The Authentic Reviewer
Our Luca cursing? Impossible.
I turned my head toward Max and gently chided him.
“Max, Luca’s still a baby, so he can’t talk very well. Of course he can’t curse either.”
Right then Luca pointed his tiny finger straight at Max and launched into a storm of babbling.
“Eubua! Aama! Kka!”
“……!”
The way he jabbed his finger made it look exactly like he was cussing Max out in baby talk. Without thinking I caught the child’s hand, resettled him in my arms, and faced him squarely.
“Luca, we don’t do that.”
Luca stuck his lip out and glared at me with a sulky face. Then he planted a hand on my shoulder, hauled himself up, and finished the rant he had left hanging while staring right at Max.
“Kkaa!”
“Waaaaah!”
“Ahahaha! The baby’s cursing!”
Max burst into tears while Shirley clapped and roared with laughter. In the middle of the kids’ whale-sized fight, it was the adults who ended up with the shrimp’s broken back. Oliver and I broke into a cold sweat trying to separate them.
Oliver briefly halted filming, herded his son and daughter into another room, and shut the door to calm them down. I was left face-to-face with Luca.
“Luca……”
“Abu.”
A one-year-old baby making a brother several years older cry. With Reni he always seemed to take a step back and learn something…… Maybe Reni was simply a little more mature than Max. I couldn’t tell whether Luca had sensed the difference between eldest and youngest in the two older boys, or whether he was simply less close to Max.
……And was it only my imagination that he looked thoroughly satisfied?
While I stared at the child who seemed to be deliberately changing the subject after a moment of speechlessness, Luca looked me straight in the eye this time and announced,
“Mamma.”
“……Ah, right. Our baby hasn’t had breakfast yet.”
So that was why he’d been in such a foul mood. I hurriedly fed Luca breakfast before Oliver finished soothing the children and came back out.
“There was a little commotion, but we’ll resume filming now.”
When Oliver emerged from the room with the kids he looked completely drained, yet the moment the cameras rolled he snapped right back into a lively host’s expression. He smoothly introduced today’s content and me as the guest, then naturally steered the children toward the presents waiting under the Christmas tree.
“Wooow!”
“Presents!”
Shirley of course, and Max—who had forgotten all about crying and was now bursting with excitement—both charged under the tree and began mercilessly shredding wrapping paper. At Oliver’s cue the camera locked onto the children while he supplied the voice-over.
“We have one extra of every sponsored product for the unboxing. See the toys under the tree over there? The clip of the kids happily playing with them will open the video.”
He added that calm filming with children was impossible anyway.
“Just two years ago they were still gentle enough that we could manage it, but these days……”
“Yes, I understand.”
I forced the corners of my mouth upward and answered the man who was muttering while shaking his head. We hadn’t even properly started and I already felt like I’d burned through an entire day’s energy.
“Well then, shall our brave little baby open a present too?”
With that Oliver fetched a small gift box from beneath the Christmas tree and held it out in front of Luca. It was a pretty box wrapped in colorful paper and tied with a big ribbon, yet instead of reaching for it Luca simply stared up at me with wide, unblinking eyes. I had no choice but to take it and open it for him.
“Here, Luca. Uncle Oliver gave you a present. Daddy will open it.”
Rustle, rustle. When the wrapping fell away, an ivory silicone rabbit roly-poly appeared. It looked plump and soft even though it was actually firm, and Luca immediately showed interest.
“It’s a cute rabbit roly-poly. Look at this, Luca.”
I set the toy on the sofa, pushed it over with one hand until it lay flat, then let go. The instant my hand left it the rabbit popped upright again. Luca’s eyes went round as saucers. He scrambled down from my knee and seized the roly-poly’s head in both hands.
“Looks like he likes the roly-poly.”
Oliver watched Luca with an affectionate smile.
“Seems so. Though we still have to make sure he doesn’t throw every toy the second he’s done playing with it.”
“Then would it be all right if he sits and plays in front of the tree for a bit? It would be nice to get a shot of him sitting with Shirley and Max.”
If each child was absorbed in a different toy, they probably wouldn’t start fighting. Since we’d already signed the contract covering Luca’s portrait rights, I carefully set him down beside the others. Max flinched for a second, then held his ground with stubborn pride—crying in front of a one-year-old would have been too humiliating. Shirley, playing the part of the biggest sister, helpfully pushed a new toy toward Luca as well.
The camera lingered for a while on the three children playing with their fresh toys beneath the tree. Against the brilliantly decorated Christmas tree and the warmly crackling fireplace, the colorful scene looked like a living postcard.
Once Oliver decided he had enough footage he sent the children upstairs again with a staff member.
“All right, shall we move to the study? It would be good to film the advent-calendar segment first.”
I nodded, scooped Luca back into my arms, and followed while whispering to Cassandra.
“Was there an advent calendar among today’s sponsored items?”
I had already received the full sponsorship list so I could research everything in advance and avoid looking unprepared on camera. Cassandra shook her head, confirming I hadn’t misremembered; Oliver must have bought them out of his own pocket for today’s content. Sure enough, once we sat at the table prepared in the study he made a point of saying so again.
“Ah, the calendars aren’t sponsored—I bought them myself.”
“I see. You bought quite a few.”
I gave a hollow little laugh at the five wildly different calendars lined up in front of us.
“Well, it’s guaranteed view-count content. Around this time every year a lot of brands put out advent calendars.”
That made sense. An advent calendar is essentially a gift set you open one day at a time from December 1st through the 25th while waiting for Christmas. The only ones I had ever known contained chocolate, but the selection Oliver had prepared was impressively varied: jewelry brands, luxury cosmetics, even stationery companies. One was shaped like a fairy-tale magic castle; another looked like a jewelry box with twenty-five tiny drawers, each fitted with a pretty ring pull. And then there was one from an ink manufacturer. My eyes went straight to it before I could stop myself.
Oliver’s staff brought a high chair for Luca, who was still utterly absorbed in his new toy. Once the baby was settled I sat opposite Oliver with the calendars between us.
“Since these aren’t sponsored, please give completely honest impressions. Honest reactions get better comments than nonstop praise.”
“Got it.”
I nodded and Oliver launched straight into filming.
“This year too we’ve brought the one Christmas gift that never fails—advent calendars! Look at all these different kinds! This time we even prepared one from a luxury cosmetics brand. Male viewers already know there’s nothing better for a mother, sister, or girlfriend than a high-end cosmetics advent calendar!”
Without a single script he kept talking as smoothly as a home-shopping host.
“Anyone who receives a calendar this luxurious is bound to feel fantastic. This is the product that cuts down the giver’s decision time and multiplies the receiver’s excitement! All right, Mr. Jun, would you open the first one for us?”
Finishing the intro with a smile so wide his dimples sank deep, Oliver gestured for me to pull the first ring. I put on the most authentic smile I could muster and tugged.
Inside was…… a tiny hairpin.
“Uh, um…… It’s a hairpin.”
For a luxury cosmetics brand it looked like something you could buy for pocket change anywhere. Granted, the brand logo was engraved in miniature on the metal. Still…… I didn’t know the exact price, but this calendar had to cost several hundred dollars at least. How could they stuff something so flimsy inside? Were the hundreds of dollars all packaging? And two grown men sitting here unboxing products aimed squarely at women already felt a little odd. But I wasn’t in a position to comment on that, so I kept giving polite reactions while Oliver and I took turns racing through the entire calendar.
The more gifts we opened, the more one single thought solidified in my head: I really hoped anyone watching this video would think twice before buying the thing. Two lipsticks of the exact same color had already appeared, and more than a few items were clearly sample-sized. Why make the box so enormous if you were going to fill it with such tiny things? It looked like pure marketing theater. Consumers spent serious money after long deliberation, trusting the brand with what was basically a random box……
“Hmm, so that was twenty-five products. Was it actually a good purchase? Let us know what you think in the comments!”
I smiled awkwardly and carefully avoided saying “this looks like a total rip-off.” Unlike Mello, who was a professional makeup artist, I simply didn’t know enough about cosmetics to be that blunt.
But when we started on the two-hundred-dollar ink advent calendar Oliver had specially bought for me because of my calligraphy, I suddenly had plenty to say. After we quickly introduced every color and finished the unboxing, I stared for a moment at the twenty-five little ink bottles clustered together and finally spoke.
“If this is all you get, it would be much smarter just to buy a few single bottles of the colors you actually want.”
I didn’t see her clearly, but I felt Cassandra quietly pressing her fingers to her forehead. I had wanted to say something nice if I could. I just couldn’t.
At my first real opinion Oliver’s eyes lit up and he asked back,
“Is that so? May I ask why you think that?”
“The packaging is pretty, but you tear paper every day so you can’t reuse it as a drawer set the way you could with the cosmetics calendar. And somehow it feels like they just threw in all the colors that don’t sell well.”
“Really? I thought the variety of colors was nice.”
“It is diverse, but a lot of these are colors I would never buy on my own. Of course that’s mostly personal taste……” I picked up the pale pink ink consumers nicknamed “cotton-candy pink,” then set it back down. “A color this light has terrible visibility, so for someone like me who mostly writes letters instead of drawing, it’s basically useless. Well, saying it out loud, maybe it’s only bad for people like me.”
I conceded that color preference could split depending on taste and usage.
“Even so, at this price every single bottle being tiny and plastic still bothers me. Not even cute little glass vials—just plain plastic with a label stuck on. Isn’t that a bit of a rip-off? Looking at them all lined up, there’s no way this is worth two hundred dollars.”
“Still, didn’t you feel a little thrill every time you pulled out a new bottle?”
“No. The first thought was that the money was wasted.”
When I answered without hesitation Oliver simply shrugged.
“So you’re not taking these inks home today?”
“Ah—if you’re offering them, I’ll gratefully accept.”
“You just finished saying they were terrible……”
Oliver gave a hollow laugh, but I added as if the answer were obvious,
“Free is free. We already opened everything, so you can’t return them anyway. And while the advent calendar itself is a miss, I do like this brand.”
Oliver laughed, thoroughly amused.