A spoonful of luxury helps the medicine go down. One pricey NYC hospital reportedly charging multiple times the going rate per birth in the US is raising eyebrows over the lavish post-partum practice of doling out Chanel gift bags to lucky mothers. Past guests of New York-Presbyterian Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns at Weill Cornell Medical Center — Chloe Tucker Caine from Netflix’s Owning Manhattan among them — have been posting now-viral videos showing the shocked parents unboxing their posh haul, said to be worth hundreds of dollars.
“Wow,” the property-pushing progenitor exclaimed in a TikTok video when she first opened the attractive branded satchel. Caine’s gratis goody bag included full-sized bottles of the designer water-to-foam facial cleanser ($58), Coco Chanel perfume ($110) and a tube of red lipstick ($58). It also contained a note: “Congratulations on being a new mom.
Here’s something special from the hospital.” Showing off her new, bougie face wash, the reality realtor joked she’d finally be able to scrub her face — after going without for three days. “Being a new mom, you don’t realize how overwhelming the whole experience is.
It’s so exciting, but it was a lot and I was already so emotional and so exhausted,” Caine told People . “I just thought it was such a sweet and thoughtful gift from the hospital. It was such a small thing at the time that made me feel so good,” she said.
“It’s nice to see every day. It just makes me feel really good and it’s just a great memory from giving birth,” she added. Caine surprised some viewers by admitting that it took her a month to finally open the gift as the duties of having an infant took up her days — but she’s not alone.
Sophia, a TikTokker who goes by @manhattan_mama, posted a video unboxing her $200 goodie bags years after welcoming her 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. “I was just organizing some stuff from my closet, and I realized I never opened it for either one of my kids,” the mom and per-diem nurse said. In her viral video, Sophia opened the luxe bag to find a bottle of Chanel perfume ($90), a lipstick ($45) and a mascara ($38).
The spoils also came with a card from the premier fashion and fragrance house, congratulating the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department for its “excellence” in caring for women’s health. The practice appears to have begun after the Upper East Side private hospital received a $1.5 million endowment from Chanel in 2004 for its “outstanding achievement in obstetrics and gynecology and will make possible a special gift of cosmetic and skin care products to all women who give birth at the Medical Center.
” And while the designer gift bags have been a recent topic of discussion online, they appear to have been bragged about publicly as far back as 2015. At one point, New York-Presbyterian also had a sponsorship deal with Ralph Lauren that allowed them to gift the designer’s baby clothes to mothers leaving the maternity ward, The Guardian reported . Giving birth at the elite infirmary costs around $35,000 — almost four times the average price in America, according to Turquoise Health.
However, busy mom Sophia revealed she had used her health insurance to cover the costs..
