(Another Xmas-related posting. These will go on for some time, since the backlog of material is huge, and I’ve only been able to manage one posting a day: back in isolation, with plenty of time in my days, but enmired in the tar of dismay, so I work even more slowly than usual.)
It’s about an “It’s a Fairy” ad of the season — for Christmas ornaments from the Stars Gemstone company — on my Facebook page, the ad and the ornnaments fashioned for a gay male audience:
(#1) (Note that a (sprite) fairy in French is masculine gender, un fée; a (faggot) fairy is, less surprisingly, masculine gender too, un pédé) The ornaments are marketed merely as adorable fairies for the Xmas tree — who doesn’t love fairies? — with little notice that they all happen to be male fairies posing as sexy underwear models, in fact as models in beefcake mode (#2 doing a cock tease; the whole bottom row wearing black armbands, on their right biceps to indicate that they’re bottoms)
One more fairy, plus a description in somewhat rocky English:
(#2)
(#3)
They aren’t cheap ($37 each, $28.70 on sale for Christmas).
And then there’s more. Bears (of the hairy-burly queer variety, not from the family Ursidae) and mermen (aquatic beefcake!):
(#4) The company (apparently) has all sorts of Xmas ornaments and decorations for sale, but this is all they list in their on-line catalog, and it’s all way gay
From the About page on the site:
(#5) This is where things get weird
So there’s not only the website, but a bricks-and-mortar store, packed with displays of many sorts. Where do you think this store is located? Texas, you say, because it has “the largest collection of Christmas trees in Texas”.
Not at all. The store is in Milan: not Milan (pronounced /máylɪn/), Michigan (which seems to be the largest place named Milan in the US; there is no Milan in Texas), but Milan (pronounced /mɪlán/ in English) — that is, Milano — in Italy. Specifically at Via Giuseppe Balzaretti, 36, 20133 Milano. (Apparently, if you order something, it’s shipped from Italy.)
Meanwhile, the website has a picture of the company’s founders, an unnamed, apparently American, couple who say they used to sell at shows and festivals, mainly with their mermen collection, and then expanded to take in more products. Now: “we have but one mission and that is for our customers to have the best Christmas ever full of beautiful decor!”
Hmm. There is certainly a website starsgemstone.com, and the site says there’s a store in Milano, but Google finds nothing for “Stars Gemstone Company” except companies offering gemstone jewelry, and apparently: the only things you can order on-line from Stars Gemstone are the gay Xmas ornaments in #4; while everything else, including those Texas Christmas trees, you have to pick up in Milano. That doesn’t seem to square with the tale of a couple selling their wares at shows and festivals.
But it does seem likely that you can order the gay ornaments and expect to get them (eventually) in the mail. How much of the rest of it is execrable website design and how much sheer invention, I cannot say.
March 25, 2022 at 3:57 pm |
I ordered the gay ornaments, the bundle of the 8 Christmas Fairies and the bundle of the 6 Christmas Bears on January 22, 2022 which totalled $197.64. I received a packet with 2 boxes in it, each containing identical ornaments which, although in the same basic pose as the Elvin ornament in the Starsgemstone photos, was shoddily done, very bad paint job and one address label on the packet was from China while another was from ‘Joe Doe” via Springfield Gardens, NY. I’ve been emailing them via the email provided on the website and they have answered but I think it’s an automated answer. If I want a 5% refund, I’m to return the ornaments to China which they say will be expensive. Of course, this is unacceptable. Luckily, I paid via paypal so should be able to get my money back. I also googled the address in Italy, and nothing remotely resembling the store in the photos on the site appears on google earth. I’ve reported this to ‘Scamwatcher.com’ and plan to report it on other scam sites. Scamwatcher has nearly 80 reports of this Joe Doe sending things to people that didn’t order anything or sending the wrong items on orders they did order.
March 25, 2022 at 4:12 pm |
I was afraid it might be a scam, and so it turns out to be. So sorry you got burned; even if PayPal gets your money back to you, you’ve been very badly treated.