090 - What I'm Reading: Week of April 14th.
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🤖: The Juicy Byte has a fresh new logo thanks to Dall-E, I couldn’t have done it without you.
💭 This week: A new solution for serious underarm sweat, an exciting hormonal wellness brand, a cervical at-home screening solution, functional popsicles, H&M gets into beauty in both retail & a new brand, cellular aging similarities across species, dcdx unpacks life without TikTok, and so much more…
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
💦 The FDA approved Brella™, a new in-office procedure for hyperhydrosis, promising to reduce excessive sweating for up to 3-4 months in just three minutes using targeted alkali thermolysis (TAT) [PR Newswire].
MIT Technology Review: We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet.
eMarketer: Attitudes towards brand uses of generative AI among US adults.
TechCrunch: With Bedrock, Amazon enters the generative AI race.
Just for fun:
🌈 The Verge: Color Quiz - You use these apps all the time, but can you identify the shades of their logos?
🍊 The fragrance you never knew you wanted…don’t you wanna Fanta?
💩 The Verge: The poop emoji - a legal history.
💩 Poop Like a Champion - “The highest fiber cereal that turns your Number 2s into Perfect 10s” - this is giving me flashbacks to SNL’s Colon Blow skit.
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
Shanina Shaik is launching a beauty line called Sala, via beauty incubator Beaubble. The first product is a mascara infused with “biotin and conditioning ingredients like panthenol and camellia oil”. Don’t worry the product will be vetted 😉 “A hallmark of Beaubble is that it will not send a product into final production until it’s vetted by a group of 15 consumers”. I might have tested my experiments on 15 people as a Ph.D student…but I am sorry 15 is never a truly representative sample especially if you plan on selling a product to (hopefully) hundreds of thousands [Glossy].
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
Sol Mama - a recently launched moisturizing mineral sunscreen [Instagram].
⭐️ The Sabi Collective is a hormonal beauty & wellness brand based out of The Netherlands, founded by Hilary Metcalfe & Anna Cave-Bigley. Products are for all stages of hormonal health from pre-conception through perimenopause and include skincare as well as wellness tea blends. They are backed by L’Oreal, Bergdorf Goodman, & Novo Nordisk [Instagram].
OHHH! (Oh Hey Hero), a new personal care brand from H&M [Instagram].
🐥 A brilliant design for a baby care line I wish were real by Nikita Gavrilov.
Forbes: Jiffy Lube And Beekman 1802 skincare are a surprising and brilliantly aligned pairing.
As Morphe emerges from bankruptcy its new strategy is to distance itself for reliance on influencers, they are positioning themselves as beauty led rather than influencer-led [WWD].
👩🦱 Haircare:
WSJ: How the hottest name in hair care became a cautionary tale.
Beauty Independent: The scalp microbiome isn’t a well-studied area. K18 And HelloBiome are partnering to change that.
💊 Supplements:
Clara - a female founded supplement brand for all stages of life for everyday, prenatal, and menopause [Instagram].
🍏 🥦 Plant People launched a new veggie gummy with broccoli, spirulina, chlorella, probiotics, and vitamin D called WonderGreens.
🍄 Nummies a functional mushroom gummy brand is getting a cool new look [Instagram].
⭐️ 🧊 Nia’s Arc, functional frozen pops for body & soul [Instagram].
Emotional Utility Beverage - a beverage to make you feel with nootropics & adaptogens [Instagram].
TechCrunch: FTC orders supplement maker to pay $600K in first case involving hijacked Amazon reviews.
👃 Fragrance:
🇨🇳 Daxue Consulting: Three Chinese perfume brands taking over the fragrance market: Documents, To Summer, and Scent Library.
🚗 Pura, which describes itself as the Keurig for home fragrance has moved into cars. I guess we are moving on from this 🌲. D.S. Durga & Dedcool both play in this space.
BeautyMatter: The new fragrance consumer and emerging opportunity at mass.
👩🔬 Femtech:
⭐️ 🇮🇳 A look at CERVICHECK, from Pragmatech, - a self-sampling HPV screening tool for at-home use [YourStory].
Visual Capitalist: Visualizing the world’s plummeting fertility rate.
Fortune: Birth control fail - Why American women can’t have better contraceptives in 2023.
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more.
BeautyMatter: H&M opens first global beauty flagships in Oslo.
Modern Retail: Major retailers walk back their metaverse strategies.
eMarkteter: How will Gen Z change shopping?
Winsight Grocery Business: Store brand sales outpaced national brands during the first quarter by nearly two-to-one, according to data released Monday by the Private Label Manufacturers Association.
Amazon is reportedly instituting return fees to reduce shopping cost.
eMarketer: What’s driving US e-commerce growth in 5 charts.
Modern Retail: Inside Babylist’s emerging technology strategy.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and More...
Researchers at Cornell developed glasses with sonar technology capable of helping the wearer communicate without physical input.
Axios: Privacy is at risk as HIPAA fails to keep pace with digital health.
⭐️ Outside: Most people get slower with age. But is that inevitable? - New data raises questions around aging and exercise.
The Conversation: The rich are pouring millions into life extension research – but does it have any ethical value?
🇬🇭 Quartz: Ghana is the world's first country to approve Oxford's new malaria vaccine.
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, Twitter...
eMarketer: TikTok Shop struggles to attract US merchants.
NYT: They’re over being real.
♻️ Sustainability: Sustainable DesignMIT Technology Review: How heat could solve climate problems.
🇬🇧 Detoorp, a marketplace for aesthetically pleasing sustainable home and personal care products.
🔬RESEARCH
JAMA Neurology: It’s time to rebrand “Mommy Brain”.
⭐️ 🇩🇪 A team of researchers out of Germany identified the cellular aging process is similar across humans, fruit flies, rats, mice and worms. This finding show how the enzyme speed driving transcription becomes increasingly faster with age and more error prone across species. Researchers were able to show a decrease in enzyme speed when fruit flies, mice, and worms exhibited an insulin mutation as well as in mice on a restricted calorie diet. All of this is exciting news for the aging space [Nature].
🧐 REPORTS
🇨🇳 KPMG: Luxury Redefined - Building trust with Chinese consumers through authenticity and integrity.
Spate: TikTok Skincare Trends.
Accenture: Technology Vision 2023 - When Atoms meet Bits - The foundations of our new reality.
⭐️ 🇨🇳 Deloitte: 2023 China Consumer Insight and Market Outlook White Paper.
☀️ Dermtech: Millennials and Gen Xers Not Following Safe Sun Habits, Increasing Risk of Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer.
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne