043 - What I'm Reading: Week of May 13th
👋 Hello everyone.
🔗 Links in this newsletter route back to my blog or directly to the original content.
⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
💭 This week: injectables come to Saks, water quality & its impact on beauty, prenatal vitamins for men & women, a lab on skin wearable, two breakthroughs in aging science, a study raising the alarm around the chemical exposome of neonates and much more.
🎙 In a past life I spent a lot of time studying how people accessed and used water for bathing in their daily life. A big piece of this work examined how water quality, defined by sediment, brackish water, & hard water (water high in electrolytes - iron, calcium, magnesium), impacted these habits. Hard water for a number of reasons is less than ideal when it comes to bathing, often resulting in poor product foaming / performance and the rinsing off of products, and in some cases leaving behind a product film on the skin. For many consumers, hard water due to its slimy sensory perception, makes it hard to sense when a product is fully rinsed off, resulting in more time bathing and more water being used to rinse the skin or hair.
There are two solutions to address the issue of water quality: improving the water quality (removing the sediment and chemicals in the water impacting performance) or improving product performance (the products used with water - soap, body wash, shampoo, or conditioner) to work in substandard water conditions.
The easier approach is improving the water quality, both Jolie & FilterBaby (see below), are addressing this. Both make an argument that the compounds in our water (primarily chlorine) impact skin and hair over time, resulting in drying. Temperature can have a greater impact on the drying of the skin.
I have yet to see a product that has made it to market (there are prototypes in this space) that actually counters the impact of the water quality, where a cleansing bar foams up and rinses off in brackish water and leaves skin soft or a shampoo that cleans the hair without a residue due to water interactions. The technology is more expensive, and the story on the consumer end is harder to tell, but I have always felt this would be a major breakthrough, where water quality is no longer the barrier to better skin or hair.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
⭐️ 💉 Saks is now offering injectables in store through a partnership with Skinney Medspa. Even just a few years ago, many consumers would only go to a derm for this type of treatment. This partnership speaks so much to the changing views on this type of treatments, who is trusted, and where to get them.
🇨🇳 Dior Beauty launched their first influencer Whatsapp campaign with an automated chatbot version of the influencer Jisoo.
In other AI beauty chatbot news…Olaplex announced the debut of its first ‘digital employee’, a non-gender binary synthetic intelligence worker named “Cigi,” “Kai” or “Rumi.” This is a more extended potentially more advanced version of the chatbot rolled out by Dior Beauty, allowing for consumers to receive help around products and their carbon footprint. In the end this is new spin on chatbots (it also screams ‘hey we are a tech brand, not just a haircare brand’).
🪞 🤷♀️ Schick, launched a new campaign with its new dermaplaning wand, along with an ‘Unfiltered Beauty Mirror’ (currently in beta), which allows users to stream live video without seeing comments or shares from followers in real-time. There is a lot to unpack here, it is not clear why Schick is getting into the smart beauty mirror business and what they are hoping to gain.
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands...
Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs rebranded and is launching at Sephora as a clean beauty brand.
Iskra Lawrence’s Saltair expands into deodorant, with a line of acid based refillable natural deodorants.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
Blueland extended their offering into personal care with the launch of a waterless powder based gel body wash that takes one-hour to activate once water is added.
Hayes, a body care brand is launching on May 29th with their first body oil product.
👶 Dabble & Dollop, the baby care startup, launched a new line of products for babies with sensitive skin & eczema called Dabble Ducky, formulated with proprietary Beta-Baby™, a beta-glucan ingredient.
🤔 Kate Rose, a sustainable sun care brand, offering a ‘pre sunscreen’, a concentrated vitamin C serum.
The American Boxer, a skincare line from Vancouver B.C. and founded by Shoyan Wright and Dalis Gures, offering a three-step skincare regimen targeted toward men to ‘train your skin’.
Restorative Elements is a new skincare line from Taro Pharmaceuticals, an Israeli pharmaceutical manufacturer. The line uses dermatologist Dr. Rachel Nazarian to back up the ‘dermatologist developed’ claim and conducted an eight-week perception study with 37 consumers using their 3-step skincare routine, to substantiate it clinical claims.
⭐️ 🚰 FilterBaby, a sink filter attachment that removes chlorine and calcium/magnesium (softens the water), for better skin benefits. Founded by Xin Ma, FilterBaby tells a story about water quality and skin health, similar to what Jolie is doing for shower heads. Hard water can contribute to skin/hair dryness, hot water can be the bigger culprit.
🚿 On device news…Boona is an easy-install tandem shower head solution that was recently featured on Product Hunt.
👩🦱 Hair:
Divi, a natural hair growth serum from Dani Austin, a blogger influencer. The formula includes: Ascorbic Acid, Caffeine, Melaleuca Alternifolia (Tea Tree) Leaf Oil, Camellia Sinensis (Green Tea) Leaf Extract, Rosemary Officinalis (Rosemary) Leaf Extract, Peppermint (Mentha Arvensis) Oil, Eucalyptus Globulus (Eucalyptus) Oil, Acetyl Tetrapeptide-3, Copper Tripeptide-1, Biotin, Hyaluronic Acid, Menthol…
💊 Supplements:
⭐️ WeNatal, a newly launched supplement brand offering prenatal supplements for men & women, founded by Ronit Menashe & Vida Delrahim.
Oxomio a beauty supplement startup founded by David Friedeberg, sells four different supplement for men and women focused on skin and hair health. In addition to the supplements, Oxom offers free consulting services, with the ability to connect to nutritionists to under how to use the products, which products are best for you, and bespoke nutrition services.
Timeline Nutrition, the first consumer facing product from, Amezentis, a Swiss based biotech startup backed by Nestle Health Sciences. Timeline offers powder and soft-gels with their signature ingredient, Mitopure, derived from Urolithin A, a metabolite produced by the ingestion of pomegranates, beneficial to anti-aging.
Dote Wellness, a CBD based supplement & topical line, founded by Alina de la Vega & Felipe Maclean, offering products that are meant to boost performance. For every product, the certificate of analysis is shared.
🇨🇳 HBW Insights on how lockdown stockpiling is pushing China’s supplement market into the top spot.
♻️ Sustainable Design:
Voyage Foods just raised $36M in Series A funding to bring more sustainable foods to the market - think coffee without coffee beans, chocolate without cacao, and peanut butter without peanuts.
👩🔬 Femtech:
🚩 A recently published review is raising questions over the security & privacy standards of a number of the top women’s health apps, citing many of the apps do not meet the basic ethical or legal standards around data privacy / sharing. This is of particular concern due to the nature of the data in these apps and women’s privacy sensitivity in light of Roe V. Wade
Enter the modern-day dental dam, Lorals, the consumer facing brand from Brazen Goods and founded by Melanie Cristol, received FDA clearance as an oral sex barrier.
🤱 SimpliFed, founded by Andrea Ippolito, closed a $6M seed round to scale its digital lactation services.
🛍 Retail:
BestBuy plans to offer beauty devices.
Morning Brew profiles Goodbuy, a browser extension making shopping conscious easier.
Morning Brew: What retail gets right—and wrong—about Gen Z, according to a Gen Z investor.
💄 Moda Operandi, like a number of other high end fashion retailers, announced it is moving into beauty.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and More...
🌿 💊 Brightseed, a startup using AI to active plant compounds from supplements to new drugs. The startup just $68M to further build out its platform for commercialization.
⭐️ A team out of UCSD developed a lab on skin wearable that can monitor glucose, alcohol, and lactate in a single small device using microneedles. The three different biomarkers allow for more accurate feedback when measuring how food and activity impact health.
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs...:
👩🦱 The Bansk group acquired a majority stake in haircare brands: Eva NYC and amika (they are two brands under the same company, Eva NYC being the more affordable brand).
🔬RESEARCH
A review article on the gut-skin axis connection & psoriasis.
👂 A team at Northwestern University identified the master gene, TBX2, responsible for regulating the growth of inner or outer hair cells, a major breakthrough in therapies for restoring hearing loss.
⭐️ An alarming first of its kind study out of Vienna identified the chemical exposome in neonatal and infant development by sampling both neonatal plasma & breastmilk for 27 compounds which could contribute to clinical conditions. These compounds include plasticizers, air pollutants, ingredients found in personal care, forever chemicals, and pesticides. The study shows how early these exposures occur in utero, and lays out a method for analysis. What still is required is to establish the link between exposure and exposomal impact at this early age, and to understand how these exposures vary across populations, in addition to levels of toxin exposure and more. Right now, the study alone is alarming, due to the insights provided around how early a fetus is exposed to microplastics, but the impact it has on development needs to be explored further.
Aging (aka unlocking youth) :
🐁 💩 A study published in Microbiome, conducted in the UK, showed how fecal transplants from younger mice into older mice, were able to reduce inflammation associated with aging which impacts the health of the eyes, brain, and gut. When the reverse procedure took place (older fecal matter transplanted into young mice), inflammation from aging occurred faster. This study further establishes the strong connection between gut health and aging.
🐁 Memory in older mice improved with injections of cerebrospinal fluid from younger mice. The research team, out of Stanford, also identified a growth factor which significantly contributes to memory improvement.
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ CB Insights: The Future of E-Commerce: How AI advisors, crypto wallets, and the metaverse will enable shopping in 2030.
Rock Health: Well, is digital health in a bubble or not?
💸 WalletHub: How Consumers Spend Their Money.
Creator Economy: Are NFTs the Future of Subscriptions?
The Drum: Glossary of Web3 Terms.
eMarketer: Established brands will drive the vast majority of D2C ecommerce sales.
🇨🇳 🥬 GoodGrowth.io: Understanding the Plant-Based Market in China - Consumption Trends & Customer Personas.
💡Enjoy,
-Anne