131 - What I'm Reading: Week of February 9th
Dyson released a professional hairdryer, Beyonce is launching a hair brand, we may now know the link between women & autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer's disease & nose-picking, 2024 tech trends & more...
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
ars Technica: Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead.
Bard is now Gemini - Google’s chatGPT competitor rebrands.
Just for fun:
❤️ Preply: Mapped — Love around the world
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
Phil’s a new sustainable men’s care line launching soon [Instagram].
Billie launched a new 15-piece personal care line for targeted care including body lotion, body wash, and deodorant (with and without AHAs).
BoF: Costa Brazil returns after Amyris bankruptcy — check it out here.
Thayers launched an acne line.
Jing Daily: C-beauty’s new secret sauce: Mini dramas.
👩🦱 Haircare:
💇♀️ Dyson’s got a new hairdryer for the salon - The Supersonic r is smaller, lighter, and has smart RFID attachments that automatically adjust heat [The Verge]…looks like L’Oreal’s new AirLight Pro has some more pro competition.
Curology known for their acne tele-health platform expands into hair loss.
Blu & Green a sustainable haircare brand from celebrity hair stylist James Pecis [Instagram].
Act + Acre launches a filtered shower head removing chlorine from water [Glossy].
V & Co., a new mass haircare brand based around peptides - kind of reminds me of Virtue [Instagram].
👃 Fragrance:
ØTHERS: An aromatherapy brand inspired by ‘scent & sound’ [Instagram].
Claire’s launches layering perfume under the C.Body line.
🦷 Oral Care:
🪥 Singular Care makes a stainless steel sustainable toothbrush [Instagram].
👩🔬 Femtech:
National Geographic: The menstrual cycle can reshape your brain.
⭐️ Undark: At the OB-GYN, pain control is possible — but often overlooked.
🩸 Roche received approval in Europe for a blood test to help diagnose PCOS without the need for a trans-vaginal ultrasound.
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
Retail Dive: DTC’s outlook for 2024.
🇨🇳 rest of world: China, the world’s shopping cart.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
MIT Technology Review: The next generation of mRNA vaccines is on its way.
⭐️ 👶 A very popular article: What babies can teach AI - Studying how babies learn could help us develop more powerful AI models.
Phori is a new app to help combat loneliness, designed by introverts to help introverts make meaningful friend connections with others.
🧘 NYT: Medical meditation? Clinical yoga? Alternative therapies go mainstream.
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, X...
Dazed launched a social media app called Dazed Club.
♻️ Sustainability: Sustainable Design
NOWA offers a line of concentrated bars that can be dissolved into cleaners (similar to Blueland, just not a tablet shape) [Instagram].
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...
BoF: Blackstone said to consider bid for skincare company L’Occitane; Billionaire Geiger shakes up L’Occitane as Blackstone eyes firm.
Brita acquired Larq (the company making water bottles with UV light caps to reduce bacteria).
🔬RESEARCH
⭐️ New research out of Stanford shows why and how women are at greater risk of autoimmune disease.
⭐️ Researchers identified a new cell type type-2 memory B cell (MBC2), that is strongly associated with allergies. Individuals who had this cell and also had allergies had significantly higher levels of this cell compared with those who did not have allergies. It is thought that this cell is responsible for ‘remembering’ allergies (nuts, peanuts, etc…) and when it is exposed to these allergens creates significantly higher production of antibodies increasing the response [Science Translational Medicine].
🌡️ A new study showed a strong link between higher body temperatures and depression. The study does not show increased body temperature equates to depression, the cause is not defined it is just one potential measurement and/or sign of depression [Nature Scientific Reports].
👃 There is a new hypothesis connecting Alzheimer’s disease to nose-picking, where nose picking could be responsible for allowing pathogens to enter the brain, and cause an infection. There are a few theories for how nose-picking may be contributing to the disease, one is damage to the nasal epithelium could contribute to inflammation, and infection risk. Another theory is nose-picking could contribute to a nasal microbial imbalance helping to promote pathogenesis and neuroinflammation [Biomolecules].
🧐 REPORTS
BeautyMatter: US Prestige Beauty Hit $31.7B in 2023.
⭐️ CB Insights: 2024 Tech Trends.
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne