174 - What I'm Reading: Week of December 6th.
AI and emotions, your body to power batteries, electrical flavors, cervical cancer rates dip due to HPV vaccine, menstrual blood & vitamin levels, Australian teenage social media ban, & more...
👋 Hello everyone.
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
TechCrunch: Google says its new AI models can identify emotions — and that has experts worried.
📷 AP News: Associated Press 100 photos of 2024 —An epic catalog of humanity.
🇨🇳 Vogue Business: ‘Lazy Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Adult Milk Tea’: The wellness trends driving engagement in China. As the post-pandemic wellness boom continues to thrive, data from Xiaohongshu shows that Chinese consumers want longer, healthier and fitter lives.
🍫 The Pantone of the year for 2025 is Mocha Mousse.
Business Insider: Spotify's viral data ruse. Everyone used to hate sharing their data. Then came Spotify Wrapped.
The New York Times: Google introduces A.I. agent that aces 15-day weather forecasts. GenCast, from the company’s DeepMind division, outperformed the world’s best predictions of deadly storms as well as everyday weather.
Just for fun:
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
🇫🇷 Botenor - a French sustainable farm to face skincare brand [Instagram].
🇨🇦 Collage Beauty - pro-aging skincare for radiance [Instagram].
Erly - a newly launching skincare brand designed around healthy skin routines [Instagram].
Amour de Moi Skin — a new skincare brand based around self love offering three products, an exfoliation serum, a retinol / niacinamide serum, and a moisturizer [Instagram].
👁️ Daily Practice by Dr. B — a skincare brand developed by Dr. Ashley Brissett, an ophthalmologist. Products include a cleanser, makeup removing balm, under eye cream, lash enhancer, and under eye patches [Instagram].
🧪 Beauty Independent: From the founder of Susteau, new platform Syndeo connects brands with Bbehind-the-scenes biotechnology innovators.
BoF: The multi-step beauty routine moves beyond the face. It’s not just facial skincare that gets 10 steps or more these days as influencers drive demand for entire scalp, hair, body and hand care routines.
BeautyMatter: Climate & skin — inside the race for geo-targeted beauty products.
🇨🇳 Jing Daily: Beauty buzzwords: 2024’s biggest trends - efficiency, personalization, and wellness define the year’s beauty innovations.
👃 Fragrance:
BoF: Mass men’s brand Harry’s introduces $250 fragrance. The shaving label aims to build “scent equity” with its first fine fragrance, a collaboration with artist Matt McCormick.
👩🔬 Femtech:
⭐️ Nature: How big data can improve women’s health.
Bloomberg: How a billionaire’s ‘baby project’ ensnared dozens of women. Disgraced tycoon Greg Lindberg built a network of egg donors and surrogates. Several say he conned them—and that US fertility clinics helped him do it.
⭐️ NYT: You had a hysterectomy. What did the doctor leave behind? Patients often are in the dark about which organs remain and which were removed — particularly the ovaries, which profoundly influence lifelong health. TLDR; an interesting deep dive into how hysterectomies have changed yet, women are highly misinformed when undergoing these procedures and what it means.
STAT: There’s an effective treatment for menopause symptoms. Why do so few women use it? Less than 5% of menopausal women use estrogen, compared to 27% in 1999.
🇨🇳 Dao Insights: What is the sanitary pads scandal that’s sweeping Chinese social media?
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
eMarketer: Personal luxury goods sales growth reaches nadir in 2024.
AP News: Why Temu and Shein could give Western retailers a run for their money this holiday season.
🇲🇽 Rest of World: Door-to-door saleswomen are fueling Shein’s rise in Mexico. A large community of catalog saleswomen are selling items from the Chinese platform.
Black Friday / Cyber Monday:
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
🔋 Design Boom: Power-over-skin can turn people’s bodies into batteries.
Fast Company: AirPods that never need charging? These researchers just found a way to use your body as a charger. A new Power-over-Skin technology invented at Carnegie Mellon University could change the way we charge our wearables.
🤧 The Verge: Oura’s smart rings can now tell when you’re getting sick.
🦠 MIT Technology Review: Would you eat dried microbes? This company hopes so. LanzaTech is hoping that bacteria grown in massive bioreactors could soon be on the dinner menu.
🇬🇧 The Guardian: Why I regret using 23andMe — I gave up my DNA just to find out I’m British.
TechCrunch: Orakl Oncology combines data and biology to bring new drugs to cancer patients.
🍭 ArsTechnica: Licking this “lollipop” will let you taste virtual flavors. It produces nine flavors: Sugar, salt, citric acid, cherry, passion fruit, green tea, milk, durian, and grapefruit.
Healthcare Brew: Retail pharmacies are having a tough year. Here’s why. After a pandemic bump, retail pharmacies face a murky future.
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, X...
⭐️ Pew Research Center: A majority of U.S. TikTok users are there for product reviews and recommendations.
⭐️ 🇦🇺 BoF: Australia bans under-16s from social media. The country’s senate has approved a controversial bill banning children under the age of 16 from accessing social media apps, with fines of up to $32 million for firms who fail to prevent children accessing their platforms.
♻️ Sustainability: Sustainable DesignNYT: Inside the plastic industry’s battle to win over hearts and minds. Documents leaked from an industry group show how plastics companies are pushing back against a “tide of anti-plastic sentiment.”
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...
🇮🇳 BoF: Nykaa acquires Indian beauty Brand Earth Rhythm. The Indian beauty juggernaut has acquired the local skincare, cosmetics and personal care brand, two years after making a minority investment in it.
Bof: Nike-owned virtual sneaker brand RTFKT is shutting down. The virtual sneaker and fashion brand will cease operations at a moment when Nike is reassessing priorities under new CEO Elliott Hill.
🔬RESEARCH
⭐️ 💉 Since the rollout of the HPV vaccine in the US in June 2006 there has been a 65% reduction in cervical cancer incidences in women less than 25 years of age between 2012-2019 [JAMA].
🚶 Researchers have successfully used deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the lateral hypothalamus (LH) to improve lower limb mobility and autonomy in individuals with partial spinal cord injuries. The study, published in Nature Medicine, shows that the treatment not only produces immediate motor improvements but also promotes long-term reorganization of residual nerve fibers, offering groundbreaking potential for paralysis recovery.
⭐️ 🩸 German startup The Blood, published research on the efficacy of using menstrual blood to monitor vitamin levels [Journal of Clinical Medicine].
🧐 REPORTS
CB Insights: Digital Health 50 — The most promising digital health startups of 2024.
Canva: Design Trends. In 2025, expect engaging motion elements, dreamy textures, and AI innovation to open new design possibilities. Explore the Design Trends created by you, curated by us.
Trackr: Top 25 Beauty Brands in Influencer Marketing of 2024. Discover the top beauty brands in influencer marketing for 2024, ranked by VIT across the US, UK and France.
⭐️ McKinsey Quarterly: 60th birthday edition — Technology.
GWI: Brand discovery in 2025 — How consumers find new brands and research products.
👩🦱 Spate: Viral to Vital — 2024’s Must-Know Hair Trends on TikTok.
🇨🇳 PWC: Voice of the Consumer Survey 2024.
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne