Colleen Hoover, the viral romance author, has teamed up with Olive & June to create a press-on and nail polish collection available at Target. The colors of the 17 press-on nail sets and eight polishes are inspired by the covers of Hoover’s novels. The collection is rapidly selling out, but the marketing for this collaboration feels horribly tone-deaf.
Two of Hoover’s novels featured in the collection, It Ends With Us and the sequel It Starts With Us, deal with the themes of domestic violence and abuse in a rather poor, romanticized way. I am not a fan of Hoover’s work as her novels tend to resemble mass-produced romance books that have disturbing undertones. The title of It Ends With Us refers to the main characters separating from one another after the male love interest abuses the female lead one too many times. The abuse is graphic and disturbing, and the female lead continues to remain in contact with her abuser, allowing him to see their child whilst knowing that he is physically abusive.
Creating a nail set based on two novels that poorly handle domestic violence is extremely inappropriate. In the display shown at Target, It Ends With Us is captioned with “Great manis and great reads.” It Starts With Us has the caption “It starts with beautiful nails.” Did the marketing team at Olive & June even read the books? This is a capitalist cash grab that is a slap in the face to survivors of domestic abuse and assault. It’s absolutely disgusting that Hoover, who has already faced scrutiny in the literary community for her romanticization of abuse, agreed to a nail-set collaboration that so blindly misconstrues the titles of the texts into a marketing strategy.
Hoover’s fans are mainly young women on BookTok, impressionable women who may face abusive relationships in the future. The National Library of Medicine found that 10 million Americans experience domestic violence every year, with as many as 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men being victims. Hoover and Olive & June have no respect for survivors.
There is no problem with collaborating with a beauty company to create color palettes inspired by book covers, but when it comes to novels that romanticize abusive relationships, that is a major misstep. The polish colors may be beautiful, and the press-on nails may be strong and stunning, but domestic violence is not.
