130 - What I'm Reading: Week of February 2nd
Kyra's State of Beauty report Gen Z is all about skincare, MINU's mineral sunscreen, the rise of Syphilis, Walmart shutters its innovation unit, Alzheimer's disease's transferability & more...
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
Fortune: The dawning of the unicorpses: The boom and bust of billion-dollar startups.
MIT Technology Reviews: Three ways we can fight deepfake porn - after this issue came from & center due to Taylor Swift (even thought it has been happening for quite a while).
Syphilis cases are up 80% since 2018 in the U.S. [NYT].
Just for fun:
US News & World Report: The most popular dog breed in each state.
Some visual inspiration - Graphic design trends 2024.
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
🇷🇴 Matkas, a Romanian, science led skincare brand, tapping into efficacy with a straight forward line-up of products - very much made to win on Amazon (there are all of the expected actives, and at a mid-tier price-point) [Instagram].
🇬🇧 Calling Beauty launched Face Fog - to offer plumper more even tone skin. The brand is very TikTok girly aesthetic coded. Personally, I struggle with face mists, I can never get the perfect spritz glisten versus the ‘just dunked my face in water’ look [Instagram; Beauty Independent].
🇫🇷 A.P.C. the French brand known for their apparel & accessories is launching a personal care line [BoF].
⭐️ MINU launched their mineral-based luminious sunscreen, congratulations Christine [Instagram].
Dao Insights: SK-II says anti-Japan sentiment hurt skincare sales in China.
🇮🇳 YourStory: Meet the Naga woman entrepreneur who cracked the K-Beauty business with beauty barn [Instagram].
BeautyMatter: In beauty, the opposite of clean is not dirty. It’s science.
👩🦱 Haircare:
Plantanicals, a haircare line from Beauty Mark International, offering a line-up of botanical based haircare [Instagram].
💊 Supplements:
immy, a new supplement, that is neither a probiotic nor drug meant to be taken daily made up of Mycolicibacterium aurum Aogashima (M.aurum). They are positioning it as an ancestral bacteria, helping to reduce inflammation helping with anxiety and more. Another, now shuttered company in the same space was Aurum+ [Instagram].
👩🔬 Femtech:
💔 Axios: Cervical cancer deaths rise among low-income Americans.
Axios: Tech firms court growing demand for male fertility services.
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
Many of us have probably experienced the hassle of trying to buy any kind of personal care product that is now locked up at a Target or CVS due to increased theft, Freedom Case, is offering a solution to this where facial recognition, your phone number, or even a loyalty card could be a a solution to opening the case rather than waiting to find an employee.
Bloomberg: TikTok Tests feature that could make all videos shoppable; TikTok’s big pivot to shopping risks putting off users [Morning Brew].
CNBC: Walmart plans to add more than 150 large-format stores across the U.S.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
Bloomberg: How a lucky break fueled Eli Lilly’s $600 Billion weight-loss empire.
MIT Technology Review: How wastewater could offer an early warning system for measles.
⭐️ Elon Musk announced that they implanted the Neuralink device in a human’s brain for the first time. Here is a bit of a primer on Neuralink…and no we are not at the point where it is advanced enough for telepathy.
Biogen removed it’s controversial (due to expense & lack of notable improvement) Alzheimer’s drug one year after entering the market [Science Alert].
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, X...
♻️ Sustainability: Sustainable Design
⭐️ BoF: EU to force beauty companies to pay to reduce microplastic pollution.
MIT Technology Review: Why recycling alone can’t power climate tech.
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...
⭐️ Retail Dive: Walmart to close Store No. 8, their innovation unit. A number of other incubator’s from large CPGs have also shuttered in the past year. These types of internal incubators tend to come & go in cycles.
🔬RESEARCH
🇯🇵 An interesting study examined the impact of bathing in different hot springs in Japan and the impact on gut microbiota. The largest change observed were significant increases in Bifidobacterium bifidum bacteria when individuals bathed in bicarbonate rich springs. This type of bacteria is linked to beneficially aid in glucose tolerance, reduced constipation, and prevention against e.coli infection [Nature Scientific Reports].
⭐️ A controversial study shows how Alzheimers can be transferred through hormones. The controversy behind the study is due a few factors, one the sample size is very small (n=8), secondly the study is based on a method of practice that is no longer in use. Up until 1985 human growth hormone had been sourced from cadavers (in the U.S. & U.K.), from that time onward it is sourced synthetically. In the study 5 of the 8 subjects who received the cadaver sourced HGH showed signs of early onset dementia. In a previous study - four subjects showed high levels of amyloid-beta deposits in their post-mortem brains. The genetic variants often linked to early onset Alzheimers were not found in the newest set of subjects [Nature Medicine].
🇰🇷 Eating 1-3 servings of Kimchi a day showed to reduce the odds of obesity by ~10% compared to those who at less than 1 serving a day (1 serving = 50 grams). This study included 115, 726 participants…no small sample group so eat up! [BMJ Open]
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ Kyra: State of Beauty Report 2023.
⭐️ World Economic Forum: Closing the Women’s Health Gap: A $1 Trillion Opportunity to Improve Lives and Economies. Incredible report discussing the massive gap posed to women’s health - with staggering figures showing the impact of Endometriosis and Menopause on the global GDP.
🇨🇳 Bain & Co.: China’s luxury market expected to grow at mid-single-digit in 2024.
🏓 McKinsey: Time to move — Sporting goods 2024.
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne