As a product to put on your face, Snake Oil was not ideal; an ingredients list she eventually posted online showed that the first ingredient was grapeseed oil, a perfectly fine product that sells for around $3 for a 4-ounce bottle at most natural foods stores. It was accompanied by a lineup of other fragrant oils that a dermatologist told VICE UK could very easily lead to a sensitizing reaction. (Many skincare experts do not recommend putting fragrance of any kind on your face, for obvious reasons.) As VICE UK reporter Katherine Rodgers pointed out at the time, the sterility of the product was also questionable, given that there was a visible cat hair in one of the product shots Calloway posted to Instagram.Calloway’s once-loyal fans want her to leave behind more than decaying flowers and dead batteries: Many of them still want closure, and also a refund.
She’s selling a $75 bottle of untested face oil and making several unsubstantiated, undocumented, unscientific, false misleading, deceptive claims about its medical benefits and efficacy. She claims that it is the elixir of youth, and that in a month you'll see results (despite zero testing), claims that the ingredients can repair damage to DNA at a cellular level and reduce skin cancer cells, among other outrageous claims. None of these claims have been tested and there are no sources for them. She’s marketing this to her impressionable Instagram followers and lying about having used the concoction herself for years. She also provides no contact information, has no posted refund policy, and no timeline for shipping. Additionally, she has been selling preorders of a book on her website for over a year (since Jan 2020), with no updates about when it will be written or shipped to those who paid. She originally promised that it would be shipped in March 2020, then pushed in multiple times without notifying customers. Now she’s taken the long-passed estimated shipping date off her website and it just says it will come when it comes, as she continues to advertise the book on her Instagram and take money from people for preorders. Also no refund policy for this.
Caroline Calloway became Caroline Calloway long before FDA complaints, unusable face oils, and missing chandeliers. She first came to prominence as a sort of aspirational college lifestyle influencer. Originally from Virginia, she spent years honing an American-fairy-tale-at-Cambridge University persona, replete with river jaunts, black-tie balls, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and a Swedish, polo-playing boyfriend, all shared with the world via an episodic tale told in Instagram captions. When she moved to New York, she produced aspirational content for the addled era of young woman who came of age between Sex and the City and Girls: she seemed to live a life bedecked with artistic chaos, flowers, stacks of books, and daily Pilates workouts. In 2015, as she told Man Repeller, she scored a contract with Flatiron Books for the first version of her memoir, quickly spent her entire advance (mainly on rent for a London flat she shared with a boyfriend at the time and “meals,” she said), and then was dropped “when it became clear to my publishers that I didn’t want to write this book.”“I paid and I kept on asking for help but only heard back once. I look at her Instagram and there are other customers who are not receiving their products either. In the comments people are mentioning not receiving anything.”
Beach’s essay cemented Calloway’s reputation for over-promising and under or non-delivering; Calloway responded by launching a website where she claimed she’d deliver her response essay in serialized form, charging $10 per installment and claiming she’d give the money to the organization Direct Relief. She delivered three installments; the website is now gone. In the third installment, Calloway wrote about learning that her father had died by suicide not long before Beach’s essay was released, another horrifying data point making it hard to view her without a healthy dose of pity. This moment was another turning point, and Calloway became even more adept at social media: She had a voracious appetite for controversy, a blithe lack of interest in whether the attention she was receiving was positive or negative, and a canny young woman’s ability to be occasionally, strategically nude online (she briefly set up an OnlyFans, saying she made $130,000 from it). She also abused Adderall and talked about living with mental illness, which put a far sadder light on some of her antics. After promoting Snake Oil and spending months of 2021 enmeshed in a certain version of New York's downtown scene—she developed a curious symbiotic relationship with the post-left anti-feminist shitlords of Red Scare—all her accounts went quiet. Calloway claimed to be working on her book in England, and it wasn't until February of this year that she returned from Twitter hibernation. Then, almost as quickly, she began staking out the terms of her departure, framing it as the logical next step. “I started my Instagram account when I was 20 and moved in here,” Calloway said in one recent TikTok, gesturing to the mostly-empty apartment. “You could never tell because my skin, because Snake Oil”—here she paused, rolled her eyes, stuck out her tongue, and pointed at her face. “But I’m 30 now, and I’ve realized that my purpose in this world is writing a book. I don’t have many books in me. I’m very much a Harper Lee. I’ve always known since I was little that I’d be a famous memoirist and that I’d have one important book. And I need to make that for the world, because I think it will help people who struggle with suicide, honestly.” She promised that while the book will take a while, “I’m making beautiful, effervescent, radiant prose that will explode over you.”It began to seem like the high-volume background noise of her life meant she couldn’t produce anything but Instagram captions.
Another very online presence, the poet Rachel Rabbit White, has moved into Calloway’s apartment and documented the wreckage left behind: dirt-smeared floors, fetid countertops, mystery jars of liquid in the refrigerator, wads of trash and batteries in the sink. White has been kind about Calloway herself, writing on Instagram, “I really feel for her! Obviously things got…. Intense.. In her life. From what I know, she seems like a person who wants to give ppl around her lots of love but I’m not sure anyone was taking care of her in return.” (It’s unclear whether Calloway moved out voluntarily or was evicted; court records appear to show that her landlord filed eviction papers in New York City’s housing court in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, stating that she owed several thousand dollars in back rent. Neither Calloway nor the agent who has represented to her responded to a question about whether Calloway is being evicted or moving out voluntarily, but the fact that she handed the apartment over to White suggests the latter.) In a certain light, the squalid state of Calloway’s apartment is disturbing, and it’s impossible not to reflect on how difficult life gets for an attractive young woman with a knack for the spotlight and a tendency towards the scammy as she gets older and has fewer bridges to burn and ropes to fray. The people who ordered things from her that never arrived seem to toggle between frustration and resignation; several people have noted on Twitter that their bottles of Snake Oil have shown as “in transit” for several months, existing in a sort of metaphorically apt liminal space that they seem unlikely to ever escape. Or—in as liminal a space as Calloway herself. In the meantime, Calloway seems somewhat undaunted, posting regularly to TikTok and liking and retweeting every comment about her on Twitter, good or bad, approving or exasperated. Her book is, for those who live in a certain kind of hope, still available for pre-order.In a certain light, the squalid state of Calloway’s apartment is disturbing, and it’s impossible not to reflect on how difficult life gets for an attractive young woman with a knack for the spotlight and a tendency towards the scammy as she gets older and has fewer bridges to burn and ropes to fray.