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Why anti-ageing is out in the beauty industry
The term “anti-ageing” may now be taboo, but the new era of beauty advertising still profits on women’s insecurities.
It is not longer fashionable to be anti-aging:it has been rebadged as”pro-skin”,by the founder of American skincare brand Drunk Elephant and”anti-wrinkles”by Neutrogena. A new vocabulary now dominates the language of the beauty industry, industry, the ethos of body-positivity finally inching its way up to the top.
It falls into a familiar category:stuff you know is basically tripe, but you can’t really object to because what went before it was worse. Still, the principle is that any visible sign of aging is a disgusting thing in a woman, whether that is a wrinkle or the overall dulling effect of having seen too much life.
Is it in any way preferable for the term “anti-aging”to become taboo while all its apparatus remains intact?Take the Neutrogena products that dare not say “anti-aging”still say”anti-wrinkles”.Or does it just resituate the discomfort back with the consumer?
If fear of mortality is universal, then attempting to erase its reminders is reasonable. It is not a feminist’s duty to look like a tea-towel that got stuck at the back of a tumble dryer.It is where vanity is marshaled by commerce that it becomes oppressive and disproportionate. Anti-aging is an OK word and an OK pursuit, so long as you don’t buy into products at all: make face masks out of white wine and bathe in the excretions of a donkey, like Cleopatra, who was oppressed by nobody.
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As its trading debut looms, China’s Meituan locked in battle of supper-apps
Meituan Danping, which raised $4.2 billion in its Hong Kong IPO, is one of China’s super-apps,with 340 million users ordering groceries, paying bills, renting bikes and booking hotels—but it is far from alone.
The delivery-to-ticking platform, backed by internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd, is squaring off with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd-backed rivals including Alipay,ele.meand Koubei as well as Tencent’s own WeChat.
Meituan Dianping, like many of China’s fast-growing tech firms, has had to burn cash to keep ahead of rivals, both to subsidize shoppers and add new service. It bought bike-sharing firm Mobike for $2.7billion this year, an expensive acquisition that is straining is margins.
But it sees room for growth.Citing a report from iResearch, it estimates China’s consumer service e-commerce market will grow to 8.01 trillion yuan ($1.17 trillion) by 2023, almost three times the size of the market last year.
“In the short term there will be turbulence, but in the long run I expect (Meituan’s) Valuation to exceed $100 billion,” said Li Chengdong, a Bejing-based tech analyst. “The reasoning is simple:the position that Meituan has in food and amusement services is similar to Alibaba in e-commerce, but even more solid,”Li added.“The market is big enough.”
The battle for that market is playing out on China’s streets, with Meituan’s fleet of yellow-and-black-clad couriers competing against an army of blue-wearingele.meworkers and red-uniformed Baidu takeaway crew.
“The question will be, when you stop subsidizing the items, how many people can afford it?”Jane Sun, chief executive of Chinese online travel platform Ctrip, told Reuters in an interview in Beijing. “That’s the challenge for any company who is using cash rebates to gain customers.”
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Spotify can tell if you’re sad. Here’s why that should scare you
Want to figure out if someone is a psychopath? Ask them what their favourtive song is. A New York university study last year found that people who loved Eminem’s Lose Yourself and Justin Bieber’s What Do You Mean? Were more likely to score highly on the psychopathy scale than people who were into Dire Straits.
Over the past few years, Spotify has been ramping up its data analytic capabilities in a bid to help marketers target consumers with adverts tailored to the mood they’re in.
They deduce this from the sort of music you’re listening to, coupled with where and when
4
Introducing Sans Forgetica, the font designed to boost your memory
Psychology and design researchers at PMIT University in Melbourne created a font called Sans Forgetica, which was designed to boost information retention for readers. It’s based on a theory called “ desirable difficulty,” which suggests that people remember things better when their brains have to overcome minor obstacles while processing information. Sans Forgetica is sleek and back-slanted with intermittent gaps in each letter, which serve as a “simple puzzle” for the reader, according to Stephen Banham, an RMIT lecturer who helped create the font.
来自RMIT（皇家墨尔本理工大学）心理学和设计方向的研究人员创造了一款名为Sans Forgetica 的字体。这款字体旨在促进阅读者的信息留存。他有一个叫“有益困境”的理论为基础。这个理论题出，当人们的大脑在处理信息的过程中，必须克服小障碍时，他们记东西更牢。Sans Forgetica线条流畅、向后倾斜，每个字母上都有断断续续的缺口。根据史蒂芬·班汗姆，一位协助了字体设计的RMIT讲师的说法，对读者来说，这些缺口充当了一道“简单的题目”。
The team tested the font’s efficacy along with other intentionally complicated fonts on 400 students in lab and online experiments and found that “Sans Forgrtica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention,” according to a news release on the university’s website.
这个团队测试了这个字体的有效性，以及其他故意复杂化的字体，对象为参与实验室实验和线上实验的400名学生。该大学网站发布的新闻称，他们发现，“Sans Forgetica恰到好处地打破了一些设计原则，但又不至于变得难以辨认，并有助于记忆留存。”
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It's time to ditch（get rid of 摆脱，抛弃 She has ditched her boyfrind) the stereotypes (刻板印象）and look at the realities behind single（单身）dom（出于某种状态）Santa Barbara provides a very different view of singledom 是时候摆脱刻板印象，看看单身背后的现实
As a society, we barely (=hardly几乎不)discuss the realities and implications（可能引发的后果，产生的一些影响/涵义 暗指。 The development of the site will have implications for the surrounding countryside.） of singledom.In pop culture kingdom is almost invariably (总是；始终如一的）represented as an easily fixed unhappy state,a step along the way to getting happily hitched（get hitvhed 结婚).We know little about the long-term singles:how many relish（v.喜欢；享受） their freedom and independence ,and how many feel burdened with loneliness and hope to meet the love of their life?
The single stereotypes abound（v.大量存在；充满）.For men, it’s the dysfunctional（adj.【关系、行为等】失调的；反常的） fortysomething（n.四十几岁的人） still living with his parents .For women, the callous （adj.冷酷无情的；冷漠的）career woman—who could forget former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard being accused of being “deliberately（故意的） barren（adj.不孕的；不生育的）”?
Beyond the stereotypes, there’s been remarkably little robust （【信念、观点等】坚决的；坚定的）research on singledom and social infertility（n.不孕；不育）.Love,family and relatonships only feature in（占有地位；起重要作用） policy debates about how we live to the extent that they concern（v.影响；牵涉） children’s lives.Our attitude has always been that —outside medical infertility—finding love and entirely private matter.
But social infertility exists, and we should be talking about it more,from whether there should be publicly funded fertilityn.怀孕；生育 advice for women looking to conceivev.怀孕；怀胎 Women,hexsays,should give up alcohol before they plan to conceive alone, to the realities of aging without children, to whether we should be investing in research into how to extend women’s fertility spans in the first place.
To do so, though, we need to be able to have healthy conversations about singledom that go beyond the undateableadj.无法约会的；约会无能的, the unloveable adj.不可爱的；不讨人喜欢的and the “deliberately barren”.
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Sweden election:far right makes gains as main blocks deadlocked
Sweden faces a protracted period of political uncertainty after an election that left the two main parliamentary blocks tied but well short of a majority, and the far-right Sweden Democrats promising to wield “real influence”in parliament despite making more modest gains than many had predicted.
The populist, anti-immigrant party won 17.6% of the vote, according to preliminary official results—well up on the 12.9% it scored in 2014, but far below the 25%-plus some polls had predicted earlier in the summer. It looked highly likely, however, to play a significant role as kingmaker.
The election was Sweden’s first since the government allowed 163,000 migrants into the country—the most per capita of any European nation—during Europe’s 2015 migrants crisis, polarising the nation’s 7.3 million voters and magnifying popular concern about a welfare system many felt was already under strain.
Far-right parties have made significant gains at the expense of the political mainstream across western Europe in resent years in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis, and are now in government in Italy, Austria, Norway and Finland.
“Traditional parties have failed to respond to the sense of discontent that exits,”said Magnus Blomgren of Umea University.”That discontent maybe isn’t directly related to unemployment or the economy, but simply a loss of faith in the political system. Sweden isn’t alone in this.”
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