The Duchess of Sussex’s weekend trip to Paris dominated headlines for a full four days. They’re still talking about it, obviously, but the fever broke and I hope some people are deeply ashamed of how they tied Meghan’s Balenciaga beauty to Princess Diana’s death. Well, the haters are on to their new “thing”: complaining about a photo on As Ever’s site. The photo, seen above, debuted on As Ever’s site last Friday, alongside the product restock of jams and teas and the introduction of As Ever’s first Sauvignon Blanc. In the photo, which was taken in Meghan’s real Montecito kitchen, you can see Meghan peering into a steaming pot and using some fancy tongs to presumably extract a sealed jar of jam. Look closely – they’re claiming that Meghan is using the jar tongs incorrectly. According to Tom Sykes on his Royalist Substack, this is just further evidence of Meghan’s “authenticity crisis.”

If jam really is Meghan Markle’s jam, then does it seem reasonable to expect she would know one end of a canning tool from the other? I ask this because an image of the duchess making jam at home has lit up bulletin boards after attentive readers noticed she was holding her jar lifter upside down, plunging the rubber handles into the boiling water instead of the (usefully jar-shaped) metal end.

The mistake seems, to me at least, to be a powerful metaphor for the yawning void at the heart of Meghan’s brand and image. In an age obsessed with “being real,” it suggests that the Meghan part of the Sussex project—so reliant on telegraphing authenticity—is, at its core, staged for the cameras.

Using the wrong end of a jam lifter is a fairly common mistake, and, at the end of the day, if it got the jar safely out of the boiling water, does it matter? On a brand DNA level, yes. And it’s no good having a go at me in the comments for being mean to Meghan, because the upside-down canning tool debate is a thing that is actually happening on the internet right now. I’m not making this up. This exercises people.

Confusion, muddle, and, frankly, hypocrisy, have shadowed Meghan since the day she left royal life. And when it comes to rebrands, the speed of her pivots leaves the audience unmoored.

The entire With Love, Meghan debacle crystallized the confusion, beginning with the fact that the kitchen we were invited into was not, in fact, her own. The decision is entirely understandable for a mother of two young children, yet it complicates a project built around selling your lifestyle. She showed us bees in “her” garden and told us she hates honey. A friend who praised her cooking told us they keep cosmetics in the fridge.

Viewers were promised intimacy; what they got was a set. And the more effort that goes into manufacturing authenticity, the more artificial it appears when the cracks, as they must, show.

[From Royalist Substack]

I’ve never canned or hermetically sealed anything in my life, so I spent a minute looking at canning tools and tongs online. I compared the images for sale to the tongs used by Meghan and… sure, it does seem like she’s using them upside-down. But look at the whole photo again – see the little baby-sized jars already on the tray beside the pot? Those jars are likely too small to be “caught” by the “jar-shaped” side of the tongs. Instead of this photo exhibiting inauthenticity, doesn’t it show that Meghan knows certain tricks and jamming-hacks about her own kitchen tools? As for this continued obsession with “Meghan doesn’t film in her own kitchen” – those “critics” really need to get over it. Even when Meghan shows her own kitchen (like in this photo in question), they’re still bitching and nitpicking.

Photos courtesy of As Ever’s Instagram and Meghan’s Instagram.