Affiliate disclosure

The required statement

Gentle Carat is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

What that means in practice

Most of the buy buttons on this site go to Amazon. When you click one and buy something, Amazon pays us a percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket, and clicking a link here never gets you a worse price than going to Amazon directly.

Buy links are marked. Every one is tagged #ad with a link back to this page, and every commercial page carries a disclosure line above its first affiliate link rather than buried in the footer.

Why the links go through /go

Buy buttons point at an address on this site (/go/<product>) which then redirects you to the retailer. That is not obfuscation — the destination is named in the button text and the redirect is instant. It exists so that if we ever move a product to a different retailer, the change is one line of configuration rather than an edit to every page that mentions it. Those links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", which is what Google asks publishers to do with paid links.

What the commission does not buy

• It does not buy a placement. No brand has paid to appear on this site. There is no rate card and no sponsored post.
• It does not buy a ranking. Commission rates vary between products and categories. That variance has never been an input into an ordering. Where a cheaper product is the better answer, the cheaper product wins, even though it pays us less.
• It does not buy silence. Every roundup on this site contains at least one explicit skip this — a product or category we tell you not to buy. A list with nothing on it we would steer you away from is an advertisement wearing a list’s clothes.
• It does not buy a review copy. We have accepted no free products, because we do not test products at all. See how we pick.

Programs we are and are not in

At launch, Amazon Associates is the only affiliate program Gentle Carat participates in. Where we mention a brand that sells directly and that we have no relationship with, the link is an ordinary one and we earn nothing from it. We will say so on the page when that is the case.

If that changes — if we join another network — this page changes with it, on the day it happens.

Prices

Prices shown on this site come from an automated feed and are stamped with the date they were checked. They go stale quickly; a price older than 48 hours is hidden and replaced with “Check price on Amazon” rather than shown to you as though it were current. Always confirm the price on the retailer’s page before buying.

Questions

If something here is unclear, or you think a page is not disclosing properly, tell us: info@gentlecarat.com, or the contact form.