Regular readers will have noticed that I haven’t been blogging that much lately. But I haven’t been inactive. I have for some time thought that what I do would lend itself well to being done in a podcast format rather than just text. Very good. Unfortunately, it turned out that I didn’t have any of the skills or knowledge to actually do any kind of a podcast, let alone a good one. I have, to some extent, rectified this now. I have now at least worked out how to get a podcast recorded and online. It has turned out to be a good deal more difficult than I at first imagined. But here is my first offering. I can’t promise that I will get another one up any time soon, but when I do I hope it will be the start of a steadily improving product.
About the same time that there was all the fuss about the launch of the iPad, over on the bit of LinkedIn where the cosmetic chemists hang out a Read the rest of this entry »
With profits of €1.8 billion, they aren’t exactly barely scraping by, but profits are down. L’Oréal are not performing as well as other big companies at the moment.
I can’t help thinking that the biggest problem is just that they are simply too big. Some of the brands that get lost in their huge stable ought to be gems rather than orphans. Take Ralph Lauren for instance. How can you not make a success of a brand with such a prestige name? The answer seems to be to be owned by a faceless international conglomerate. In the hands of a visionary leader, Ralph Lauren ought to be a real plum. If I had a few million handy I would be on the phone making them an offer.
Not directly related to beauty, but a handy reminder that there are always people out there ready to separate you from your money and not too scrupulous about how they go about it.
The kind of man that a woman finds attractive varies over her monthly cycle. During ovulation more masculine looking men are rated more highly. Also men with more dissimilar immune systems are more appealing. During the less fertile stages, less masculine and more similar men immunologically are the preference. It isn’t entirely clear why this disparity occurs. It might be as simple as being a mechanism that favours selecting partners from a wider gene pool. It works both ways too. Women are more atractive to men when at their most fertile. This can be detected in something as simple as that lap dancers get a higher level of tips when at this stage of their cycle. As often seems to be the case, the details of the science behind how females work is not easy to elucidate, what motivates the males is all too obvious.
We don’t yet know the details of how these differences are signalled, but they seem to involve smell and subtle changes in the voice. But whatever the details,something is going on.
A recent paper suggests that taking the contraceptive pill breaks this cycle. The preference shown for men with different immune systems is lost. So it is possible that being on the pill might lead you to select a different mate to the one you would have chosen if you weren’t on it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It is hard to tell, and probably we’ll never know. Looking at one facet of our biology in isolation is interesting, but we remain hugely complex organisms and we don’t really fully understand ourselves enough to make that kind of judgment.
I am normally a bit of a news junkie but I have been traveling this week so I haven’t had my normal newspaper fix. As a result of this the first I heard about the rather gruesome story from Peru was from a briefing note from the cosmetic manufacturers trade association. The note was assuring people that cosmetics are made to high standards and are fully assessed for safety prior to release. It sort of assumed you had read the news story which I hadn’t, so I got the impression that there was some sort of Sweeney Todd type of arrangement going on where people were being processed into bars of soap or pots of cream.
It was quite a scary thought.
Now I have read the actual press coverage I am both horrified, like everyone else would be, but also rather baffled.
This week I heard for the first time about Google’s planned Chrome OS system. When I found out that it was planned to be a clean and quick operating system I knew straight away that I wanted it and that when it comes out I will get it. The interesting thing is that what I didn’t do was check out the price. I was going to pay whatever because it was something that I wanted. Well the price tag might be too high for me, but that would only mean it would be a unsatisfied desire- it would still be a desire. This got me thinking. There are some things that are simply so desirable that you want them whatever the price tag.For me Google has that desirability – even though a lot of its products are free the fact that they are free isn’t what appeals about them. There is lots of free stuff on the net that I don’t want. The only thing that would come between you and owning one is simply whether or not you have the money. If you have the money you get, end of story. I think some people are like that about iPhones for example. Read the rest of this entry »
I really thought I had seen it all, but this really is a novel marketing angle. A UK company has launched a lip gloss product that includes a test strip so you can check if someone has doctored your drink with a date-rape drug. The idea is that it will be on sale in vending machines in night clubs.
So now you can feel safe while also making your lips look nice.
The Advertising Standards Agency in the UK is charged with maintaining standards in advertising. On the whole, I think they do a good job. You don’t have to work in a consumer goods company to know that there are people about who will say almost anything to make a sale. If you spend any time on Twitter you’ll find plenty of so-called ‘internet marketers’ who seem to have no shame in pushing their products with the most outrageous statements.
