About

Plaster Goods covers new objects: menswear, watches, spirits, caffeine, cars, travel, home, hi-fi, tech and grooming. We say what a thing costs in the first paragraph, where the specification came from, and whether we think you should buy it. That is the whole format.

There is a lot of writing about products and most of it has the same two problems. It will not tell you the price until the end, and it will not tell you its opinion at all. A page that describes eleven jackets without ranking them has wasted your afternoon. We would rather be wrong in public than useless.

How we decide what goes up

Brands and their agencies send us releases. We read them, bin most of them, and write about the few that are genuinely new, genuinely good, or genuinely absurd. The third category earns its place. A $499 toothbrush with a camera in it is more interesting than a competent $60 one, and pretending otherwise is how product writing became unreadable.

We write every word ourselves. We do not run releases as copy, we do not publish sponsored posts, and nothing here was paid for by the brand that makes it.

What we have and have not touched

Almost everything here is reported rather than tested, and we will not pretend otherwise. You will not read what a jacket feels like from someone who has never held it. You will read what the material is, what the figures mean in use, and what the thing asks of you. Each piece carries a line at the bottom saying where its facts came from and on what date we checked them.

If a sample arrives and we use it, the piece says so at the top, in the first line. That is a different kind of article and you should know which one you are reading.

Money

Some outbound links earn a commission. The disclosure sets out how. The commission is the same whether we recommend a thing or tell you to skip it, which is the only arrangement under which a recommendation means anything.

One more thing, since it sits under everything here. These are objects. The good ones are worth owning and none of them will carry a life on their own. We would rather say that plainly than write as though a jacket could.