Gifts of love or just scary messages

It’s Valentines Day – the day when roses become more expensive than the Koh-i-Noor diamond and chocolate sales rival the rush for Boxing Day bargains. The days when most lovers wooed each other on February 14 with cards and a bunch of hand-picked flowers are long gone. Business interests have seen to that. Commercialism is now rife and that, of course, means it’s also an opportunity for the world’s rich and famous to flaunt their wealth.

Roses might become very expensive at this time of year but pop singer Justin Bieber was undaunted.

He once gave then-girlfriend Selena Gomez not just a mere bunch of blooms, but an entire flower shop at a cost of $200,000.

That’s a loving gesture not to be sneezed at – unless you suffer from hay fever, of course.

At first glance you might consider Brad Pitt was being more down to earth when he gave Angelina Jolie a tree for Valentines Day, but this was no ordinary tree. It was a 200-year-old olive tree destined for planting at their French chateau and it set Brad back $30,000. I hope the tree survived better than the couple’s marriage, which later hit the rocks. Perhaps Angelina wasn’t keen on olives.

A platinum phone ($24,000 – Jay Z for Beyonce) and a purple Bentley ($380,000 – Katy Perry for Russell Brand) are two other love gifts with eye-watering price tags, but nothing rivals David Beckham’s February 14 present to his wife, Victoria.

In 2006 he gave her a Bvlgari necklace that was valued at (I refuse to say ‘‘worth’’) $8 million.

I had a quick glance at the Bvlgari website to see if I could find inspiration for a gift for my wife – something much less expensive than Beckham’s purchase, obviously. I found a quite simple-looking bracelet that I thought might be more in my price bracket. What a dreamer.

I quickly logged off when I saw the asking price was in five figures – and I don’t mean $100.50. I was half expecting to get a bill for just having the temerity to look at a website so obviously out of my league.

But, of course, you don’t have to spend a fortune (especially if you don’t have one) to send that romantic message to your loved one. You can buy something bizarre that still says ‘‘I love you’’.

If there’s someone you’d give your eyeteeth for – well, you can do just that.

There’s an Australian jewellery designer who fashions pieces out of human body parts – necklaces from human hair and so on. To keep her overheads down she gives customers a 10 per cent discount on an item fashioned from their own teeth.

But Valentines Day is not just about being lovey-dovey. It also offers jilted lovers a chance to get back at their ex.

The PinStruck.com website enables the bitter and twisted to send an anonymous digital curse to their victim. The website sends an email to the unfortunate recipient to let them know someone has placed a voodoo on them. The sender has been given a choice list of chilling messages to choose from.

The email then encourages the victim to view the curse by clicking on an enclosed link. When they do so they are taken to a site where they will see a personalised effigy of themselves (the sender has submitted a description from a list of physical characteristics) impaled with pins. By this time the unlucky recipient has probably got the point. And this is one Valentines Day gift in which it is most certainly better to give than to receive.