What Gen Z Got for Christmas in 2025
we officially have a new "it" water bottle
For the last few years, I’ve watched thousands of Christmas hauls on TikTok, tallying up the most popular gifts of the holiday season.
If you’re new to this riveting (truly!) genre of short-form content, Christmas hauls are videos in which people — primarily young women — share the gifts they’ve received for the holidays, typically holding up each item, one by one, for the camera. It makes for an amusing watch, but it’s also a really useful barometer for what young people actually want right now.
I like to send this recap within a few days of the 25th — 2024’s was on the 27th and 2023’s on the 29th — but this year, the Christmas hauls just kept coming! Even today, almost a full week after Christmas, my feed continues to be populated with shiny new Christmas hauls. The volume surprised me, since, as I noted a few weeks ago, there were far fewer Christmas wishlist TikToks this year.
Despite economic pressures (tariffs, rising unemployment, persistent inflation), the vast majority of the hauls I watched were bigger and more expensive than ever. The vibecession came through in funny ways — one girl began her haul by saying, “Okay, this is my Christmas haul. I almost didn’t do a Christmas haul as, like, a protest to capitalism, but everybody’s been asking me for one.” Financial constraints aside, there was no shortage of abundance: Shark gadgets galore, so many Gucci (?!) bags, and enough Uggs to populate a large sheep farm.
THE TOP 15 GEN Z GIFTS OF 2025
1. RHODE SKINCARE KIT, $117: Hailey Bieber’s brand was ubiquitous across Christmas hauls, especially the logoed Peptide Depuffing Eye Patches ($25), Pocket Blush ($25), and skincare sets. Of Rhode’s skincare lineup, the Glazing Milk ($32), which functions as a skin-prep pre-makeup toner, is a particular favorite. Most girls noted that these gifts were restocks, which speaks to just how good Rhode’s products are. (And they say brand loyalty is dead!)
2. HYDROJUG, $39: This “it” water bottle ousted last year’s “it” water bottle, the Owala, which ousted the previous year’s “it” water bottle, the Stanley. (Most girls point out that the Hydrojug is not prone to spills, unlike the other two.) That said, the LoveShackFancy x Stanley tumbler was still very coveted this year.
3. ALO MATCHING SWEATSHIRTS AND SWEATPANTS, $138 AND $138: Alo sweatsets — which, combined, cost nearly $280 — came up again and again. As far as styles go, the hoodies edged out the crewnecks by a narrow margin, while the straight-leg sweatpant overtook the elasticized ankle. Color-wise, brown and navy were favorites; Gen Z doesn’t love to wear black (unlike millennials who grew up being told that black is the only color you should wear because it makes you look skinniest, something I could but won’t write a thousand words on). Another sweatset brand that came up a lot was Comfrt, whose value prop, according to a cool teen I talked to for this story, is mental health-focused weighted clothing; they’re also notably much cheaper than Alo, though the website is so generically DTC I had to close the tab immediately.
4. JELLYCAT, $35: “One of [the] hottest gifts in the world,” André Maeder, the chief executive of Selfridges, told the New York Times last month. He wasn’t lying! Every girl seemed to get at least one of these.
5. IPHONE 17, $800: I couldn’t believe how many new iPhones I saw, though I probably shouldn’t have been surprised: According to the most recent Piper Sandler Semi-Annual Teen Survey, 87% of teens own an iPhone and 17% of them said they were expecting to upgrade to an iPhone 17 this winter. ”Y’all, the camera quality is actually insanity,” said one girl.
6. MINI UGGS: Two years ago, I wrote that “seemingly everyone” got the $170 Classic Mini Platform Boot; last year, I mostly saw the $160 Classic Mini and $150 Classic Ultra Mini, both sans platform. This year, those same two styles held steady, but the preferred color has begun to shift — many girls got “light Uggs” (the brand calls it “sand”) versus the darker “chestnut” that previously dominated.
7. HATCH ALARM CLOCK, $170: They all wanted it. They all got it.
8. PARKE MOCKNECK, $135: The sweatshirt brand started less than two years ago by 28-year-old TikTok influencer Chelsea Kramer brought in $16 million in revenue last year, mostly from their $125 mock-neck sweatshirts that have become status symbols on college campuses. At a three-day NYC pop-up in May, nearly 1,000 people shopped on opening day, with some customers arriving at 5:45 a.m. and waiting up to six hours to buy sweatshirts. These sweatshirts are pretty much constantly sold out, so I’m not sure how Santa managed to get his hands on so many of them. One girl got six of them!
Scuffers and Boys Lie were the preferred hoodie brands among the girls who find Parke to be too basic (a not insignificant contingent).
9. ENEWTON BRACELETS: This jewelry brand became a staple of rush OOTDs and has, through TikTok virality, expanded beyond sorority girls. It’s perhaps best known for its gold beaded bracelets — having a good “stack” is very important to teens and young twentysomethings — which use 14kt gold-filled beads and supposedly don’t tarnish. “If you know me, you know I’m obsessed with Enewton,” said one girl who got three Enewton necklaces for Christmas.
10. OURA RING, $500: A ton of girls got this health-tracking ring, mostly in gold and rose gold. A few months ago, Vogue reported that the company’s fastest-growing customer segment is 18-25, with sales among women growing 250% in the last year, but I suspect next year will be even bigger.
11. SHARK FLEXSTYLE, $250: This multi-use hair styler, which is around half the price of a Dyson Airwrap, was the most popular SharkNinja tool in TikTok hauls this year, but I also saw a lot of Facial Pros and CryoGlow LED Face Masks. SharkNinja, as Bloomberg wrote a few weeks ago, has more than doubled its annual revenue in five years by creating social media-friendly appliances with “instant payoff” features designed for TikTok virality, like a facial device that lights up the gunk cartridge and a face mask that twinkles when cooling pads activate; Goldman Sachs analyst Brooke Roach described the brand as “aspirational, but it’s still attainable,” which pretty much sums up everything Gen Z wants.
12. CANON POWERSHOT G7 X, $1,305: Digital cameras were the top gift of 2024 based on my Christmas haul research last year; they were marginally less popular this year, which could indicate a lagging trend, or maybe many of them just already have one. Either way, this Canon G7 X was the favorite camera this year. What I found to be amusing is that most girls want a digital camera specifically to improve their Instagram grids; “Instagram pictures are about to be fire,” said one girl.
13. LOLA BLANKET, $400: The $300 (and up) faux-fur throw heavily promoted by influencers has become popular enough to achieve “single-name status” on social media, with the company claiming it’s “the #1 softest blanket on the market.” The blanket has a high fiber density of approximately 1,090 GSM (grams per square meter), putting it at the higher end of the faux-fur category, and is made from 95% high-density minky faux fur and 5% spandex. Wirecutter compared the texture to “the skin of a Jellycat.”
14. IPAD, $350: This generation is obsessed with Apple’s tablet computer. They’re the real iPad kids! Most use it for Pinterest and gaming.
15. BALA ONE-POUND BANGLES, $55: I saw hundreds of Bala Bangles and Bala Bangle dupes, and every single one of them was cotton-candy pink.
A FEW KEY TRENDS (I.E. WHAT THE COOL GIRLS GOT)
I was shocked — shocked! — by how many Gucci purses I saw in hauls this year. (Lest you think this was a case of DHGate, they all claimed they were real!)
A lot of hauls included a viral Alo exercise skirt that, in several of their words, “everyone has.” They’re talking about the $78 Match Point Tennis Skirt, though as far as I can tell, they rarely wear it to actually play tennis.
I saw hundreds of Intimissimi sweaters. Specifically, the $65 Boat Neck Modal Cashmere Ultralight Top — if you’ve set foot in downtown Manhattan in the last year, you know the one.