166- What I'm Reading: Week of October 11th.
Another study on benzoyl peroxide and benzene from Valisure, a new sunscreen ingredient, Messi's scent, a visually inspiring skincare brand, pets win at Walmart, Melinda Gates' new fund, and more...
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
Fast Company: 8,000 people, 50 brands — what Sephora’s annual festival reveals about the future of beauty. Fans flocked to Sephora’s ‘beauty funhouse’ in Atlanta last week.
🌞 CBS News: FDA now weighing approval of first new sunscreen ingredient in decades — bemotrizinol, branded as PARSOL Shield.
🏡 The New York Times: A nation of homebodies. A recent study shows Americans are spending notably more time at home, a trend that started long before the pandemic.
Technavio is predicting the global online beauty and personal care products market size will grow by USD 50.96 billion from 2024-2028.
👯♀️ The Conversation: When and why do girls start forming cliques? I distinctly remember this happening in 6th grade - and thinking this is so weird a year ago we were almost all friends.
Just for fun:
⏰ Nintendo’s newest product - an alarm clock called ‘Alarmo’. The alarm clock tracks movement, and uses game sounds to wake you up. It gamifies waking up and going to sleep.
🇦🇺 🐨 An Aussie - Koala led police chase.
🐘 This is kind of cool - elephants were able to identify their zookeepers after 13-years of separation based on scent.
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
⚽️ Lionel Messi launched a fragrance, Messi - they are hoping to build a $100M fragrance brand. The current fragrance is launching exclusively at J.C. Penny (for 1-year) for $72 per 100 mL bottle.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
Birds & Blokes a new skin and body brand founded by Shanna Gonyea offers one product that is both a cleanser & moisturizer [Instagram].
🇵🇹 Bam & Boo - a Portugal based skincare brand with ingredients sourced from the Azores [Instagram].
KLEOS+KLEA — a skincare brand from the founder Tammy Demos using nutrients at its core [Instagram].
⭐️ 🇷🇺 SMORODINA, a Russian skincare brand offering face, body, and skincare - where the branding is highly textural in a pretty inspiring way [Instagram].
Solawave expands from devices into topical skincare [Instagram].
Bravo Sierra is with prestige skin & hair - will making their mass line available for purchase on Amazon [WWD; Instagram].
👩🦱 Haircare:
👃 Fragrance:
💊 Supplements:
🐕 Pet Care:
CNBC: After scrapping health clinics for people, Walmart is expanding pet care.
Fast Company: Finally, there are Crocs for your dog. Dog shoes already exist. Now you can put those paws in some dog clogs.
👩🔬 Femtech:
⭐️ CNN: Melinda French Gates launches a $250 million women’s health fund.
⭐️ Time: Why it’s time to uncouple obstetrics and gynecology.
TechCrunch: Levy Health wants to help women identify fertility issues sooner.
The Cut: Backpack bans are making teens dread their periods. Girls say the policies force them to hide tampons in their hair and shoes.
⭐️ Harbor, a baby monitor company, is now offering remote ‘Night Nanny’ services, to help families who may not be able to have a night nurse. The remote service works with pediatric nurses and infant care specialists, identifying goals - and will alert parents only when necessary.
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
🎁 Deloitte: Holiday retail sales expected to increase 2.3% to 3.3%
Retail Brew: Ulta’s CMO shares the how beauty retailer is approaching the holiday season. “The consumer needs choice this holiday more than ever,” Michelle Crissan-Matos told Retail Brew.
Retail Brew: Lack of customer loyalty is forcing retailers to experiment. As empowered consumers keep their options open, retailers are investing in improving the in-store customer experience.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
⭐️ STAT: Frustrated telehealth providers say their businesses face ‘doom and gloom’. They blame DEA’s failure to enact new rules governing the prescription of controlled substances
😵💫 Financial Times: Would you trust a self-hypnosis app? Once an entertainment gimmick, the practice is becoming a powerful wellness tool
💉 Wired: Bird Flu fears stoke the race for an mRNA Flu Vaccine. Researchers have been working on mRNA flu vaccines since before the Covid-19 pandemic, but we may get one for bird flu first.
😴 Outside: The problem with tracking sleep data. The latest wearables have gotten much more accurate at logging our Zzzs. Too bad researchers haven’t figured out how we should use the data.
⭐️ Wired: The crackdown on compounded GLP-1 meds has begun. Now that the Mounjaro and Zepbound shortage is over, Eli Lilly is going after the cottage industry selling “compounded” versions of its meds.
Fast Company: Hims & Hers Health stock tanks after FDA says competitor Eli Lilly’s weight-loss drug shortage is over. The San Francisco telehealth company had capitalized on the shortage by making copycat versions of popular brand-name GLP-1 medications.
Right after seeing this I got targeted with this - Cheeky MD - an oral semaglutide gel to be used daily - a needle free option.
The Guardian: Study of new personalised cancer therapies could ‘transform’ how the disease is treated. Large-scale clinical project could give real-time view of how well treatments are working and lead to earlier diagnoses.
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, X...
🇨🇳 rest of world: Xiaohongshu has revolutionized Chinese tourism in Southeast Asia. The lifestyle and social media platform, often compared to Instagram, is turning obscure sites into must-see attractions.
CNN: TikTok sued by 14 attorneys general over alleged harm to children’s mental health.
♻️ Sustainability: Sustainable Design🌱 MIT Technology Review: The weeds are winning. As the climate changes, genetic engineering will be essential for growing food. But is it creating a race of superweeds?
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...
BoF: Why Mytheresa Bought Yoox-Net-a-Porter. The merger between the luxury e-tailers has potentially far-reaching implications for the troubled sector.
🔬RESEARCH
⭐️ There is mounting evidence linking neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, a MS with prior viral exposure. A new study published in Neuron, found viral encephalitis had the highest association with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Influenza with pneumonia was significantly associated with five of the six NDDs studied (AD, ALS, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and vascular dementia). The study found increased risk of neurodegeneration persists up to 15 years after the initial viral exposure. Thinking is vaccines for flu, shingles, & pneumonia - and potential availability of more vaccines could lead to a decrease in these diseases.
💉 Clostridium difficile (C. diff) is a bacteria that can infect anyone, but more commonly individuals over the ages of 65 wreaks havoc on the gut, there is now a mRNA vaccine, developed at U Penn that has proved successful in treating mice who received a lethal dose of the pathogen.
⭐️ 🧓 A paper published in Nature Aging suggests that the average life span we are set to reach is fairly stagnant around 82 years for males and 88 years for females and unlikely to go beyond 88 for females and 82 for males without large advancements to biological aging. At one point in time we believed we could steadily increase life expectancy, this paper is showing that is not the case. The age range for death is narrower and the inequalities previously reported for reaching said lifespan have been reduced. The liklihood of reaching age 100 remains low—around 5% for females and 1.8% for males in most long-lived populations.
⭐️ 😫 A second paper by Valisure, this time published in a peer reviewed journal, Journal of Investigative Dermatology. This time products were tested at less extreme temperatures (37°C). Findings still showed heightened levels of Benzene in Benzoyl Peroxide (BPO) products, but certainly not as many products - where the threshold for ‘heightened’ is categorized as above 2 ppm. Criticism is similar to the first study - in terms of the analytical method used, products tested, and heightened levels of concern. Critics have been quick to point out that this type of data needs to be taken in the context of overall daily exposures. Additionally, although there may be benzene levels recorded above 2 ppm, how this translates into blood benzene is not clear…to me this is not a great argument, considering just because there isn’t data - doesn’t mean it is NOT harmful, a study would need to be done on exposure and blood-benzene levels to rule this out. In general the study highlights variability in on-shelf stability, which is something to be aware of, but does not mean BPO products = toxic. Some are also suggesting product refrigeration, which in theory is not a bad idea, except if the product has not been refrigerated during transport and on shelf, the damage may already be done.
***Also as a side note, although this study has been published in a ‘peer reviewed journal’, I really struggle to read papers where basic principles of scientific writing are not followed. This paper does not define what is ‘room temperature’ and in its tables / figures does not provide basic information on abbreviations (just some examples). This is all standard grounds for a reviewer to ask for this information…for context this is something learned in high school or undergrad as standard…and no thesis would ever be accepted at a university without this.
🧐 REPORTS
🇨🇳 McKinsey: China brief —the truth about Chinese consumption.
📱 The Harris Poll: What Gen Z thinks about its social media and smartphone usage.
♻️ Good on You: How Sustainable Is the Beauty Industry? We Rated 239 Brands to Find Out…TLDR - beauty brands have less transparency overall than the fashion industry.
McKinsey: Fortune or fiction? The real value of a digital and AI transformation in CPG.
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne