this is not a gift + guide

🌟 Culture + society

2024 was the year pop stars told invasive fans to back off… how’d we get here? – nme
Have parasocial relationships with celebrities finally fallen from their peak? A once-obscure culture of intense celebrity following has spilled out of fan forums and into mainstream social media in recent years, normalising obsessive and intrusive behaviour. But all of this is starting to freak out those in the spotlight. Given that numerous stars have set strong boundaries with their fans this year (think: Chapelle Roan, Madison Beer, and Charli XCX) the answer to this question could be a strong maybe.

Are we all just scrolling through life? – as slow as possible (via substack)
Currently loving any article that challenges society’s overuse of (addiction to?) technology, and this one’s no exception! The author, Tuğba, offers a eye-opening explanation of what happens in our brains when we try to ‘multitask’ between real-life tasks and checking our many devices. Consider this: ‘Every time you pick up your phone to check WhatsApp for a quick glimpse, it’s like shutting down your laptop and starting it up again to reconfigure it for the previous task. If you think restarting your laptop takes a while, know that it takes us, on average, 25 minutes to regain our focus after just a 5-second distraction from our phones!’ The whole piece is worth a read.

📲 Tech talk

All the best products in the world right now – wired
Not to get all ‘yay capitalism!’ on you right on the cusp of the holiday season, but WIRED is probably one of the best places to discover new tech and gadgets and learn about how (well) they function. Just a week away from Christmas, they’ve published the above list, which features everything from fitness, cooking, and work-related tech, making it super handy if you need to find a gift for a particular gadget-lover.

Bluesky, smiling at me – new york times
This article is a rave review of Twitter/X’s direct rival Bluesky. Launched by Twitter’s original founder, Jack Dorsey, it was created to compete with the actual dumpster fire that Elon Musk’s takeover has made the once-loved social media platform. While this NYT article explores the nostalgia of a timeline that resembles Twitter’s early days and overall vibe, others aren’t so sure, predicting the platform’s implosion within half a year’s time.

💄 Beauty + style

The year our lips all looked like jelly – the cut
The matte lipstick look fell off completely over the last year, making way for a trend that had been locked into the 90s-2000s for a number of years. That’s right, young people were on the hunt for a product that would give them the glossiest and most moisturised pouts in town. The global lip oil market was valued at USD $538.4 million in 2023 and is anticipated to grow with a CAGR of 4.9% through 2029.

Does fashion hate women in power? – vogue business
It’s no secret that white men are at the head of most fashion houses, a strange reality when fashion is typically seen as a woman’s world’s and one in which women make up the majority of sales. Looking at the CEOs of Kering’s top five brands, only one is a woman (Saint Laurent’s). Of LVMHS’s top six womenswear brands, only Dior’s is woman-designed. In this piece, Vogue’s Christina Binkley questions what our closets might look like if women were in charge of creating and selling women’s clothing.

🧠 Recommendation

I loved this video so much, I wish I could make everyone watch it. It’s sort of long, but you won’t get bored because the creator, Malik Peace, knows your brain has rotted along with its attention span. To combat this, there’s ultra-stimulating tidbits, entertaining clips, and changing lights and colours throughout.

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Until next time,