Kara McGrath has spent more than 15 years reporting on the beauty industry, and she has landed on a blunt verdict about its most popular holiday product. Beauty advent calendars, she wrote for Cosmopolitan on November 6, 2026, are "one of the worst things to ever happen to holiday gifting." Her piece, published on AOL, is less a rant than a test: she laid out four rules a good gift set must pass, then found only 10 sets that cleared all of them.
The math behind the hate is simple once it is laid out. Most advent calendars hide miniature products behind their tiny cardboard doors, and miniatures are the products least likely to be recycled. The box itself, usually covered in festive, gilded designs, all but guarantees the outer packaging heads to the trash too. As McGrath put it, the calendars "combine all of these wasteful nightmares into one."
The waste problem is bigger than one product category. According to McGrath's reporting, the vast majority of beauty products are not recyclable at all, because they are too small, contain too many different materials, or are made from a material municipal recycling facilities simply do not accept. Even the tiny percentage of products that are refillable are not always helping sustainability efforts.
What are the four rules for a better gift set?
McGrath set out to find beauty gift sets that were better than advent calendars, and she judged every candidate against the same four principles. First, the set needs to be mostly full-size products, not the "and one full-size gift" arrangement she says is common with advent calendars. Second, there should be a significant savings, not just a couple of dollars off; otherwise a buyer is better off purchasing full-size products when they actually need them.
The third rule concerns what beauty products do over time: they expire, so hoarding discounted sets does not bode well. Fourth, any non-beauty extra included in a set should be something a reasonable person would actually use more than once. And the packaging rule runs through all of it: no egregious amounts of extra packaging, just boxes or bags that fit the products and nothing else. Readers following this should also see How the Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Season Actually Runs, From New York to Paris.
Why did only 10 gift sets make the cut?
The list is short, and the reason is the finding itself. Per the article, a lot of gift sets are, in McGrath's words, "kinda lame": the products tend to be smaller than usual, which again means there is no chance they will be recycled, and the savings are often not significant enough to justify the extra packaging. Out of the hundreds of gift-set pitches in her inbox, she managed to dig up 10 that hit every point.
She is candid about where she drew the line. McGrath writes that she wished she could have been stricter and included only fully recyclable, refillable or biodegradable sets, but doing so would have left her with, as she put it, "a list of hopes and dreams."
Is there anything good about advent calendars?
McGrath grants the category one genuine merit. Advent calendars are, in her description, cute and fun and nostalgic and great for content, and they bring some whimsy to what she calls an often hellish timeline. She understands why that is tempting. Her argument is that the same holiday fun can come from a set that passes the four rules, without the miniature sizes and the gilded, destined-for-the-trash outer box.
What does this mean for holiday beauty gifting?
The useful takeaway is the checklist, not the list of 10. A shopper can apply the same four questions to any gift set on a shelf: Are the products full size? Is the discount real? Would the extras actually get used? Does the packaging fit the products, and nothing else? Sets that fail those questions, per McGrath's reporting, tend to be the ones whose miniatures end up unrecycled and whose boxes end up in the trash.
Beauty and fashion presentation overlap more than the gifting debate suggests, from the beauty collections built around runway moments to the retail side of the industry covered in our guide to shopping a Seoul beauty store like a local. For more from the season, see our shows coverage. The evidence McGrath assembled points one way: the category's popularity runs on nostalgia and content appeal, while its structure runs on miniature sizes and layered packaging. Both things can be true, and only one of them survives the four-rule test. This connects to our earlier piece, The Best Fashion Shows to Watch From Your Sofa, and How to Stream Them Well.
