What I actually kept from my TikTok shop era

There was a phase. I think almost everyone who uses TikTok in any consistent way knows the phase I mean. It starts innocuously: a video appears while you're scrolling at some late, unguarded hour, and someone very convincing is holding a product and explaining — with very good lighting and a very natural speaking style — why this item has changed their life. The price appears on screen. A discount code materialises. The algorithm, which has been quietly studying your interests for months, has served you this video with a precision that feels almost personal.

I bought things. A non-trivial number of things. Not all at once — it was gradual, accumulated over the better part of six months, the way these things tend to be. Small purchases, mostly. The kind of purchase where you don't really notice it's happened until you do a proper accounting and find seventeen packages you'd semi-forgotten arriving over the course of a few months, some of which you opened and some of which — honestly — you just put to one side, meaning to deal with them later.

This summer I did the accounting. I laid everything out (metaphorically — a lot of it was already donated or binned by this point) and gave each thing an honest verdict. What actually survived. What earned its place. What I bought in the 3am-scroll, use-this-code-for-20%-off, limited-time-only fugue state and immediately knew, in the sober morning light, had been a mistake.

The results surprised me a little. Not in the direction I expected.

The things I thought I needed

There was a kitchen gadget — I won't be specific, but the category is the kind of thing that does one extremely specific task that you could accomplish with the equipment you already own, in slightly more time, with slightly more effort. The video for this was brilliant. Seventeen seconds of satisfying food-preparation content, music that hit just right, a comment section full of people saying "I bought this six months ago and use it every day." I bought it. I used it twice. It lives in the back of a cupboard now because the space it takes up is more valuable than the ninety seconds it saves.

There was a skincare thing — not a brand name, I'm not going to do that — in a very pretty frosted bottle with a serum consistency that was sold as the fix for something I'd been vaguely concerned about. I used it for three weeks. It didn't noticeably do the thing it was supposed to do. It also didn't do anything bad, which I suppose is something. But the bottle sat on my bathroom shelf for two months after I stopped using it, because I'd paid enough for it that throwing it away felt wasteful, and that's a particular kind of low-grade guilt I do not recommend.

There were tiktok purchases I made because of aesthetic rather than actual need: a decorative object, a set of things that matched a colour palette I'd been admiring online, a type of storage solution that was perfectly useful but which I already had a version of that worked fine. These were the purchases that reveal, I think, the real mechanism of this kind of buying. It's not need. It's the desire to inhabit a version of a life I was watching someone else inhabit on my phone at 11pm. That's not the same thing at all.

The things that actually survived

Here is where the results surprised me: there were two things — only two, but genuinely two — that I still use every single day without exception, and that I would buy again without hesitation, and that feel, in retrospect, like actual good decisions rather than good marketing.

The first is a small linen pouch for my phone and charger cable. I know. It sounds absurdly minimal for such a grand audit. But I travel with a bag that has seven thousand pockets and none of them are the right size for a phone and a cable together, and the result used to be that every time I needed either I had to empty half the bag and then spend five minutes untangling the cable from everything it had wrapped itself around. The linen pouch: phone goes in, cable goes in, they live together, they come out together. I have used it on every single day I've left the house since I got it. A thing that solves an actual problem that you actually have is a different object entirely from a thing that solves a problem you didn't have until a sixteen-second video convinced you that you did.

The second is a small round cushion I put behind my lower back when I sit at my desk to film. It's not glamorous. The video that sold it to me was genuinely quite dull — someone just showing that their back hurt less after using it. But I'd been having the back-of-chair problem since I started filming from my bedroom, and I'd been ignoring it with the particular stubbornness of someone who doesn't want to admit their setup has a flaw. The cushion cost almost nothing. It solved the problem immediately and completely. I've used it every single day for months.

A curated few things you actually love beats a cluttered many, every single time.

The one that made me stop and feel things

There was also a small oil diffuser — the reed kind, not the electrical kind — that I bought on a semi-impulse during a scroll in late winter. Linen scent. I put it on the windowsill in my bedroom. I had basically forgotten I'd bought it by the time it arrived, which tells you something about the purchasing process. I opened the box, set it up, thought: fine, okay, we'll see.

That was six months ago. I notice it every morning when I open the curtains — the smell of linen in the particular slant of morning light, the reed sitting in the amber glass bottle, entirely unpretentious. It costs almost nothing to replace and it makes my bedroom smell like somewhere I want to be. I find it, genuinely, one of the small daily pleasures of my flat. The texture of the glass when I pick it up to move it. The way the scent is present without being overwhelming. The fact that it's been there long enough now to feel like it was always there.

I didn't buy it for a reason. I bought it on a whim at an unguarded hour. And it turned out to be one of the best small purchases I've made in the last year, which is both the promise and the trap of the whole TikTok shop era: occasionally, among the things that don't survive the morning-after audit, there's one that just — works. That actually becomes part of your life in the quiet, habitual, unremarkable way that the best objects do.

The rule I have now

I still use TikTok and I still, occasionally, watch a product video that makes me want to buy the thing immediately. I am not going to pretend I've achieved some enlightened state of total consumer detachment. But I do have one rule now, which I apply before I add anything to a cart from a short-form video, and which has saved me a remarkable amount of money and cupboard space.

I wait three days.

That's it. I note the item. I sometimes screenshot the video. I set a reminder for three days later. If, in three days, I have thought about this item again and still want it and can articulate why I want it in a sentence that doesn't include the words "everyone in the comments had it" or "it was only £9 anyway," I'll buy it. If I've forgotten about it — and I forget about roughly seventy percent of them — it's the clearest possible signal that the want was borrowed rather than real.

This is, I know, not a radical insight. It's basically the advice your sensible friend has probably given you. But there's something about coming to it yourself — through the actual physical process of laying out your impulse purchases and accounting for them honestly — that makes it stick differently than being told it from outside. I arrived at the three-day rule not from a budgeting article but from standing in my own bedroom holding a kitchen gadget I'd used twice and asking myself how this happened. The answer was instructive. The rule followed naturally.

Buy less, better. That's the gentle conclusion of my TikTok shop audit. And the things that survive — the linen pouch, the back cushion, the little oil diffuser on the windowsill — I'm genuinely glad I have them.

The bigger thing the audit taught me

Somewhere in the process of laying all these purchases out and giving them honest verdicts, I noticed something about the pattern of the ones that didn't survive. The kitchen gadget, the pretty skincare bottle, the decorative thing I bought because I liked the aesthetic of someone else's life: none of them were solving a real problem. They were all solving a feeling — the 3am feeling of wanting, the scroll-induced sense that my life had a gap in it in the shape of this specific item. That's a very different category of purchase, and I'd been treating both types the same way.

The things that survived — the linen pouch, the back cushion, the little diffuser — were all, in some quiet way, solving something real. A specific friction in my actual daily life. The cable tangle. The aching back. The bedroom that didn't smell like mine. They weren't exciting. They didn't come with a comment section full of people saying they'd changed their lives. They just did a thing I needed done, reliably, every day, without requiring any further justification.

There's a version of the mindful consumption conversation that can get a little solemn and self-righteous, and I'm aware I've been edging toward it in this post. I don't want to be preachy about buying things. I like objects. I like the pleasure of a well-made thing. I like finding something small and useful and having it become part of the rhythm of a day. That's a real pleasure and I'm not interested in denying it in the name of minimalism as a moral stance.

What I'm interested in is just: buying deliberately. Buying things that will earn their square footage in my small flat, that I will actually use and notice and be glad of. Curating, slowly, toward a collection of objects that genuinely belong in my life rather than objects I accumulated in moments of longing for someone else's life. The audit helped me see the difference. The three-day rule helps me apply it going forward. And the linen pouch lives in my bag and the diffuser is on the windowsill and on the days when everything else is a bit much, those small right things feel like a quiet sort of wealth.