Who chooses
One person: Adrien Caiazzo. There is no editorial board, no submission form for makers to fill in, and no algorithm ranking anything that comes through. An object is on this site because he looked at it — usually its own maker's page, sometimes the object in person — and decided it belonged here, not because it was submitted, pitched, or sent in for review.
What qualifies
Objects that do one thing precisely rather than several things adequately — a razor cut for wet shaving and nothing else, a pen that is also a pencil and nothing more. Materials that show their own construction: brass, steel, borosilicate glass, machined aluminium, rather than a shell over a mechanism nobody sees.
And a maker willing to say what the object doesn't do, on the object's own page rather than smoothed out of it — a decanter that shows fingerprints, a charger with one port, a lighter that needs a refill nobody else sells. None of that is a flaw to hide; it is information a buyer should have before spending the money, and its absence from most product pages is most of what this site exists to fix.
What doesn't
Nothing that arrives by sponsorship, and nothing chosen because a specification sheet reads well. Every object here already has a table for its numbers, further down the page — the paragraph above that table has to say something the table can't, or the object doesn't belong here.
Nor is anything added to keep a count moving. An empty week is nothing to hide; an object added only to fill one is.
How this pays for itself
Not Brutal earns a commission on some of the links to where an object can be bought. The price is the same either way — the commission comes from the seller's margin, not from yours. Where a link pays, it says so beside the link, before you click it, not only on this page.
Nothing is sold here. Every purchase happens on the maker's or seller's own site.
What the commission doesn't decide
The commission is checked after an object is chosen, never before. No maker has ever paid to appear here, and this site accepts no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, and no advertising. The absence of a commission has never kept an object out.
The full arrangement — what counts as a paid link, and the rules that require saying so — is on the affiliate disclosure page, linked below. This is the short version: the money follows the choice, the choice never follows the money.