

I wanted to know if the Ruti On The Loose Pants were worth how unavoidable they felt.

I assumed once I put them on, I’d know everything I needed to know and the chapter would be closed. I thought this would be a simple pant review. It turned into something else entirely.

Read more

I smiled and said “Yup, I have…you’ll have to let me know what you think!” Lately, I'm trying to understand that not every thought needs to come out of my mouth. Especially on someone's birthday, when everyone is in a great mood and someone you love is excited about a new robe.

A couple days later, she texted the group chat.

The group chat was immediately divided. 50% of us had smelly Quince experiences. The others had ordered from them and were perfectly happy. One even sent a picture of her newest Quince sweater to prove it.

So I did exactly what I said I am trying to stop doing. I killed the mood.

I went into how Quince is basically a tech company disguised as a fashion company. I even brought up how Amazon was never really a bookstore (um, yikes). At some point I was referencing this WSJ podcast, this EcoCult investigation into Quince’s greenwashing (cease and desist included), and explaining that “fast fashion” refers to the speed at which a collection is made, not how fast people consume it. Basically, I was a lot and I pushed it too far. I went to bed after apologizing for my Quince shaming.

When I woke up though, I just couldn’t stop thinking about that stink.

My specific stinky Quince experience was with their bedding. I received a large box which looked like it had been dropkicked off a 12 story building and smelled like it had landed in a vat of vomit. I had to get it out of my home because the smell lingered in my hallway for days after. I felt embarrassed taking that stinky box into FedEx when I returned it. Quince sent me another, and the smell was the same. Now I’ve got two FedEx walks of shame under my belt.

I went sniffing around on the Quince website and filtered by lowest reviews. I didn't see much. They have a reputation for negative reviews mysteriously "disappearing." When I googled "my quince order smells,"plenty came up…

Read more

Often, it’s a colorful sock in a debatably ugly rubber clog. The crown jewel: Plasticana Gardana clogs.

These French hemp clogs have been popular among fashion people for quite some time. When I first discovered them, I told myself they would be my “adorable gardening shoe.” This was somewhere between when Bode put them on the runway in 2020 and they became the unofficial uniform of every gorpy Brooklyn dad.

In my mind, I had been a gardener for years. This mostly meant falling asleep to the sound of Monty Don’s voice more times than I can count. Who needs Ambien when you have Gardener’s World? I find the show incredibly relaxing, though there is a whole population of people genuinely outraged because he said begonias are repulsively ugly. It is riveting.

I’ve also been charmed by gardening things for a while. I love seed catalogs. A frie…

Read more