156 - What I'm Reading: Week of August 2nd.
Blake Lively says 'no' to conditioner, Flo's unicorn status, a 'Friend' that will always text back, colon cancer detection gets a blood test, the answer to keloids & mosquito bites - the microbiome...
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
eMarketer: Generative AI hits 100 million user milestone in US.
GeekWire: Amazon can be held responsible for faulty goods sold on its marketplace.
Just for fun:
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
Blake Lively is launching a haircare brand at Target called Blake Brown with shampoo and hair masks (no conditioner - ‘the secret to better hair’) [Vogue, BoF; Instagram].
The Industry: Harry Styles' Pleasing enters suncare category with two new launches.
💀 For so many reasons this is probably the best / most unfortunate celebrity product ‘Mario Lopez Wipes for Men’..the packaging is brown and at a quick glance it looks like Mario Lopez wipes men…it appears to have been around for at least a few months according to the Reddit threads.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
🇰🇷 Mimu Mimu - a skincare line from South Korea - inspired by the Maltese Cross, a pattern seen in healthy skin under a microscope [Instagram].
🇬🇷 Betta Beauty - a new skin and beauty brand from artist Kris Betta [WWD; Instagram].
🇦🇺 Strange Luxury - a vegan, small-batch, and fragrance free skincare line from Australian skincare brand [Instagram].
Vogue Business: Starface made pimple patches a status symbol. Now, it’s making them disappear. As Gen Z and Gen Alpha flaunt their pimple patches, Starface is growing its business to include clear patches for the first time.
WSJ: Il Makiage owner Oddity tech prepares to launch medical-grade skincare brand. The beauty company, which went public in 2023, is planning to launch a new skin and body care product line next year
🇮🇳 BoF: Indian fashion designers wade into beauty. Well-known designers like Manish Malhotra and Sabyasachi Mukherjee are hoping that their reputation in luxury fashion circles will help bring them success in the highly competitive and price-sensitive beauty market.
Glossy: Curology sister brand Agency launches on Amazon, setting its sights on the mature consumer.
👩🦱 Haircare:
Underlining Beauty incubator developed a 32-product line-up haircare brand for Sally Beauty called Freewill [Beauty Independent].
🇮🇳 BusinessLine: Moxie Beauty raises ₹17.3 crore to boost Indian haircare solutions, expand product range.
🦷 Oral Care:
🦾 IEEE Spectrum: A robot dentist might be a good idea. Actually Perceptive's autonomous robot offers more accurate, steadier, and faster dentistry. I would be ok with a robot filling a cavity…knowing the work might be steadier and more precise.
🐕 Pet Care:
Raw Sugar Living - known for their clean skincare - launches a pet care line called ‘Fur Kids’, starting with DTC only [WWD].
👩🔬 Femtech:
🇦🇺 WHEN Fertility - Australia’s first at-home egg count test. Reports by fertility experts, with clinical grade results [Instagram].
ftb: Why a brat girl summer sparks long-term support for the women’s health movement.
The Commonwealth Fund: 2024 State Scorecard on Women’s Health and Reproductive Care.
Kiehls moves into intimate care [Glossy].
TechCrunch: Fertility tracking app Flo Health raises $200M at a $1B+ valuation.
Hello Cake launches online prescriptions for female libido boosting products.
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
🇨🇳 Jing Daily: SK-II, Nars vs Winona, Proya — Which beauty brand outshone for Qixi? From Chinese Valentine’s Day gift box giveaways to live action role-playing games, international brands are tapping innovative strategies to grab consumers’ attention online.
Beauty Independent: ‘It’s not you, it’s us’ — Saks Fifth Avenue phases out sexual wellness. Saks is streamlining their beauty offering - sexual wellness did not make the cut. Perhaps this has more to do with where consumers prefer to buy these types of products. Saks not necessarily being top of mind for this category. For a category that has had difficulty growing (finding investment and retailers), it is not a great sign.
Seeking Alpha: Ulta downgraded as competition heats up and promos weigh on margins.
Business Insider: What is ‘underconsumption core’? A new trend on TikTok aims to get GenZ to buy less.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
⭐️ Friend, a wearable always-listening device - described as a way to combat loneliness. The device ‘listens’ and texts you back with quippy responses. It definitely feels very black mirror. Interestingly, according to the site, the device stores the responses - so if ‘Friend’ breaks or gets lost…you start from zero. [Wired; Instagram].
Vox: MDMA is on the brink of becoming medicine. Psychotherapy may never be the same.
🇦🇺 🥜 BBC: Australia starts world-first peanut allergy treatment for babies.
🇨🇳 Jing Daily: A slower pace of life: What is China’s ‘lazy health’ trend?
🇨🇦 Noze - a breath based disease diagnostics company raised $5 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
🌭 There is mounting evidence that regularly consuming ultra-processed foods - specifically meats (e.g. hotdogs, bologna, bacon, sausage…) can contribute to dementia. While there is increasing data, the link is not well understood, and eating these foods does not necessarily mean you will develop dementia [The New York Times].
🩸 Morning Brew: These startups are doing what Theranos couldn’t. New medical startups are making blood tests more accessible and less painful.
🩸 FDA approves blood test to screen for colon cancer. The new test could increase the number of people screened for colorectal cancer, especially among adults too young for routine colonoscopies [Fast Company].
🔬RESEARCH
⭐️ 🦟 UCSD scientists genetically engineered skin microbes to be less attractive to mosquitos. Researchers modified Staphylococcus epidermidis and Corynebacterium amycolatum, two common skin bacteria. They created strains that can't produce L-(+)-lactic acid by deleting the L-lactate dehydrogenase gene…I would be happy to be a test subject for this…modify my skin please. The peppermint and citronella just don’t cut it [PNAS NEXUS].
⭐️ 🤕 This is a pretty cool study - there is now an understanding that keloid formation (raised scars) is potentially the result of a microbiome imbalance (everything seems to be tied back to this). The authors found that keloid-specific bacteria increase the production of the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-8. This promotes fibroblast migration and collagen production, though the effect is weaker than expected..so perhaps anyone could be given a topical cream to avoid this type of bacteria formation for better wound healing [PNAS NEXUS].
Researchers found a strong connection between high levels of 11,12- dihydroxyeicosatrienoic acids (diHETrE) - a dihydroxy fatty acid - found in cord blood and children who developed Autism Spectrum Disorder. Why this is this is the case is not understood and understanding why the dihydroxy fatty acid has such great implications during the fetal inflammation needs to be further studied [Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences].
A new study looked at drug review sentiment on WebMD and found that reviews from women were a solid indicator of whether there were quality issues with a drug or potential for recall [Sage Journals; Business Insider].
Gen X and millennials are statistically more likely to get cancer (even cancers that had previously been in decline) - specifically oestrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer, uterine corpus cancer, colorectal cancer, non-cardia gastric cancer, gallbladder and other biliary cancer, ovarian cancer, testicular cancer, anal cancer (for males), & Kaposi Sarcoa [The Lancet].
👃 Nature: Your nose has its own army of immune cells — here’s how it protects you. Detailed profile of the immune cells in the upper airway could help to improve nasal vaccines.
⭐️ An editorial in The Lancet calls attention to the fertility industry, where the commercialization of this industry has led to ethical concerns, as profit-driven practices often prioritize shareholder revenue over patient-centered care, exacerbating psychological stress and creating global inequities in access to quality infertility treatments.
⭐️ 🎧 If you are interested in this topic, listen to Misconception by Prognosis - a podcast (Season 9) (produced by Bloomberg Media), which follows Kristen V. Brown’s journey through learning about IVF…it is fascinating and disturbing.
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ BeautyMatter: 2024 Middle East Beauty Market Report.
⭐️ Visual Capitalist: Life Expectancy vs. Health Spending Per Capita.
McKinsey: Gen Z ditching ESG?
🤾♀️ Douyin: The Rise of Sports 2024.
🇪🇸 Sifted: Barcelona-based Olistic tops Sifted Leaderboard of Southern Europe’s fastest growing startups. Launching today, the Sifted 50 is the third ranking in a series charting European startups with the strongest revenue growth.
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne