I have become fascinated by the culture of youtube videos where people buy low quality products off of sites like Wish and Romwe just for the curiosity of what the low cost products are like in real life. It does seem that youtube is a sea of these types vicarious purchasing videos as evident by all the haul and product base review videos.
Now I have gotten at least two items from Romwe in the past and I hated them and I have no desire to get anything off of Wish but I want to play in this content sandbox too so I decided to see what Wish had to offer for Hunchback products.
Wish Disney Esmeralda Costume
Turns out it seems like to search through Wish you need to have an account, screw that. A cursory google search brought me to a $93 Esmeralda costume, which looks like a really good costume. Wish however is notorious for using other people’s images to sell the products so is this actuallly the costume someone would get in that mail? No, not very likely.
Aliexpress Disney Esmeralda Costume
The same picture is used on Esmeralda costume on Aliexpress along with some other pictures of clearly different Esmeralda costumes. Also there are two different sellers on Aliexpress “selling” this particular costume.
myshow26 Disney Esmeralda costume
After a bit more research I found this costume on eBay where I finally could read the watermark which reads “myshow26.” This is not a person but a cosplay company. They sell a lot on amazon.jp. The only myshow26 costume I could find on amazon.com was Ariel’s Blue dress. So while this product may not be the best quality at least the sellers did not steal someone’s cosplay picture to sell the product. It is in fact the product they are selling (in theory.)
Now for the record I don’t want to waste any money for curiosities of what this costume is actually like in person so I failed there but the culture of buying products for the sake of entertainment is very interesting to me.* The people on youtube buying these cheap products are making their money back on ad revenues, at least for the bigger channels, but it still stands that people are being entertained by someone else’s consumerism. And if I were to get a advance degree in sociology or even anthropology, I would love to study it more or just read reviewed articles on the subject for fun.
2024 edit – Entertainment based on consumerism is much less entertaining as it was since this post went up in 2018.