There are many airlines that sell jewellery and other knick knacks on their flights and some of them even have auctions going for them. I have fallen prey to attractive offers and often bought what the brochures had to offer.

And the brochures always lie. They don’t tell you that the jewellery photographed set against a background of frills and lace and printed on glossy paper, may not actually look like they do in the pictures. And after you have paid for it and open your exotically packed box, you are in for a let down.

In one long haul from London home, I bought a set of exotic perfume in miniature bottles. It cost a bomb, and that too in pounds, but it was a brand I always wanted to own and I had the luxury of shopping from my seat, so I fell prey to it, specially to the packaging, complete with gauze and silver ribbon et al.

I was dying to open the box, but as the flight was choppy I didn’t want to end up dropping some of the glass perfume bottles on the aisle and breaking them. So I got to open them only at home.

There were two twin bottles of the same perfume, so instead of eight different scents, I got only six different scents as two of them were repeats. Ok that seemed fine for perfume, but what do you do when you get duplicate earstuds?

That was my experience, during another flight from New York, it was time for branded jewellery and designer-wear  earstuds. When I opened the package I found two duplicate sets of heart shaped earstuds. How do you gift away heart shaped earstuds? And when I began calculating the cost in Indian money, my ears sang in remorse.

Does this mean that a woman who has been twice bitten stops looking at inflight shopping forever more. No they don’t. During a short domestic flight, I fell for an auction and bid the lowest for some costume jewellery which looked like silver in the brochure.

I guessed if I could get silver at that price, I had a bargain.  Firstly it was not silver and secondly there was no auction, everybody who bid for it got it, so there were at least half a dozen people down the aisle, buying the same jewellery.  Now every second person I see boarding a flight from Bangalore is wearing the same assembly line jewellery. So much for designer wear.