176 - What I'm Reading: Week of December 20th.
Temu dominates downloads, 2024’s top tech fails revealed, Spate predicts 2025's beauty trends, smart rings take center stage, what the skin's immune system means for the future, & more...
👋 Hello everyone.
🔗 More about me.
Thank you for reading The Juicy Byte! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🚨 🎆 Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday! The Juicy Byte will return in the New Year with fresh news and insights. 2025 promises excitement in wellness, from potential tariffs raising costs on personal care and splurge items—due to imported packaging, ingredients, or manufacturing—to deregulation spurring a surge in bold claims across supplements, cosmetics, and health products. This could bring innovative, effective solutions but also risks of fear-mongering (e.g., “NAD+ cures cancer”). On the bright side, I am eager to see how AI accelerates treatment efficacy, diagnostics, drug discovery, and approvals. Even with the uncertainty ahead I have hope that there could be some very exciting breakthroughs ahead.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
🇨🇳 TechCrunch: Temu is the most downloaded app on the US App Store in 2024.
⭐️ Mashable: That viral black plastic kitchen utensil study was overblown thanks to a simple math mistake…maybe I pulled the trigger too soon on buying all new kitchenware…I guess it was a brilliant way to drum up sales.
MIT Technology Review: The 8 worst technology failures of 2024. Vertical farms, woke AI, and 23andMe made our annual list of failed tech.
Forbes: The world’s most powerful women.
📸 Nature: The best science images of 2024 — Nature’s picks.
Pitchfork: 101 things that happened in 2024, ranked on the Pitchfork scale.
Just for fun:
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
JODE - botanical cleansing bars driven by scent. There is definitely a focus on post movement/workouts. The bars are super colorful [Instagram].
🇰🇷 ByUR - a Korean skincare brand launching soon - with skin firming and glowing ingredients and eco-friendly packaging [Instagram].
⭐️ Loulu Hawaii - a wellness brand with both topicals and ingestible supplements for glowing skin - using biofarming. An interesting blend of science + nature [Instagram].
🏳️🌈 Grimoire New York - a queer owned skincare brand focused on fun and looking good [Instagram].
MŌR - a new holistic skincare brand coming in 2025 [Instagram].
Skin Revolt - another new brand launching in 2025 on the basis of clean efficacy [Instagram].
Evya is offering an integrated SaaS solution for the personal care industry combining, research, product development, marketing, and consumer insights in one [Beauty Independent].
Versed Skincare announced it is unveiling a new look - and is focusing more on Gen Z and Millennial consumers [Instagram].
Business of Fashion: How do you make body lotion cool? The brands driving the body care boom are using technology, innovation, fragrance and collaborations to make their personal care products covetable.
BeautyMatter: Beauty's blind spot —Why older Millennials are the key to future growth.
👩🦱 Haircare:
A new haircare brand Base-K is coming soon, focused on Korean traditions with a focus on the scalp.
💊 Supplements:
😴 Fitt Supplements: Eight Sleep enters supplements. Sleep tech meets sleep stacks. Eight Sleep is known for its $$$ smart mattresses - they are now branching out.
tmw longevity - a new supplement claiming to be the “world’s first liquid liposomal “multi-vitamin” to be formulated for longevity” [Instagram] .
👩🔬 Femtech:
⭐️ Vogue Business: Our obsession with hormones is growing. How can brands tap in? Hormonal health has entered mainstream conversation, shaping everything from skincare to supplements and beyond.
⭐️ “M[o]ms take on 79% of daily jobs like cleaning and childcare—over twice as much as dads (37%)”...are we surprised?
⭐️ New York Times: Is facial hair the last taboo in women’s beauty? Millions of women regularly remove it. Does it have to be that way?
⭐️ WellTheory - a virtual care platform for autoimmune disease, announced a new women’s health program focused on addressing hormonal conditions including PCOS, endometriosis, postpartum, hypothyroidism, perimenopause, and menopause [Instagram].
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
eMarketer: Consumers report changes to spending habits in response to rising prices.
🇨🇳 Retail Brew: Year in review — online shopping. China emerged as a major theme in e-commerce in 2024.
Marketplace: Why it’s harder to find shopping baskets in some supermarkets these days…apparently grocery stores are trying to push consumers more towards carts to encourage larger shopping trips.
Modern Retail: More people are using buy now, pay later for auto repairs and elective health care.
Salon: TikTok changed the shopping game. Then came a potential ban.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
⭐️ 🩸 The University of Edinburgh: AI-powered blood test spots earliest breast cancer signs. Reporting “98% effective at identifying breast cancer at stage 1a”.
💍 The Verge: 2024 in wearables: the year of the smart ring. Smart rings had a resurgence this year. The question is whether the renaissance will continue.
👯 MIT Technology Review: Digital twins of human organs are here. They’re set to transform medical treatment. The models can be used to plan surgeries and in the future could be used to help trial new drugs.
💔 The neuroscience of heartbreak - why it hurts - and the love addiction.
🇹🇷 Vox: How did Turkey become the world capital of hair transplants? How Istanbul became the new Hair Club for Men.
⭐️ Fast Company: Weight-loss drugs are sending Americans back to their doctors. And it’s not why you think…patients going to their primary care doctors for GLP-1s, who may have traditionally avoided doctors are now receiving care that may have been long delayed - like a pap-smear, colonoscopy, or other routine procedure.
Fast Company: Prenuvo’s controversial full-body MRI scans just got cheaper for some people. After its 100,000th scan, Prenuvo just lowered the price of its full-body scans for certain groups.
The New Yorker: A cancer-causing virus hiding in millions of Americans. Why does hepatitis B, which can lead to liver cancer, often go undetected, even though tests exist?
TechCrunch: Culina Health nabs $7.9M to provide virtual access to registered dietitians.
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, X...
TechCrunch: Threads now has 100M daily active users.
TikTok is headed to the Supreme Court.
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...
BoF: Puig to assume full ownership of Charlotte Tilbury in 2031. The Spanish company extended its partnership with the eponymous founder of Charlotte Tilbury, who will retain a minority stake in the brand until 2031.
Beauty Independent: Multipurpose skincare brand The Better Skin Co. shutters after nine years.
🔬RESEARCH
⭐️ Nature: The skin’s ‘surprise’ power — it has its very own immune system. There is new evidence that the skin’s immune response system may mean that traditional vaccines administered through injection could be replaced by creams, that anyone could apply.
Researchers have found that intermittent fasting reduced hair growth in both mice and humans…so if you want your hair to grow faster you may want to take a close look at your dieting practices.
🇰🇷 New research out of Korea highlights the strong relationship between the presence of C. Acnes, microbial diversity, and anti-aging. As we age it’s presence strongly decreases, leading to potential products that may be able to help increase microbial diversity and C. Acnes presence to slow skin aging (specifically wrinkle formation & skin elasticity) [microorganisms].
🧐 REPORTS
McKinsey: An update on US consumer sentiment: A boost in optimism amid the holiday spending season.
⭐️ Forerunner: Our Source of Truth on Marketplaces.
⭐️ Klaviyo: 2024 Consumer Spending Report. This includes some great insights around beauty and consumer spending, with many consumers consistently spending in the category especially for gifting.
Deloitte: Tech Trends 2025.
⭐️ Spate: 2025 Beauty Trends Report.
a16z: Big Ideas in Tech 2025.
Adobe: 2025 Creative Trends Forecast.
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne