038 - What I'm Reading: Week of April 8th
👋 Hello everyone.
🔗 Links in this newsletter route back to my blog or directly to the original content.
⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
💭 An exciting skincare brand challenging what we know about our traditional beauty brands, movement in the continuous monitoring wearable space, contacts to alleviate allergies, microplastics in our lungs, measuring brain size, a bunch of D2C supplement/nutrition startups out of India, and a number of really exciting reports on consumer views of social commerce, the metaverse, and so much more.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
Deciem, majority owned by Estee Lauder, announced it is scaling back its brand offering (removing HIF, Hylamide, Abnomaly, and The Chemistry Brand).
P&G Ventures is partnering with Her Campus Media to create Her Campus Labs, sourcing new business ideas from female STEM students.
NYT explores the link between Dr. Bronner’s (yes the personal care company) and psychedelics.
The Diplomat: What Will China’s Metaverse Look Like?
Shiseido announced a partnership with Revieve (a competitor to Perfect Corp. & Modiface), enabling virtual try on and discovery. This is part of a larger play to digital personalized platforms for beauty & wellness.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
⭐️ Exponent Beauty: is challenging, efficacy, potency, & freshness in the skincare space. This is a launch I have been looking forward to for quite some time, the brand is creating a new model to deliver skincare at peak efficacy, with precise dosing, and backed by clinical research. Rather than talking about what the products are free of, Liz Whitman is shifting the conversation to what is in the skincare you put on your face.
⭐️ Tiny Associates, an exciting new brand using biotech derived ingredients for more sustainable and effective skincare.
Joos Cosmetics, cold-pressed phytonutrient skincare. The packaging is the same clear bottles used for juice, and includes ‘Skintrition Facts’ to explain benefit, directions, and ingredients. I really do think it is possible someone could accidentally drink this…
Mistine, the Chinese skincare brand (born in Thailand) raised $31M in fresh funding to grow its R&D and supply chain capabilities.
BUHA, a low maintenance ‘high impact’ lifestyle driven skincare line from Miami, featuring a cleanser, moisturizer, and serum.
TPH, Taraji P. Henson’s namesake haircare line by Maesa, is expanding into body care with body wash, creams, oils, butters and bath products, and three candles.
🐳 Love Ocean, a kids personal care brand from the UK, with recyclable and reusable bottles to reduce single-use plastic.
💊 Supplements:
⭐️ Ty Haney, founder of Outdoor Voices, recently launched Web3 community commerce platform Try Your Best ‘TYB’, which allows for brand co-creation, exclusive content, and loyalty. Haney is launching her own brand of CBD supplements & topicals called JOGGY on the platform.
🇮🇳 Welly, an Indian startup making better for you vegan gummies with no sugar and high fiber, offers supplements with benefits for sleep, immunity, and beauty. The branding is quite similar to the Unilever acquired wellness first-aid brand Welly.
🇮🇳 Wellbeing Nutrition is a researched backed D2C plant-based nutrition startup experienced and 700% YoY growth since its launch in 2020. The brand excels in the beauty, women’s health, and kids nutrition spaces offering fun formats.
Wild Dose, a Gen Z branded supplement to address gas and bloating quickly.
BrainBelly, a line of fun on-the-go, live probiotic smoothies. Check out the line-up here.
🛍 Retail:
A look at China’s Poizon, e-commerce platform.
🇮🇳 Tata launched its superapp, ‘Tata Neu’, bringing together Tata owned and/or highly invested in companies like online grocer BigBasket, electronics store Croma, pharmacy service 1mg, luxury brand Cliq, streaming app Tata Play, as well as ticketing with AirAsia and food and beverages with the coffee chain Starbucks into one app. Additionally they have launched Tata Pay, a unified payments system.
👩🔬 Femtech:
Evernow, a menopause telehealth platform raised $28.5M in Series A funding from a number of notable investors including Abby Wambach, Cameron Diaz, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Competitor platforms in this space include: Caria, HerMD, Lisa Health, Elektra Health, Rory, Gennev, & Awesome Woman each offering similar services including guided telehealth, prescription solutions, and community.
Femly is a menstrual health brand creating better products for those who menstruate and the earth, along with building technology to end period poverty.
Peanut, known for connecting moms, is connecting women to doulas & therapists. Last year they expanded their community into menopause.
Jovi, makes an ‘energy’ patch to help provide relief from period pain, the only problem is…they have no data behind their claims and are linked to a number of less than credible companies. The technology is actually from a company called nCAP Technologies, who licenses their products to Signal Relief. The placebo effect is real.
🇧🇷 Meet OyaCare, the first women’s virtual health clinic for gynycology & fertility in Brazil and founded by Stephanie von Staa Toledo.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and More...
⭐️ Afon Technologies is working on a non-invasive continuous glucose monitor wearable. It recently reported via Twitter promising results against minimally invasive glucose monitors.
👁 Johnson & Johnson received FDA clearance for the first drug-releasing contact lens. The lens contains 19mcg of Ketotifen, an antihistamine, ideal for someone with itchy eyes due to allergies. This is a breakthrough, and the technology is being looked into for treating cataracts and glaucoma.
🔬RESEARCH
😷 Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a sensor to convert facemasks into smart masks, dubbed Facebit. The sensor platform will not only help ensure better mask fit, a key concern amongst medical professionals, but measure physiological markers such as respiratory rate, heart rate, and head movement. Although not mentioned in the article, it would seem logical that this platform could also handle breath analysis - and potentially help screen for diabetes and other health related issues.
😲 Many rare diseases are linked to distinct facial phenotypes, researchers are training AI using a database of facial images to be able to better diagnose these rare disorders.
⭐️ 🫁 In last week’s newsletter I mentioned scientists found the first evidence of micro-plastics in blood, now microplastics have been found in lung tissue for the first time. If this is not alarming, I am not sure what is…
🧠 An article in Nature questions why we do not regularly scan the brain during check-ups. Brains expand and shrink over time, but when a baby is in utero, checking anatomy (size of brain development) is commonplace. Once a baby is born it is not common practice to measure the brain unless there is a specific reason. The neuroscientist Jakob Seidlitz and his colleagues collected a database of over 123,000 MRI brain scans to understand how brains change in size as we age, as noted in the paper the imaging is not as inclusive as they would have hoped, but the results are the most comprehensive data thus far on how the brain changes as we develop. This may lead to a potential future where brain imaging could be part of regular check-ups alerting to health changes.
I found this particularly interesting, because in a previous newsletter, researchers noted those who are suffering from long COVID have remarkable brain changes; however, how would one know this without regularly receiving scans or having a database for comparison.
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ Snap X Crowd.DNA: Gen Z in 2022 - Identity, Communication, Commerce, & Connection.
⭐️ ♀ Avestria Ventures: By the Letters - Opportunities in Women’s Health, an extensive dive into underserved spaces.
⭐️ 🔭 Axios|Momentive poll: What’s Next 2022 - U.S. Consumer Views on Future Trends (including views on the metaverse, smart cities, electric everything and more).
💊 🇮🇳 YourStory: Inside the rise of D2C nutrition startups in India.
⭐️ Stanford HAI: AI Annual Index Report 2022.
ThingTesting: How can shoppers sniff out when a brand is greenwashing?
CB Insights: The 5 biggest challenges for brands and retailers this year — and the tech that can solve them.
💄 Beauty:
⭐️ Spate: Top Rising Ingredients Report.
Spate’s Latest Trends - Unisex Perfume, Scar Sheets, & Bubble Braids.
Retail Brew: How the Pandemic Changed the Beauty Business.
💡Enjoy,
-Anne