Where our reviews come from, and how every one is verified
Updated 2 July 2026
Reviews are only useful if you can trust where they came from. Anyone can print five stars on a page. What matters is whether a rating is tied to a real person who really bought and used the product — and whether the store is honest enough to publish the reviews that are not flattering. This page explains, in full, exactly where every review on this site comes from, how we verify it, how we moderate it, and the rules we hold ourselves to.
Our promise is short and strict: first-party only, human-checked, and honest about the negatives. We collect reviews from two sources and only two. We never import, scrape, or copy reviews from Trustpilot, Google, or any other platform, and we never buy reviews. If you have ever wondered "are these reviews real?" — this is the page that answers it in detail.
The two — and only two — sources of our reviews
Every review you read on this site comes from one of exactly two places. The first is a verified-purchase review collected through Judge.me after an order has been delivered. When a customer completes an order, Judge.me invites them to review the product they actually received; because that invitation is tied to a real, fulfilled order, the resulting review can be marked "verified purchase". The second source is a review submitted directly on this site by a customer, using the "write a review" form.
There is no third source. We do not pull reviews in from external review aggregators, we do not republish testimonials from social media, and we do not generate review-like content with software. Limiting ourselves to first-party reviews is more work and produces fewer reviews than scraping the web would — but it is the only way to keep the wall honest.
How the 'verified purchase' badge is earned
The verified-purchase badge is not decorative. A review earns it only when it can be matched to a real order. For reviews collected through Judge.me, that link is established automatically: the review is attached to a delivered order, so the badge is applied.
For reviews submitted directly on this site, a customer can add their order number and email so we can confirm the purchase against our records. That email is never displayed publicly and is used for one purpose only — verification. A review without a confirmed order still gets published if it passes moderation, but it does not carry the verified-purchase badge, so you always know which reviews are tied to a confirmed order and which are not.
Every review is checked by a person before it goes live
Nothing published on this site is posted automatically by a customer. Every direct review, question, and answer lands in a moderation queue and is reviewed by a real member of the Cicabelle team before it appears. Moderation is not about silencing criticism — a one-star review that describes a genuine experience is exactly the kind of review we want to publish. Moderation exists to remove spam, advertising, personal information, and content that has nothing to do with the product.
To make that queue manageable and consistent, we use an AI assistant as a first-pass filter. It screens each submission for spam probability, personal information, profanity, language, and relevance, and it flags anything suspicious. Crucially, the AI never approves anything on its own. It only assists a human, who makes the final call on every single submission. We would rather a genuine review wait a little longer for a human to read it than let automated systems publish or reject on their own.
How we use AI — disclosed, and tightly bounded
We are direct about where artificial intelligence touches this site, because vague "AI-powered" claims are exactly how trust gets eroded. AI is used in three narrow, disclosed ways, and none of them involves writing or altering a review.
First, moderation: as described above, AI screens submissions and flags them, but never approves them. Second, summaries: we use AI to summarise what real reviewers actually said — for example, that customers praise fast Dubai delivery but note slower shipping to Saudi Arabia. These summaries are generated from real reviews only; they never invent opinions, and any summary is clearly labelled as AI-generated with the date and the number of reviews it covers. Third, translation: because our audience reads both English and Arabic, we use AI to translate reviews between the two languages so more customers can read them. Machine translations are always labelled as such, and the original review is never changed.
We publish negative reviews — on purpose
This is the commitment that matters most, so we want to be unambiguous: we publish critical reviews in the same place, with the same prominence, as positive ones. We do not hide one-star reviews, we do not push them to the last page, and we do not quietly delete them. If a product has a recurring criticism — a formula that is too strong for sensitive skin, a price that reviewers feel is high, slower shipping to a particular country — you will see it, and it will appear in our summaries too.
A store that only shows perfect reviews is not protecting its reputation; it is spending it. The moment a shopper senses that the negative reviews have been scrubbed, every positive review becomes suspect. We would rather you read an honest three-star review and order with realistic expectations than be surprised after your parcel arrives. The only reasons a review is ever rejected are spam, advertising, personal attacks, private information, or content unrelated to the product.
How to spot fake reviews anywhere on the web
The skills that let you judge our reviews will protect you across every store you shop from, so they are worth internalising. Genuine reviews tend to be specific and varied: they name a concern, a timeframe, a texture, or a delivery city, and their ratings spread across the scale rather than clustering at five stars. A healthy review wall has three-star reviews on it.
Fake review operations leave fingerprints: bursts of reviews posted on the same day, repeated phrasing, only extreme ratings, no mention of anything specific or negative, and no way to confirm that any reviewer actually bought the product. When you see a wall of anonymous, uniformly glowing, detail-free five-star reviews with no verified-purchase markers and no criticism anywhere, treat it with suspicion — wherever it appears.
Answers in our Q&A come from real sources too
The same discipline applies to the questions-and-answers on product pages. Answers come only from the Cicabelle team or from verified buyers, and every answer is labelled with its source so you know who is speaking. We never invent customer answers, and we never attribute expertise to people who do not exist. When the Cicabelle team answers a question about, say, whether a product is suitable during pregnancy, it is labelled as a team answer — and it will tell you honestly to confirm with your doctor rather than pretend to give medical advice.