Ruby Granger

No. Ruby tends to read exclusively children's books, short stories, essays and poetry. The relatively short length of these types of literature mean that she reads dozens of individual books in the same time it might take someone else to read one full-length novel.

Ruby's own "readathon" videos show that she often considers an entire collection of essays completely "read" if she's just read one individual essay or story. She also tends to compile several days' worth of footage and pass it off as being a single day, giving the appearance that she read more in one day than actually happened.

She's also given ample appearance that she does not read many of the books she claims to, and often struggles to provide any more information than you'd find on a back cover blurb or Wikipedia synopsis.

Ruby has also in the past openly admitted that she does not like to read subplots involving, for example, teen drama and romance. She admits that she will skim and skip large sections of books if they do not appeal to her.

It's not.

Her "daily" vlogs are actually compiled from footage recorded across multiple days/weeks/months.

Ruby has been caught far too many times to count lying about the timescales of her "daily" vlogs.

Continuity errors are her greatest enemy, and Ruby has been caught out by the following in numerous videos:

• Nail polish spontaneously changing multiple times throughout a single day.
• On-screen clocks and watches contradicting Ruby's claimed time of day.
• Outfits changing an average of 7 times a day.
• On-screen planners showing several wildly differing dates throughout a single "day".

Ruby knows people are aware of the above, and tends to now include lost of passive-aggressive comments when she changes her outfit for the 63rd time in an afternoon. "And OF COURSE, I change my outfits A LOT." It doesn't make it any more believable.

Ruby also relies heavily on the old "tell, don't show" shortcut; she says she did something time-consuming, but it conveniently happened off-screen. (It never happened.)

So don't feel bad about what you can get done in a day. Ruby isn't cramming 72 hours of productivity into a single day, she's just lying about it to try to get a hollow ego boost from people on the internet.

In January 2021 - not long after taking money from the NHS to promote basic hygiene and Covid safety on Instagram - Ruby (and Jack Edwards, possibly other influencers) posted on their Instagram to highlight the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day itself.

People quickly started to ask questions, mainly "Why does this post have "AD" in it?" and "Were you paid for this post?" And, yes, unfortunately this wasn't done out of the goodness of her heart to raise awareness for a charity near and dear to Ruby. It was a paid ad, and she happily accepted money from a Holocaust charity to promote a cause she otherwise wouldn't have paid any mind to.

She quickly received massive backlash.

And then she apologised and gave the money back, right?

Nope. She posted an extra comment not to admit fault or apologise, but to essentially say "I wasn't going to say anything because I don't want to make a big deal of all the charity work I totally, absolutely do when nobody's looking, honest, but the money I got paid for this post will be "reinvested" into Holocaust education and anti-bullying awareness." No need to thank her.

People quickly demanded details of her dubious explanation. Ruby claimed that she would be working on a grand project to build permanent Holocaust memorials in "underfunded state schools", and didn't want to announce this previously until it was all confirmed. But it was absolutely a real plan and definitely not just made up to avoid giving the money back.

So how many of these school Holocaust memorials has she built so far?

Zero. For a year after announcing the dubious project, Ruby deleted comments and blocked anyone who asked about it. On the rare occasion she responded, she excuses and delays but no actual updates on the memorial project. As late as November 2021, Ruby was assuring people that it was all deep in the works and we'd be hearing more mid-2022.

So it's all looking good then?

Well, not so fast... in January 2022, a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, Ruby posted a series of Instagram stories. She wanted to "clear up the confusion" regarding her charity swindle.

She claimed that, despite having the bestest of best intentions, at some unspecified time after accepting the money, she "retrospectively realised" that she shouldn’t be telling the charity how to spend their money and decided to scrap the project, allegedly return the money and start her own memorial project funded with her own money after she graduates. But she assured everyone that the money "OF COURSE" had now been returned.

She provided no further details or proof that any money was returned or that there was every any project in development.

There was no information as to how much work had been completed on this project that she'd claimed to have been hard at work on for a year.

There was no details as to how much of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust's time, money, labour and resources were wasted on this vanity project.

There was no explanation as to why she didn't just return the money in the first place and fund it with her own money.

Phew. But at least that's it for the Holocaust controversies, right?

Umm...no.

So, shortly after the above claim that she gave 2021's HMD money back, Ruby celebrated HMD 2022 by putting up an Instagram post advertising her new project: A Holocaust memorial page on, of all places, Notion.

It was, Ruby claimed, intended to be a learning resource for people to educated themselves about the Holocaust and share their own stories regarding the subject.

To share your stories, you merely had to sign up to Notion. Or, as an alternate avenue, you could email Ruby and she'd add it to the Notion page for you, although there was every possibility that she'd apply her English "skills" to it beforehand and rewrite it before uploading it.

Ruby neglected to point out that she'd been sponsored by Notion and paid to advertise their service in the past, so the whole endeavour felt like a Notion sign-up drive disguised as a charity endeavour.

The Notion page itself was a collection of plagiarised content from other, more reputable sources. Ruby has reworded and rewritten them, and in the process had added several errors and historical inaccuracies.

Ruby had also uploaded a video of herself performing a..."dramatic" reading of the story of Franziska Mikus.

Franziska's is a harrowing story of unimaginable horrors suffered at the hands of the Nazis. But Ruby performed this reading with the skill and delivery of a high school drama prima donna; it was filled with over-the-top "acting" that was all brow-furrowing and head-bobbing with her fake Emma Watson accent cranked to the max, and she took an absurdly long dramatic pause between every sentence.

It also featured loud and distracting background noise as her family slammed doors around the house. Despite this, Ruby did not record a second take.

The video was unintentionally hilarious and was not a proper way to appropriately acknowledge the person's traumatic and important life story in any way.

So she apologised and removed the page, right?

Nope. Her Instagram post was swarmed with negative comments. Ruby ignored them all and swiftly moved on to her next charity scam, waiting only a day to post an ad for On the Edge (a conservation charity) which raised similar questions about her being paid for charity ads.

Without acknowledging the backlash, she quietly replaced the "dramatic reading" video with a narration-free video of her handwritten version of the story.

That sounds better. It was better, wasn't it?

I mean, only in the way that stepping in a bear trap is better than getting hit by a train.

Ruby's handwritten version of the story was full of punctuation errors which made the depiction of this heart-wrenching story almost as cringeworthy and laughable as her audition tape-style reading.

After people raised questions about whether these Holocaust videos were monotised, Ruby at first played dumb, saying she had no clue what videos they were talking about and that she would never profit from the Holocaust, despite already having done that before.

After Tattle users pointed out that the side channel she uploaded them on was too small to monetised, Ruby coincidentally leapt to offer the exact same explanation. She also added that the 2021 HMD charity money was returned "last year", contradicting her January 2022 claim that she'd just returned it and half her stories about her still having the money and using it to fund memorials as late as the end of November 2021.

Without fully addressing the 2022 Holocaust controversy or apologising at all, she quietly deleted the Notion page in February 2022.

So that's it for the controversies?

Oh my, no. There's still a tonne of problematic patterns and history where Ruby’s concerned.

From late 2020 throughout 2021, coinciding with her decision to move back home and study remotely for the rest of the academic year, Ruby displayed dramatic, worrying weight loss in her content.

People raised concerns for her health, and also raised issue with Ruby’s increase in problematic content.

Ruby's content became full of irrelevant footage of very tiny meal portions consisting of bizarre "food" combinations (like frozen peas in porridge or porridge with carrot shavings) bodychecking montages and displayed many red flag ED traits.

Her daily vlogs featured no substantial meals and only tiny servings of porridge or toast paired with an obsessive overreliance on exercise and replacing meals with water. Her study recommendation videos encouraged drinking excessive amounts of water and eating small snacks, but never recommended substantial, nutritious food.

After months of being politely asked not to keep posting content like this, and of being reminded that it is dangerously irresponsible to encourage such unhealthy eating habits to a young, impressionable audience, a lot of whom may be struggling with eating disorders, Ruby ignored it all and kept doing it.

Eventually, in July 2021, the backlash got to the point where Ruby could not ignore it and addressed it in Instagram comments with a hand-waving dismissal to say there was nothing to see, her weight loss wasn't an issue and she wouldn't speak of it further. She increased her habit of reuploading month-old footage and photos as new to gaslight people, obfuscate her weight loss and make it seem like she was looking much healthier.

She continues to post triggering food content, shoehorn footage of absurdly, dangerously small and bland food portions. Occasionally she will acknowledge criticism like it's the first time she's ever been made aware of it.

On the most recent occasion, she was asked to stop posting irresponsible food content in all of her videos, including those unrelated to food. She wilfully ignored the criticism and claimed she hadn't uploaded a food video in a very long time, but would delete her old Victorian food videos, intentionally missing the point. She didn't address it further and still features problematic food content constantly.

On many occasions, Ruby has accidentally left visible browser tabs open in footage of her laptop during videos which showed that she had been watching video content focused on and encouraging ED habits and binge eating, and appears to have a fascination with "thinspo" content. Ruby has blurred these sections of her videos without any comment when she has been asked about them.

Ruby has, for many years, had a fascination with the topic of bullying. She has uploaded many videos for 'Anti-Bullying Week' each year. It's a worthy and important cause, but Ruby's interest in it is questionable, to say the least.

Her own stories of bullying have been inconsistent and almost entirely unbelievable. Early on, she claimed that she had never been bullied herself, but had an interest in the topic.

Around 2016/2017, she read a lot of middle-grade books about bullying while writing her own middle-grade book about bullying: 'Erimentha Parker's To-Do List'. This book, ironically, gained criticism from many who read it due to the protagonist (a thinly-veiled, barely-fictionalised version of Ruby) coming across far less likeable and more of a bully than the actual bullies in the book.

Coincidentally, upon publishing her book, Ruby "remembered" that she herself had been bullied at school. Her stories have been suspiciously vague and wildly inconsistent. The period in which she was apparently bullied has varied from Year 7 to Year 11, depending on what day she talks about the subject. The most extreme example of "bullying" that she could recall was being told that her sweater didn't look great, or that people didn't want to be friends with her.

For Anti-Bullying Week 2021, Ruby uploaded a video which detailed her tips for dealing with bullies.

The video featured more of her inconsistent, incredibly vague and washy bullying experiences. Her discussion of the topic gave the distinct impression that she could not see the distinction between valid criticism and bullying. Her advice included recommending that children who are being bullied strongly reconsider before informing appropriate adults, and to instead practice stoicism, like Ruby says she did, and just let the bullying wash over you and not bother you.

Naturally, this video (which Ruby pledged all the ad revenue from to Unicef) was instantly subjected to massive criticism from people who rightfully pointed out that the suggestions given were dangerous, irresponsible showed no perspective or forethought and was offensive and harmful advice to give to people in much worse situations than Ruby's (likely fabricated) experiences, or who may not be able to simply take control of their own thoughts.

Ruby deleted the video amidst the backlash. She has yet to provide any proof that any ad revenue from this or other anti-bullying videos with similar charity pledges, was donated. She had blocked and deleted comments from people who have mentioned this.

Ruby claims to be a dedicated vegan, and for most of her influencer career, proudly identified as vegan in her Instagram bio, has a separate vegan Instagram account and would mention being vegan often in videos.

On many occasions, Ruby has shown herself eating non-vegan foods and supporting non-vegan companies. These include buying and eating foods and products containing honey, or ordering and eating the veggie burger at Five Guys, even though they openly display that their buns are made with dairy.

She has also endorsed and advertised...

In December 2021, Ruby posted an Instagram post advertising a PETA campaign to stop cruel research experiments on mice at Bath and Bristol Universities.

Ruby received instant criticism for endorsing and signal-boosting PETA, who as an organisation have a vast reputation for being the fucking worst, engaging in mass animal slaughter and casually spreading hate towards almost every marginalised section of humanity they can.

Ruby's defence was...not great. She admitted to being aware of PETA's reputation, but claimed that she had to promote PETA's petition as they were the only ones talking about this issue.

Ruby did not mention why she, with her hundreds of thousands of followers, couldn't raise awareness or start a petition herself.

She claimed that despite their problematic history, they do a lot of good and despite signing their petitions, she "never donated to PETA, encouraged others to donate or actively promoted it as an organisation."

This was quickly proven to be a lie. Ruby had previously accepted PETA-branded merchandise, like T-shirts and phone cases, and wore and used these often despite being aware of PETA's overwhelmingly problematic reputation. She used a PETA-branded phone case and showed it often in her content, knowingly advertising the brand.

Ruby did not respond to or acknowledge this. She also conveniently ignored it when people pointed out to her that Exeter University - Ruby's own uni - also practices 'severe distress' animal research.

Ruby has a storied history of either avoiding to declare her professional ties, conflicts of interest and gifted products when advertising products and services, or trying her best to hide it when she does declare it, making the "ad" text as tiny as possible and positioning it where it's easily missed.

These include, but are not limited to:

Notion

Miss Patina

Bird & Blend

Tea Pigs

Perkier Bars/Misfit Bars/Random Snack Bars

Remedy Kombucha

Allplants

Sixteenth Talent

Fable

In August 2022, Ruby responded to a comment raising questions about her launching a partnership with Note & Wish - another store which have gifted her many items in the past, and for whom she's provided lots of glowing recommendations without declaring the gifted products or her relationship with the brand.



It was an obvious lie, and the defensiveness and denial in her comment proved especially hilarious, since Ruby immediately continued to feature undeclared ads for gifted products in her content.

Ruby often runs giveaways on her Instagram for Pumpkin Productivity products. To enter, you generally need to comment and tag a friend into her posts, so Ruby can brag to her management that she got X number of views and engagement for PP marketing content.

The unfortunate part for entrants is that Ruby never actually sends the prizes out.

Every giveaway is run the same way. Comment. Tag your friends. The kicker: Winners will be contacted directly.

Why? People entered the contest in a public comment forum, so there's no privacy concerns by announcing a winner publicly, and it's not like it's a high-value prize that they'd want to keep secret. It's cool for them, it's cool for other people to see someone actually won, and it's great publicity to have people posting about how they got your product.

But Ruby hates charity. Can't stand it. She loves accepting money, can't bear to part with it.

So winners are contacted directly so that Ruby never has to actually send anything and nobody can call her out because all entrants will just assume someone else won and was contacted directly.

Ruby attempted to deflect from this after people started wising up to the scam and made sure to mention in videos that she was going to the post office to "post some giveaway parcels". Only no parcels were seen at any point.

Pumpkin Productivity is Ruby's stationery webstore.

Depending on how much controversy the business is generating at the time, Ruby will either massively inflate the success of the business and her role in is, or wash her hands of it and downplay the size of it to avoid responsibility.

So, depending on the day, she is either the founder and it's a hugely successful business run by her, or a very tiny side hustle that other people handle the logistics of, so blame them, not her!

In reality, Ruby does not own or run the business. It is owned and maintained by her management company, Sixteenth. They handle the logistics, they source the manufacturers and suppliers, they handle customer service, and so on.

To cut costs, they use the cheapest, least-equipped option wherever possible, resulting in limited product ranges (Pumpkin Productivity is a stationery company that cannot offer pens or pencils for sale), poor quality materials, defective stock batches, major logistical problems and practically non-existent customer service. They also own and run Jack Edwards' business, Jack in the Box, hence the similar range of products made from similarly poor-quality materials.

Ruby is mostly a glorified brand spokesperson, marketing assistant and product consultant for the company. She claims to design every product from the ground up and puts months of hard work into them, but there's very little evidence to support this and every new product is almost identical to the last.

Each item is, according to Ruby, built to suit all her needs, so that she needs no other planners, notebooks and schedules. Naturally, she needs countless other planners, notebooks and schedules and the stationery the Pumpkin Productivity sells does not suit her needs.

Ruby has shown plenty of flickthroughs and unboxings of PP's products, but has never made a video detailing her involvement in product design, the company, and so on, further reinforcing that she has very little involvement.

Delivery Problems


Planner Defects


Pricing


The Great Planner Disaster of 2021

In November 2021, Ruby posted an Instagram story encouraging her Instagram followers to pass along the address and details of their friends who might be having a bad day, so that she could surprise them with a letter to cheer them up.

Ruby evidently did not either consider or care about the safeguarding and privacy concerns of encouraging fans (especially younger fans) to offer up personal details of other people without their consent or knowledge.

Ruby also either did not seem to realise that if you're having a bad day, receiving a letter days or weeks later does little to cheer you up on the day in question, or this was a flimsy reason to get personal details of unsuspecting people.

In December 2021, Ruby took her fan penpal idea up a notch and mentioned that she was working on a way for people to "opt in" to potentially get a letter and maybe some Christmas gifts from her as a Christmas surprise.

Rather than set up a PO box, or arrange to include a letter or gift in random Pumpkin Productivity orders, or any number of better option, Ruby posted a Google Form for fans to fill out with their personal details in hopes of "winning" a personalised letter and/or Christmas gifts.

The major caveat was that you had to be a Pumpkin Productivity customer, and Ruby would apparently grab your address details from your order if you included your order number on the form.

The age range options included on this form allowed for applicants under 12, despite this being far too young to legally be a Pumpkin Productivity customer or be consenting to adults from the internet writing them letters.

The question fields were oddly specific.

"Do you like tea (I hope the answer is yes haha!)" - Yes/No (how???)/ Impartial (you obviously haven't tried the right kind )
"Do you like old-fashioned things (Victorian, Edwardian, 1920s)?"
"Do you celebrate Christmas?"

The nature of the form raised instant questions and complaints about whether holding a prize draw open only to PP customers breached UK gambling/contest laws and Ruby showed zero regard for GPDR regulations or safeguarding concerns when making it.

The nature of the questions also made it seem like Ruby has specifically made it to find young fans who shared all of Ruby's interests for her to become penpals with. When asked how she chose "winners", Ruby responded, "I just choose people randomly mainly," essentially admitting that it wasn't entirely impartial regardless of all the other major safeguarding issues.

Following the complaints, Ruby did not acknowledge or respond publically, but quietly changed the form to remove the under-16 age ranges and add a vague disclaimer: "do not complete this form if you do not wish for your data to be stored for letter-writing purposes. You must be 16+ to fill out this form "

When later discussing one of the winners she had selected in one of her video, Ruby remarked that the person picked was incredibly similar to Ruby, reinforcing the notion that Ruby has simply handpicked young penpals who were most like herself.

Ruby has a proven tendency to accept paid sponsorships from any business and be far from honest about her opinions/usage of their product or service.

She always highly praises the advertised product/service, going far above and beyond the required, objective ad copy provided to her, despite rarely, if ever, using them herself.

Common things said by Ruby in sponsored content: "I love this SO, SO much", "I've ALWAYS used this" or "I've been using this for YEARS now".

LG Gram Laptop


Karma


Perlego


Cricut

Ruby has displayed a predictable pattern of behaviour surrounding charities.

She only expresses major interest in charities if there is a paid sponsorship or some kind of brand deal involved.

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust


NHS


Unicef


Ditch the Label


On the Edge Conservation


Ruby's only other charity involvement aside from those involving brand deals and sponsorships is entirely limited to reposting Instagram stories shared by other people.

Instagram stories expire and disappear from a person's Instagram feed permanently after 24 hours, drastically limiting the reach and effectiveness of using this for charity awareness.

Ruby typically does this on Sunday afternoons/evenings to fill a lull in content on her Instagram feed.

Ruby has also received criticism for choosing to repost stories for causes which she fails to support in everyday life.

She has shared Insta stories advocating for higher taxation of the wealthy, despite her wealthy father using tax loopholes and offshore tax havens to avoid paying tax. She has also shared stories stressing the importance of Covid safety precautions despite regularly choosing not to follow them herself.

Independent/Small Retailers


Waterstones