What’s behind our drive to collect useless items?
Yet perhaps the most exceptional thing about her exceptional collection is that it is not exceptional at all.
Rainbow collections are seemingly on the rise. TikTok is home to numerous consumers who buy the same item in every possible colour – be it 50 Le Creuset cups, 1,000 Bath & Body Works hand sanitisers, 150 pairs of Crocs, 60 Starbucks tumblers or 20 Yeti cool boxes. In my head, I’ve begun calling this “one-in-every-colour capitalism” – the compulsion to buy every iteration of a product, even when new releases don’t offer a change in user experience.
How did it become normal – or at least not abnormal – to own a hundred of something you’d traditionally only need one of? While hyper-consumers are not new, social media has amplified their behaviour, allowing it to influence consumption and production.
One pervasive TikTok clip summarises these voracious appetites. “If I like it, I’ll just grab it in a different colour. If I like it, I’ll just grab it in another colour. If I like it, and they have another colour, I’ll just grab it.” This audio recording has been used to soundtrack over 36,000 videos featuring lip-gloss, corset and Prada headband collections.
It’s easy to shrug, to consider this as just a quirk of some people’s personalities. Yet one-in-every-colour consumption is a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: to understand it is to understand capitalism and the internet. A 2022 study from academics at Mahidol University in Thailand found that the intensity with which someone uses social media is linked to negative shopping behaviours such as impulsive buying and conspicuous consumption. Teens have spoken out about the ways in which influencers drive them to consume; one girl told me in 2018 that after watching YouTube haul videos, “If I wanted something, I would stay up at night thinking about it.”
Examining this phenomenon also enables us to understand our brains and our beings, from the psychology of the “oddly satisfying” to the ways our identities can be branded.
“Some people are the ‘crazy cat lady’. I’m the ‘crazy cup lady’ now,” says Conti Schwartz. (...)
Still, there is one thing Conti Schwartz can’t explain, and that is why simply looking at her cups makes her happy. “I could sit here for hours and not think of a reason why,” she says.
In recent years, Victoria Sepiashvili has grown to feel guilty about her hand sanitiser collection. She owns almost 1,000 bottles from Bath & Body Works – she has a similar number of lip balms, as well as a “large” Nike Roshe sneaker collection and tens of Victoria’s Secret plush dogs.
“There’s a dichotomy between having one of the biggest collections in the world and also having thoughts against materialism,” says the 18-year-old content creator from New York. “I mean, it’s really hypocritical and it’s paradoxical and ironic. But yes, as much as I loved it as a child, now I steer away from it.”
Sepiashvili started her hand sanitiser collection aged eight, after becoming “obsessed” with Instagram videos of older girls reviewing scents. “I think it was the aesthetic of it,” she explains. “It was so colourful with every colour in the spectrum – it just looked very satisfying and fun to play with as a little girl.” Sepiashvili says it became her “dream” to build her own collection and her own following.
Very quickly, hunting for new hand sanitisers became a bonding activity for Sepiashvili and her mum. In 2020, she posted a video of her collection that was watched 13.6m times. Sepiashvili’s dreams came true – today, almost 150,000 people follow her on TikTok – but success is bittersweet. As the teen grew older, she became more spiritual, developing an interest in “more esoteric metaphysical stuff”. She says it “dawned” on her that possessions don’t matter. “We only have one life and things are absolutely not significant.”A TikTok video from 2020 shows Victoria Sepiashvili’s hand sanitizer collection.
Although Sepiashvili tries to avoid posting videos about her collections today, she still feels “a lot of guilt” that her videos promoted “hoarding and maximalism and just things, things, things, things”. (...)
How did it become normal – or at least not abnormal – to own a hundred of something you’d traditionally only need one of? While hyper-consumers are not new, social media has amplified their behaviour, allowing it to influence consumption and production.
One pervasive TikTok clip summarises these voracious appetites. “If I like it, I’ll just grab it in a different colour. If I like it, I’ll just grab it in another colour. If I like it, and they have another colour, I’ll just grab it.” This audio recording has been used to soundtrack over 36,000 videos featuring lip-gloss, corset and Prada headband collections.
It’s easy to shrug, to consider this as just a quirk of some people’s personalities. Yet one-in-every-colour consumption is a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: to understand it is to understand capitalism and the internet. A 2022 study from academics at Mahidol University in Thailand found that the intensity with which someone uses social media is linked to negative shopping behaviours such as impulsive buying and conspicuous consumption. Teens have spoken out about the ways in which influencers drive them to consume; one girl told me in 2018 that after watching YouTube haul videos, “If I wanted something, I would stay up at night thinking about it.”
Examining this phenomenon also enables us to understand our brains and our beings, from the psychology of the “oddly satisfying” to the ways our identities can be branded.
“Some people are the ‘crazy cat lady’. I’m the ‘crazy cup lady’ now,” says Conti Schwartz. (...)
Still, there is one thing Conti Schwartz can’t explain, and that is why simply looking at her cups makes her happy. “I could sit here for hours and not think of a reason why,” she says.
In recent years, Victoria Sepiashvili has grown to feel guilty about her hand sanitiser collection. She owns almost 1,000 bottles from Bath & Body Works – she has a similar number of lip balms, as well as a “large” Nike Roshe sneaker collection and tens of Victoria’s Secret plush dogs.
“There’s a dichotomy between having one of the biggest collections in the world and also having thoughts against materialism,” says the 18-year-old content creator from New York. “I mean, it’s really hypocritical and it’s paradoxical and ironic. But yes, as much as I loved it as a child, now I steer away from it.”
Sepiashvili started her hand sanitiser collection aged eight, after becoming “obsessed” with Instagram videos of older girls reviewing scents. “I think it was the aesthetic of it,” she explains. “It was so colourful with every colour in the spectrum – it just looked very satisfying and fun to play with as a little girl.” Sepiashvili says it became her “dream” to build her own collection and her own following.
Very quickly, hunting for new hand sanitisers became a bonding activity for Sepiashvili and her mum. In 2020, she posted a video of her collection that was watched 13.6m times. Sepiashvili’s dreams came true – today, almost 150,000 people follow her on TikTok – but success is bittersweet. As the teen grew older, she became more spiritual, developing an interest in “more esoteric metaphysical stuff”. She says it “dawned” on her that possessions don’t matter. “We only have one life and things are absolutely not significant.”A TikTok video from 2020 shows Victoria Sepiashvili’s hand sanitizer collection.
Although Sepiashvili tries to avoid posting videos about her collections today, she still feels “a lot of guilt” that her videos promoted “hoarding and maximalism and just things, things, things, things”. (...)
Why might 1,000 hand sanitisers make our stomachs turn, but few of us react with horror to hundreds of wine bottles in a cellar? This is a question that Gerda Reith wrestles with. As a professor of social sciences at the University of Glasgow and author of Addictive Consumption: Capitalism, Modernity and Excess, Reith is conscious of the role snobbery plays in our value judgements.
“There is a class aspect to this,” Reith says. “And it’s the consumption choices of poorer people that are frowned on.” Reith notes that we rarely bemoan people with bookshelves full of expensive first-edition books, even though they also don’t “need” them and their money could also be put to “better” use. Or, as Nietzsche put it in 1888: “Excess is a reproach only against those who have no right to it.”
by Amelia Tait, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Logan Cyrus
[ed. A small pleasure, so why make anyone feel guilty about it? Beanie babies, pogs, ceramic turtles, legos, t-shirts, tennis shoes, pretty rocks, anything. Leave people alone to enjoy their little sources of enjoyment.]
