Why I don’t review most products

People curious about the blogging process sometimes ask why bloggers don’t devote many posts to reviewing products they hate or feel just meh about. I think that this is an interesting snarl. I can only speak for myself, but here are the main reasons I don’t review every product:

• My collection is vast and blogging is in no way my job. In fact, I’ve come to feel like blogging is holding me back from actual self-care, ironic as that sounds. The idea of reviewing, even on Instagram or multi-product posts, everything I own…YIKES. It would make a hobby into a dreaded job. I review maybe…1 in 50 products if you count Western products, makeup, deluxe samples, and sheet masks? Is that even possible? Well, judging by the size of my collection and infrequent reviewing, maybe. There’s a reason I get excited about the ones that rise to a level that I deem worthy of review.
• Products that don’t impress me don’t get a full testing cycle. If something doesn’t impress me after a few uses it gets booted from my skincare and makeup work table so I can use something I like or a different new product. Life is too short to use bad products. That said, the idea of giving a product a bad standalone review simply because it didn’t blow me away on the six occasions I happened to use it seems a bit unfair.
• Readers are vastly less enthusiastic about reading middling or negative reviews of products unless the product is so bad the review can be funny.
• There are TONS of great products that I want to write about, but I’m currently interested in total body self-care and I blog for fun. If I’m going to steal time from cooking dinner, playing with my kids (err cats), and exercising, I need the product to be worth the time I spend on my ass. Considering that lots of ass-sitting can contribute to major health issues and shortened life expectancy (and I already do plenty of it at work) I have to ask myself each time I do a review: “Is this product worth potentially shortening my life by x number of minutes, hours, days, months?” If a product isn’t up to that standard, fuck it, I’m not a review machine marching to an early grave for the sake of being prolific.
• In the vast majority of cases, I don’t accept sponsored products/press samples so that I don’t even feel a sliver of obligation to review products. I take my job as enabler-in-chief here seriously, and I want total control over what gets discussed and what doesn’t here. I like the idea of a ridiculous product rejection rate, and each product I review needs to rise organically to the top, often over the course of months of testing.
• I literally have a cat on my arm and no products are getting reviewed. Nothing is getting done. My mouse is under a cat butt. He’s been like this since I came back from a work trip. omg

A photo posted by Tracy (@fanserviced) on Apr 8, 2016 at 3:32pm PDT

How I’m sharing negative information about products:

• I’m mentioning products that I didn’t like at the same time I review those I did like. For example, when I reviewed my favorite BHA, I talked quickly about 10 that I tested for varying lengths of time that didn’t win the race. I think that’s the method that I’ll use now to quickly share what I know about alternatives that don’t make the cut with me.
• I’m slamming products on my snapchat (username: fanserviced) like it’s fight night.
• Tweet me (@fanserviced) if you want to know about a product I haven’t talked about but might own.

I hope this answers some questions people have about the rationale behind what gets reviewed and what doesn’t, at least on fan-b. Season Three, my third year of blogging, is going to start very soon, so it made sense to share this info before moving forward.