In June I applied to review wigs for a brand on Reddit.
I want to be clear about that up front, because I wasn’t dragged into this. I saw the call-out, I put my hand up, I was excited. I’d never tried Luvme before and it had been on my list for ages. I’ve worn toppers or wigs for years and I’m always looking for the next thing to slap onto my noggin.
Then the actual brief landed and I sat there reading it twice.
It’s mostly ordinary stuff. Pick a wig. They ship it. Three to five posts depending on what the wig costs. Photos, mainly, with barely any writing, one or two sentences a post. Send the draft over first so they can look at it.
Fine. Normal. And then near the bottom, under a heading called Important Notes, this:
No call-to-action phrases like “go buy.”
No screenshots of our product pages.
Please write from the perspective of a real consumer and do not mention that the wig was gifted.
I read that last line about four times. Write as a real consumer, and don’t say we gave it to you.
And then directly underneath, in bold:
Once your draft is approved, we’ll let you know which subreddits to post in. Plus, you will be provided with an exclusive link in case anyone asks about the wig source.
That’s the bit that actually got me. They’d thought about it. They knew someone in the comments would ask where you got the wig, and they had an answer ready that isn’t “the brand posted it to me for free.”
Is Luvme Hair legit, and is this a wig review?
Short answer on the legit bit: yes. Luvme Hair is a real company, the wig they promised turned up, and it is real human hair. There are complaints about them on Trustpilot and on their BBB profile if you want to go and read those, and that is a separate question to the one I’m asking here. This post is about one line in their collaboration email.
Luvme are not the only wig company to have asked me not to say an item was gifted. I’ve said no every time. I’d rather you knew the ask gets made at all.
And if you’ve said yes to one of these, I’m not having a go at you. The companies know exactly what they’re doing. They go looking for women on Reddit who are already posting about their hair loss, who probably can’t stretch to a wig on their own, and then a brand they’ve seen everywhere turns up offering them one for nothing.
But I’m going off on a tangent again. Reddit used to be where you went to hear from actual people, and the brands have worked that out. Not every glowing review is what it looks like. There’s a bit further down on what I check before I believe one.
What that would have looked like
Picture it from the other side.
You’re on Reddit trying to work out if a wig is worth two hundred quid. You find a post from a woman with a normal account, a few years old, posting in the same subs you post in. She’s got five photos. The hairline looks good. She says she loves it. Someone asks where she got it and she drops a link.
Nothing about that post tells you a brand chose the subreddit, approved the wording before it went up, and sent her the wig for nothing.
Thats not a review. That’s an advert with the label peeled off.
This is also not the first time a wig brand has asked me to put my name to something that wasn’t true. A while back one emailed me asking for a five star Amazon review before the wig had even turned up on my doorstep, which I wrote about in that time a wig brand asked me to lie on Amazon.
What I did
I said no.
Not in a big dramatic way, I just wrote back and said I couldn’t do that particular bit, because in the UK you have to disclose gifted products and it’s not optional. ASA rules. It applies on Reddit the same as anywhere else.
To their credit, they came back nicely. They asked which specific part didn’t work for me, so I told them plainly: the instruction not to mention the wig was gifted. That was the whole problem.
And here’s where I have to be honest with you, because otherwise this post is a bit rich.
I did go ahead with them afterwards. I have their wig. It arrived in June and I haven’t posted the review yet. When I do, it will say they sent it to me, at the bottom of the post and in the captions, same as everything else. Anything gifted to me gets disclosed. Always. I went ahead because I wanted to review the wig and I was willing to do it on terms I could live with.
You can decide what you think about that. I’d rather tell you than have you find out.
And the wig itself, since you’ll ask
It’s the Rich Chocolate Brown Silky Straight, 18 inches, 180% density, glueless 13×4 frontal with the drawstring cap.
I’m in the UK, so one quick note if you are as well. Luvme price everything in dollars, so check the shipping and whether customs is going to catch you on the product page itself before you order anything.
It’s alright. The hair is soft, the colour is lovely and the cap is comfy. It’s also very thin. Not unwearable, I have actually worn it, but thin. Would I hand over my own money for it? No, I wouldn’t.
I’m not saying that to be mean about it. There’s just a gap between “this is fine and I’ll wear it” and “this is worth what they’re asking for it”, and I’m allowed to sit somewhere in the middle of that while still telling you which end I’m nearer.
Anyway, that’s the wig bit out of the way.
The thing I can’t tell you
There’s a limit to what I actually know here, and I don’t know what anybody else did with that email.
How many creators got the same brief, how many pushed back, how many went along with it, how many never clocked the line at all because it sits buried under a heading about screenshots and calls to action. I can’t see inside anybody else’s inbox and neither can you, so I’m not going to point at specific posts and call them fake.
That’s exactly the problem though, isn’t it? Once you know a brief like that exists, every enthusiastic wig post you scroll past comes with a small question mark attached, and I don’t think you can un-know it.
Turns out I’m not the only one
I mentioned this in a thread over on r/Wigs, where people were already comparing notes about brands and planted reviews. A few other people in there said Luvme had come to them too.
Different accounts, different people, all describing more or less the same thing. Messaged out of nowhere and offered a free wig to post about it. One of them had publicly said she didn’t rate Luvme’s wigs and got asked to promote them anyway.
None of them said they were told to hide the gifting. That instruction is in my email and I can only speak for my email. There’s a difference between getting recruited and getting told to hide it, and I’m not going to blur the two.
What it does tell you is that I wasn’t a one-off. They’re working a community that women go to specifically because they think they’re hearing from each other.
You can read the r/Wigs thread yourself, and I’d rather you did. Don’t take my word for any of it.
How to read wig posts now
I’m not asking you to be paranoid about it. What I do now is mostly boring stuff.
Does the person post about anything else, ever, or is their whole account this one wig? Watch what happens with the awkward follow-up questions, not just the easy ones. And five polished photos with a one-line caption is a very different post to somebody telling you the cap dug in behind their ear. Real people complain about something. Even about a wig they love, there’s usually a bit that annoys them. And if you ask where they got it and they hand you a link with a tracking code on the end, that tells you something too.
None of it proves anything. All it’s done is made me read a bit slower than I used to.
The same instincts apply before you’ve even got as far as the reviews. I went through the ad side of it in buyer beware when buying that hair, which is mostly about the before and after photos in the Facebook ads and what happens when the piece that turns up doesn’t match them.
Why this actually makes me angry
Think about who is sat in a wig subreddit at midnight.
Mostly it’s women who have just watched their parting widen in a bathroom mirror. Women who’ve come off a diagnosis, or a treatment, or a year of scraping their hair into a bun and hoping nobody noticed. Women who have already spent money they didn’t really have on a first piece that turned out wrong, and are now terrified of getting it wrong twice. That is the room these brands are walking into, and they know it. It’s exactly why they bother.
So somebody in that state gets a message offering a free wig. Hundreds of pounds of the exact thing she’s been staring at for weeks and can’t justify. All she has to do is post some nice photos and say she loves it.
In my opinion that’s predatory. I know it’s a strong word. I’m using it anyway.
Because look at what’s actually being traded. She gets a wig. They get her face, her voice, her ordinary-looking account, and the trust she’s built up in a community of women who assume she’s one of them. She’s spending something she doesn’t know she’s spending, and she probably won’t work out what it cost her until somebody in the comments accuses her of shilling.
And the woman who reads that post is the next one sat there at midnight. She sees a real person with real hair loss saying this wig changed things for her. She doesn’t see a brief. She doesn’t see who picked the subreddit.
A wig is not a lipstick. It’s several hundred pounds, and it’s the thing you wear on your head every single day while you feel awful about your head. If you’re spending that, you deserve to know which of the voices telling you it’s brilliant were handed theirs for free.
That’s it. That’s the whole reason I wrote this.
Update: they’ve taken me off the programme
I’m not on the review programme anymore. A few automated emails turned up saying I hadn’t sent my review over in time, and that was that.
Which was a bit confusing, because the last email I had from an actual person asked me to hold off posting, as they wanted the review to mention the influencer programme. So I held off. Then the automated ones started arriving to tell me I’d missed the window. I left it there.
Over on the r/Wigs thread I’d said I’d opted not to do it. That was written after the automated emails had started and I’d pretty much written the whole thing off.
Am I still going to write the full review? Yes. I said I would, and I’ve still got the wig.
FAQ
Did Luvme Hair ask you not to say the wig was gifted?
Yes. Their collaboration guidelines, emailed to me on 3 June 2026, included the line “Please write from the perspective of a real consumer and do not mention that the wig was gifted” under a heading called Important Notes. The screenshot of that email is in this post. I declined that term and told them why.
Do you have to disclose gifted products on Reddit in the UK?
Yes. Under UK ASA rules, if a brand gives you a product in exchange for content, that content is advertising and it has to be identifiable as advertising before anyone engages with it. Reddit is not an exception. Neither is a comment, a photo post or a one-line caption.
Is Luvme Hair legit?
In the sense most people mean, yes. They are a real company, the wig they promised arrived, and it is real human hair. What I take issue with in this post is one line in their collaboration brief asking me not to mention the wig was gifted, which is a separate question from whether your order turns up.
Did you work with Luvme Hair anyway?
I did. I refused the non-disclosure line, they accepted that, and I went ahead on terms I could live with. The wig arrived in June and I haven’t published the review yet. When I do it will say they sent it to me, the same as anything else I’m gifted. I have since been taken off the review programme, which I’ve explained in the update above. This post is not part of that collaboration and nobody at Luvme saw it before it went up.
How can you tell if a wig post is an undisclosed ad?
Often you can’t be sure, and I’d be wary of anyone who says they can. I look at whether the account has any life outside this one wig, and whether the awkward comments get answered as readily as the easy ones. A post with no complaint in it anywhere is worth a second read. So is a link with a tracking code on the end. None of it is proof.
Luvme sent me a wig for review in June 2026 as part of a gifted collaboration. The review isn’t up yet, and when it goes up it will be disclosed, the same as everything gifted to me always is. This post is not part of that collaboration and nobody paid for it or saw it before it went up.
Get my newsletter
I send one email a week, every Friday. New posts, what’s new in beauty, wigs and toppers, beauty deals and my current discount codes. Sign up here, it’s free and you can unsubscribe any time.
