AT LAST.
The pinch-to-zoom feature works with photos and videos in your profile, feed, and Explore.
It is currently available only on iOS, and will be available on Android "in the coming weeks," according to Instagram.
AinaAns / Via Twitter: @AinaAns
@ddeluciaa / Via Twitter: @ddeluciaa
Carrington Coleman Law Firm/Monica Latin
Robert and Michelle Duchouquette from Plano, Texas were sued by Prestigious Pets in Dallas after they wrote the one-star review. The company said the review violated a clause in its contracts which prohibits customers from publicly criticizing the business.
The Yelp review complained of poor communication from the company and a lack of clarity about prices — along with lackluster maintenance of the couple's fish bowl. “The one star is for potentially harming my fish,” Michelle Duchouquette wrote in its conclusion. “Otherwise it would be have been two stars.”
Prestigious Pets sought $200,000 to $1 million in damages in the suit, claiming the couple defamed it and violated a non-disparagement clause in its contract with them.
In response to the judge's dismissal of the case, a Prestigious Pets spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the company is considering appealing the ruling, and is "confident that Texas law supports enforcing their contract, including the non-disparagement clause."
The company said its claim is particularly strong "given the proof presented that Prestigious Pets never agreed to care for the fish, was not paid or hired to care for the fish, and the fish was never harmed."
The business has said in court documents that the Duchouquettes' "media campaign" around the lawsuit led to a "dramatic decrease in new business and the loss of current clients that has left Prestigious Pets a shell of its former success."
Yelp / Via yelp.com
"The burden is on the plaintiffs to establish, by clear and specific evidence, each essential element of each of their claims," the couple said in a court document. "They cannot do so."
The judge apparently agreed. District Court Judge Jim Jordan dismissed the allegations against the Duchouquettes and ordered Prestigious Pets to cover their attorneys’ fees.
The judge also said the couple was entitled to "recover sanctions against the plaintiffs sufficient to deter them from bringing similar actions" under the state's free speech codes.
In May, Yelp placed an alert on its page for Prestigious Pets, warning users the company may be issuing "questionable legal threats" against reviews. The consumer alert was the first of its kind issued by Yelp.
Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen, who represented the Duchouquettes, told BuzzFeed News that the order is a useful step in efforts to protect consumers from being slapped with similar so-called gag clauses.
"The very fact that a non-disparagement clause was held unenforceable shows other consumers that they can stand for their rights," he said. "What consumer wants to hire a company that sues its customers and has a non-disparagement clause in its contract?"
"We are so grateful for the attorneys who have supported us through the case," she said. "It took lots of hours and many smart minds spending too much time talking about Gordy the betta fish. Thank goodness they did not lose sight of the real issue: the threats posed by non-disparagement clauses to our right to free speech.”
LINK: A Pet Sitting Business Sued These Customers For Posting A Negative Yelp Review
LINK: Yelp’s Warning: This Dentist Might Sue You For Posting A Negative Review
The Tile Slim is an ultra-thin tracker that can fit anywhere a credit card can.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Which jacket was I wearing yesterday? Are they in that one purse? How about the backpack? Did I leave them in my pants that are now IN THE DRYER? Noooo.
– Me, every morning.
There are a lot of useless gadgets on the market – Dash buttons for binders, $700 juicers, internet-connected laser pointers for cats, and the like – but Tile isn't one of them. It can find your stuff when memory fails you.
Bluetooth trackers, like Tile, are a pretty elegant tech solution for an everyday problem. They're small, typically no larger than a tin of lip balm. Almost every tracker has the same features (including Trackr, Chipolo, and, of course, Tile): the ability to ring the item from your phone, display the item's last known or current location on an app, reverse find a phone by pressing on the tracker itself, and tap into a network of the device's users to crowdsource your search when the tracker goes out of Bluetooth range.
I bought my Tile more than a year ago. Of the three trackers I considered, Tile had the most Facebook likes and therefore, perhaps, the most users ("millions," according to the company)?? Yeah. Idk. Those users, I figured, could come in handy when I lose them for good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But even on my own, Tile has come in handy more times than I'd prefer to admit. My boyfriend has been driven INSANE by the 90-decibel Tile chirp I activate every morning to find my door key.
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed
The company sent a review unit over, on loan, and I've been playing with it, and trying to lose my stuff ever since.
It's fundamentally the same product as the original Tile, but much slimmer and minus a key ring. There's an integrated button you can double tap to locate your phone, and it will also appear in the app with a map of its current or last known location. It has the same IP5 splash-proof rating and 100-foot Bluetooth LE range.
Tile
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed
Kelly Ellis is an software engineer at Medium. She's verified on Twitter and has roughly 11,000 followers. And for the past week or so, Ellis has been the subject of relentless targeted abusive tweets from @fredcarson915. Among the barrage of 70 tweets (all of which were posted to Medium by Ellis), @fredcarson9151 tells Ellis he wishes she would be raped and calls her a "psychotic man hating 'feminist'."
When Ellis reported the abuse, Twitter replied that its investigation found the alleged violent and abusive tweets did not violate Twitter's rules, which prohibit tweets involving violent threats, harassment, and hateful conduct. Twitter's rules explicitly state that one may not "threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease."
Anyhow, here are some tweets that Twitter does not believe rise to the level of violent, abusive, or hateful:
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Get your life under control.
Zoe Burnett / BuzzFeed
:cryingforever:
The app is being killed as a part of an acqui-hire by Microsoft, and folded into Outlook for mobile, which sounds like a deathbed but is actually my favorite email client for iOS. Here are some alternatives that aren't as good, but will be just fine until the next Sunrise comes along.
CBS / Via cbs.com
The Good 🔥 – Outlook is an email, calendar, and cloud storage app in one. You can easily manage multiple accounts, which makes it great for merging your personal and work lives.
Best of all, Outlook’s calendar already incorporates a lot of Sunrise features. The daily agenda and 3-day view look nearly identical. Email in the app is surprisingly good, too. Outlook sorts messages into two inboxes: Focused (for important stuff) and Other (for everything else).
The Bad 👎 – Because Outlook’s email and calendar views are side-by-side, you might get caught in an email vortex when all you want to do is look up where you’re supposed to be right now.
Also, activities on Outlook for mobile can’t be synced with the Outlook web app, so you’re shackled to your phone. Currently, there are no plans to revamp the web app or integrate the Sunrise experience. However, you *can* open the Outlook app and go to Settings > Help & Feedback > Suggest A Feature to give the team a lil’ nudge in the right direction.
Outlook
Over 60 million account details were stolen in 2012, and the list has been leaked.
Hackers obtained around 68 million email accounts at that time – and it was recently revealed that passwords were also at risk. The database was sent to Motherboard by the breach notification service Leakbase.
In a blog post, Dropbox wrote, "If you signed up for Dropbox prior to mid-2012 and haven’t changed your password since, you’ll be prompted to update it the next time you sign in."
The forced reset is a "purely preventative measure," according to the company.
Dropbox
A month after releasing its clone of Snapchat Stories, Snapchat's user numbers are holding steady, according to four third-party data providers.
The data providers — App Annie, Apptopia, Sensor Tower, and SurveyMonkey — did not find any meaningful decline in Snapchat's numbers in the weeks after the introduction of Instagram Stories. So for those who were quick to deem Instagram Stories a Snapchat killer, the early results suggest it may be wise to reconsider that label. It doesn't look like Instagram's number of users changed after it released Stories, either.
"About a month into the launch of Instagram's Stories feature, we are still not seeing a significant increase of time spent in the app versus Snapchat," Danielle Levitas, SVP of research at App Annie, told BuzzFeed News. "While there are several factors that may be contributing to this, the early stage of adoption by its user base is still ongoing."
Wes McCabe, at Sensor Tower, said the trend lines remain the same as before Instagram's introduction of Stories. Data from Apptopia showed no ill effects on Snapchat at all. And Snapchat usage among SurveyMonkey's panel of over 1 million US iOS and Android users also didn't flinch.
“Our data shows that Instagram Stories hasn't made any discernible impact on Snapchat. The core usage metrics haven’t budged for either app throughout August,” a SurveyMonkey spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
It's still early in the battle between the two prominent social apps, but the data reveals that Instagram won't be able to swiftly poach Snapchat's users by adding the same features. It's now clear that Snapchat's users are loyal. And if Instagram wants to convince its rival's 150 million daily users to port their activity over, it will need to be patient.
Snapchat declined to comment. An Instagram spokesman indicated Facebook will soon introduce even more features to the app: "We're thrilled to see how quickly Instagram Stories has caught on with the community," he said. "We’re working on some exciting new features for the coming weeks."
Sebastian Reuter / Getty Images
Sonos, the wireless home speaker company, is partnering with Amazon to add voice control to its devices, the company announced at an event in New York today.
Starting in 2017, users will be able to issue voice controls to any of their Amazon Alexa devices to play music from Sonos speakers. Voice requests such as playing specific songs in certain locations will be recognized by Amazon's smart assistant and passed over to Sonos software.
Voice control has been rumored for Sonos for months — and directly acknowledged by CEO John MacFarlane in March — but it wasn't clear whether it would be integrated directly into the devices themselves or through a partner like Amazon. According to Sonos vice president of software Antoine Leblond, the new functionality has been in the works since March.
Though Sonos voice control is limited to Amazon Echo devices for the time being, the company said that the partnership is not exclusive, and would not rule out partnerships with other voice control platforms, like Siri, or even native voice control made by Sonos itself.
"We want to integrate with any voice provider that can provide a great voice driven experience for songs," Leblond told BuzzFeed News. "And Amazon is clearly first out of the gate."
In March, Sonos chief product officer Marc Whitten, who launched the company's Play5 speaker, left the company to work for Amazon.
Sonos is also working to enhance the streaming music experiences it offers through its wireless systems. In October, the company will roll out a new feature that will enable its speakers to be controlled via Spotify's desktop and mobile apps. It plans to do the same for Pandora.
US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx delivers an announcement in Washington, DC, in 2014.
Larry Downing / Reuters
Automakers and ride-hail companies are racing to put self-driving cars on the road. In a few weeks, Uber passengers in Pittsburgh will be able to hail self-driving Volvos. Last month, Tesla announced its hopes to build an autonomous ride-hailing fleet. And this month, Ford said it plans to mass-produce autonomous vehicles by 2021. These timelines might seem ambitious, considering how self-driving vehicles still have backup humans behind the wheel. But US Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who has done several Silicon Valley tours and ridden in Google’s self-driving cars, thinks the transition could be even sooner.
“For the last couple of years, folks have asked me, ‘When do you think people will be able to get into an autonomous car?’” Foxx told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “I’ve said, ‘You know, it could be five years, it could be less.’”
As Silicon Valley and Detroit have been reimagining transportation, the US government has been contemplating how to develop standards for this unproven technology. In a few weeks, the Department of Transportation is planning to release guidelines for autonomous vehicles. BuzzFeed News sat down with Foxx to talk about the future of transportation.
Humans are responsible for more than 90% of car crashes, but of course nobody wants that blame to simply shift to machines. "Where we spend most of our time is figuring out how safe a technology is,” Foxx told BuzzFeed News. The Department of Transportation is still working on its guidelines, but Foxx hinted — as he has in the past — that the agency wants to conduct its own testing and examination of self-driving technologies before they are released to the public. “It’s going to be far better for everybody if we have a chance to be part of the construction, if you will, of a new system,” Foxx added.
"Where we spend most of our time is figuring out how safe a technology is.”
He said that he doesn’t know what questions the department will pose to automakers, but that companies should be “working with us on the front end as they’re developing the technology, so we understand it and we’re not having to pore through 15 treatises to figure out how the technology works.”
The guidelines are coming after the fatal crash of a Tesla while the car’s semiautonomous feature, called Autopilot, was activated. The accident is under federal investigation to determine whether Autopilot was at fault. Although the feature is named Autopilot, Tesla advises drivers to still keep their hands on the wheel.
Foxx couldn’t elaborate on the details of an ongoing investigation. But he said the incident underscored how critical it is to consider how humans will interact with new vehicle technology.
“There are YouTubes of people riding around in Autopilot cars in the backseat, filming themselves,” he said. “At some point, as this technology evolves, there has to be a massive public relations campaign to convince people that they can’t use the technology in ways that aren’t intended.”
Foxx’s department is forming a federal advisory committee on autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence, which will consider the relationship between humans and driverless cars. How do you teach a person what they can and can’t do in an autonomous vehicle? What if the car has some technology that takes over for the human, but the driver is still expected to remain vigilant and ready to take over at any time, as in the case of Tesla’s Autopilot? The committee will attempt to answer those questions.
When the Department of Transportation released a 30-year traffic report last year, Foxx told BuzzFeed he thought public transportation would start “behaving more like Uber.”
A year and a half later, public transit agencies across the country are not just behaving like Uber — they’re subsidizing it outright for their residents. Altamonte Springs, Florida, 10 miles north of Orlando, subsidizes 20% of the cost of every Uber ride within its borders, and bumps that discount up to 25% if the rider is going to or from the local light rail. Centennial, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, began offering residents free Lyft rides to the light rail station this summer. Foxx told BuzzFeed it wouldn’t be surprising if more agencies followed the trend — and eventually, the majority of public transportation could become a string of private services.
“As a former mayor, I can say it with confidence: It’s all part of trying to figure out how to do more with less,” Foxx said. “A transit agency is going to say, ‘Look, the cost of acquiring 50 new buses to connect that last mile is going to be more expensive for us than plugging in our operating budget some additional money to connect to a ride-sharing service.’”
Some critics have raised concerns that turning over public transportation to private companies could leave out the people who need public transportation most: lower-income people who might not have smartphones, or who live in areas that are less lucrative for drivers, given that Uber and Lyft employees are private contractors and earn their wages based on each drive. But Foxx said cities could mitigate some of these criticisms; for example, some cities have suggested placing kiosks on the streets to allow people to call for rides.
Some of Silicon Valley’s emerging transportation technologies are still beyond Foxx and his department. “We’re going to almost have to have a part of our department that’s like ‘The Office of Stuff No One’s Thought Of,’” Foxx said.
Ideas like the Hyperloop — the tube dreamed up by Elon Musk that would zip through a pipe and transport people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes — bring up the same questions as driverless technology, Foxx says.
Via giphy.com
“The fundamental question for us is going to be ... how do we evaluate that through the prism of safety?” he says.
Foxx said the department hasn’t formed any agreements or offered funding to help move the Hyperloop project forward. (Hyperloop One, a company with $92 million in funding, has an agreement with Russia to build a Hyperloop in Moscow.)
But could the Hyperloop actually become a real thing that people commute on? Foxx and his department are preparing for it.
“We’re certainly watching,” Foxx said. “We’re paying attention to it.”
EndingTheFed.com is filled with dubious articles taken from other right-wing websites.
EndingTheFed.com was anonymously registered by its current owner in March of this year. The site has grown quickly thanks to a strategy of publishing aggressively pro-Trump, right wing stories. Even more notable is that the majority of its recent stories are simply taken word-for-word from other right-wing sites.
That means Facebook, the largest social network on the planet, actively promoted a fake story from a website that basically exists to republish other, often dubious, posts from fringe sites on the conservative web.
It's unclear whether Ending The Fed has permission to republish content from other sites, or if it's committing mass plagiarism. BuzzFeed News contacted the site but has not heard back. Facebook declined to comment on the record about how the story made it to the Trending Topics list.
The top story is a word-for-word reprint of this story, while the (partially false, partially true) claim about Obama cutting military pay is taken from here.
It's unclear whether Ending The Fed's success on Facebook in recent months caused it to be selected as the top story for the Megyn Kelly Trending Topic. On Friday, Facebook announced it was no longer using humans to write the summaries that accompany Trending Topics, though human engineers would be reviewing the topics selected by the algorithm.
Facebook previously announced measures to try and reduce the spread of fake news on its platform, but a BuzzFeed News report found that false stories continue to receive strong engagement.
BuzzSummo
Ending The Fed's story was a word-for-word repost of this from Clash Daily, which claimed Kaepernick had converted. That post was based on a claim from a sports gossip website, which cited anonymous "people close to the player" who said Kepernick is going to become Muslim.
Kaepernick recently attracted criticism after he refused to stand for the national anthem before a football game; he has said nothing about converting to Islam.
Ending The Fed / Via endingthefed.com
This summer, I paid $22 to make my face look like a freshly glazed doughnut.
For weeks, Glossier, an online-only beauty startup with a fanatical following, had been hyping a face highlighter called Haloscope by referencing Krispy Kreme’s straight-out-of-the-oven look (“warm on the inside, a little wet and sculpted on the outside”) in its ad copy. How had I never noticed that Original Glazed has a come-hither glow?
The desired effect is less glistening carb than Karlie Kloss on her way to barre class — i.e., someone more likely to Snapchat fried food than to eat it — but the analogy was endearing nonetheless. Twenty days after Haloscope was released, Quartz, the pearlescent pink shade, sold out. That’s nothing compared to the waitlist for Boy Brow, Glossier’s eyebrow pomade, which famously climbed up to 10,000. Before restocking last month, Glossier had 60,000 names on waitlists for its nine skin care and makeup products, which the company releases in limited collections every few months.
In the two years since Glossier launched, it has hired 44 employees (many of whom double as models) and raised $10.4 million in venture capital financing over a seed and series A round. Revenue, meanwhile, is on track to grow 600% in 2016, and the company expects to grow several hundred percent next year as well. Fashion and beauty blogs now cover the company’s font choice, packaging, product launches, and inevitable product sellouts like Apple fanboys awaiting WWDC. More than 267,000 people follow the brand on Instagram. Its signature washed-out pink has become so iconic that fans use the hashtag #glossierpink when they see the color in the wild: on a surfboard, a San Francisco Victorian, a mural in India, “aura crystals,” a rosy cocktail at a rooftop bar in Chelsea. According to Emily Weiss, Glossier’s 31-year-old founder, most customers come from word-of-mouth and fall into the enviable 18-to-35 age bracket. Glossier has fans in Kloss (whose Instagram selfie sporting a branded sweatshirt got 27,000 likes) and in Eva Chen, former editor-in-chief of Lucky and current head of fashion partnerships at Instagram (who calls the brand “phenomenal”), and, probably, in the most effortlessly luminous young woman in your office, group text, or Twitter feed.
The brand quickly ascended to cult status through a curious alchemy of market research, calculated intimacy, and the ineffable coolness of its founder, figurehead, and often model, Weiss. A magnetic former fashion assistant at W and Vogue, she had a brief but memorable stint on The Hills as an uptight “super intern,” flown in from New York as a foil to Lauren Conrad’s West Coast casual work ethic. While she was still at Vogue masthead, Weiss started the beauty and fashion blog Into the Gloss, known for a column called "The Top Shelf," which features interviews with up-and-coming It girls, revered magazine editors, future street-style muses, models, entrepreneurs, and the occasional heiress, some of whom spilled the secrets of their beauty routines while Weiss sat on their bathroom floor. Glossier used the community that formed around the blog to create a dossier (hence the name) of skin care and makeup for consumers to build out their own top shelves.
MTV
“It was never a pivot,” Weiss told me during a recent visit to her office in lower Manhattan. The move from Into the Gloss to Glossier, she explained, was “a total evolution of the same mission, but with tactile content.”
Sure, but not every blogger’s move toward "tactile content" could be so seamless. In order to make her pitch to the masses, Weiss has had to reposition herself not as the super intern who knows the makeup secrets of the stars, but as your best friend or benevolent big sister. In her letter introducing the company, Weiss said she wanted to welcome everyone. “Snobby isn’t cool, happy is cool,” she wrote. Part of the thrill of being a Glossier girl is the proximity to Weiss, her model-employee workforce, and her company’s hella ’grammable Soho headquarters. She is one of a cohort of aspirational founders of women-centric startups in New York City — including her good friends Leandra Medine of Man Repeller and Sophia Amoruso of Nasty Gal. Sitting in a glass-walled conference room wearing a pair of vintage white Levi’s that she picked up on her honeymoon to Tokyo, she resembles a Nancy Meyers version of a millennial girlboss: beautiful but not too intimidating, appreciably ambitious but almost always smiling, neurotic — but in a charming way. After sitting down to our interview, Weiss got up immediately to straighten a rack of postcards behind me. "Sorry," she said, "it’s going to drive me crazy if it’s crooked."
Part of the thrill of being a Glossier girl is the proximity to Weiss, her model/ employee workforce, and her company’s hella ’grammable Soho headquarters.
Glossier’s office looks like its Instagram account come to life. The white walls are covered in ethereal mood boards in dreamy pastels. Wooden chairs are outfitted in chic fur shrugs. Floor-to-ceiling arched windows look out safely at the cityscape below. The lacquered conference table is long, lean, and high-gloss. And on every floor, employees radiate good health and subtle highlighter. This is the kind of office where an administrative coordinator or front-end engineer can, and does, double as a model for the company’s Instagram account, FaceTime tutorials, and Facebook Live videos. On YouTube, Glossier hosts a feature called “Get Ready With Me,” where the person (often a Glossier employee) walks the viewer through their morning routine.
On a recent summer day, the office was buoyant over big news: The company had just restocked its lipsticks and concealers, which combined had a waitlist 30,000 would-be customers long. They celebrated for a few minutes with cupcakes covered in stiff pink frosting with miniature replicas of the sleek Generation G tubes on top, as well as breakfast parfait cups and foil-wrapped breakfast sandwiches. The cupcakes got Instagrammed, but not the sandwiches. Perfect for a Snapchat story, one employee told another as they walked away from the table, fancy cupcakes untouched.
Joel Barhamand for BuzzFeed News
To understand what makes Glossier popular, start with its sales pitch. The line promises a barely there, lit-from-within effect that plays up features instead of masking flaws, though of course this works better when your “flaw” is a cute scar, winsome snaggletooth, or freckles — not cystic acne, purple under-eye bags, or a hirsute chin. Words like “imperceptible” and “sheer” pepper the site’s ad copy, and aside from its lipsticks, a newer addition, Glossier’s products aren’t really meant to be noticed at all.
“We always err on a light touch versus a heavy touch,” Weiss explained, meaning “there’s never going to be some kind of explosion: ‘Oh my god, I’ve overdone it! There’s too much product — I have to wipe some off.’”
Haloscope definitely can’t be overdone, I told Weiss — believe me, I'd tried. “It’s hard!” she replied, smiling. “It’s so subtle. If anything, the criticism would be that our products are too subtle than too intense. But I think that’s so important to be able to build. So few of us are makeup artists. We want the products to be universally flattering, to be very intuitive, very easy.” None of the products require brushes; it’s all designed to be slapped on in the back of the cab. “Glossier is makeup for the truly lazy” was The Frisky’s assessment, but make no mistake — laziness in this case means studied effortlessness, not puffy and greasy-haired, six hours deep into a Netflix binge still caked with the remnants of last night’s mascara.
The look is “trying hard but not trying to look like you’re trying hard,” said Munachi Ikedionwu, a blogger and Vanderbilt University premed student. Palm trees and hollowed-out coconuts are a recurring motif on Glossier’s posters and stickers, which come free with every order. Packages arrive in a brown box with that baby-pink interior, plastered with slogans like “SKIN FIRST. MAKEUP SECOND. SMILE ALWAYS” and “SKINCARE IS ESSENTIAL. MAKEUP IS A CHOICE. (MAKE GOOD CHOICES).” Inside it, the makeup itself comes in a bag made of pink bubble wrap that doubles as a clutch so cute the company sells them à la carte, three for $12.
If the references are familiar to you, it feels whimsical as fuck.
Website copy is just arch enough not to sound too 13 Going on 30: “The lip-smacking, 11-year-old in you is freaking out right now,” declares the description for Generation G; Boy Brow’s implores you to “Brush your teeth, brush your brows, and then maybe brush your hair.” Packaging channels the hopeful futurism of the ’80s (“as opposed to the the whole ’90s heroin-chic thing,” executive editor Annie Kreighbaum said, “which is not so cool for us”). To hype Haloscope, Glossier flooded its Instagram with pics of a shimmering tulle skirt cascading down a runway, a flaxen-coated horse on a beach, and of course, doughnuts. If the references are familiar to you, it feels whimsical as fuck. A teenage daydream, elevated and commoditized. A series of coded signals for a certain kind of girl.
“The people seeing Sofia Coppola movies, they’re also buying Glossier,” said Natalie Guevara, a 29-year-old who works in communications for the Brooklyn-based startup Genius. “It’s very much taking the Coppola aesthetic — the dusky pink and supple skin — and making it something tangible that you can buy.”
It’s a far cry from the heavy colors and oozing lipstick logo for Kylie Cosmetics(™) or even Milk Makeup, which goes by the slogan “cool girls get ready quick,” and traffics in high-pigment, high-shine products that offer effects like “an iridescent, hyper-lavender sheen” or “super-intense color in one swipe.” Glossier never explicitly says whether these are the bad makeup choices it warned you against, but its aesthetic is subdued and refined, more Connecticut (where Weiss grew up) than Calabasas. Glossier girls probably keep up with the Kardashians, but they don’t want to look like them.
The products themselves tend to be hit-or-miss. Glossier's concealer feels impossibly light and looks incredibly natural, even if it settles into fine lines. Milky Jelly is a space-age treat, but doesn’t remove my mascara. I’m not entirely sure Haloscope is visible on me, but when I put the products on in the morning I feel destined for a compliment. Surely all this radiance will turn some heads.
At any rate, the Coppola comparison is real: Weiss gave the director one of her lipsticks and then Instagrammed a handwritten thank-you note. Coppola loved the shade Crush.
@Glossier / Instagram / Via instagram.com
Glossier typically gets lumped in as a startup because it “launched” on Instagram, but that was just a savvy promotion strategy. People had to leave the app to buy the goods, and the company still had to set up a website, buy dynamic online ads, and advertise in the subway just like every other e-commerce hopeful. Glossier’s real innovation was optimizing for the internet at every step: using the tools of the social web to turn readers into followers and followers into brand evangelists, unpaid product advisers, and, maybe, something like a community, albeit one that buys things from you.
“We really want to listen very closely to our audience across all our channels,” Weiss told me. That means talking to customers through FaceTime videos and Instagram comments, and using Into the Gloss’s robust commentariat as an updated take on a focus group: The formula for Milky Jelly Cleanser, a nonfoaming, ultralight face wash, came largely out of a post titled “What’s Your Dream Cleanser?” in which Weiss encouraged readers to answer that question, “anecdotes/paragraphs/love stories encouraged.” “We will do our best to compile what you tell us into one helluva Glossier cleanser,” Weiss wrote; 382 comments and almost a year later, Milky Jelly was released.
Glossier girls probably keep up with the Kardashians, but they don’t want to look like them.
Power users are invited to sign up for a special, confidential Slack group. New York–area ones are invited to the Glossier penthouse for “a night of mystery product testing, pizza, rosé, and g.IRL talk with other members of the Glossier community and CEO and Founder Emily Weiss!” If in 2016 brands are your friend, Glossier wants to be your BFF. (Or at least talk like her.) The nondisclosure agreement doesn’t come until later.
“Copy plays a huge part,” explained Kreighbaum. It’s important to be “personable and down-to-earth. You can have 'real girls,' but if you’re not being casual with your language, it gets lost.”
Kreighbaum became a social media star in her own right after her lush, unrepentant eyebrows were featured prominently in campaigns for Glossier’s Boy Brow product. “Maybe my eyebrows are more famous than I am? I hear they do well on our paid ads,” she told me. She was a beauty blogger before Weiss recruited her through a Twitter DM. “I think they thought I was funny. A lot of beauty writing didn’t have as much personality,” said Kreighbaum. “It kind of comes naturally to me to overshare.”
Indeed, there’s something intimate and cliquish, almost conspiratorial, about the brand. “You’re part of this crowd and you don’t want to stray from it too much,” said Claire Carusillo, a 24-year-old beauty blogger who puts out a charmingly unhinged newsletter called My Second or Third Skin. In other words, even if Balm Dotcom, Glossier’s petroleum-based salve, is essentially nice-smelling Vaseline, pulling a tube out on the subway still feels good. “When you get really hyped about something, you kind of lie to yourself,” Carusillo told me. “Like, 'This is the stuff!’” Perhaps tellingly, Glossier sells nine beauty products and four items of merch, including an enamel pin in the shape of the company’s signature gothic “G” ($14) and the very sweatshirt Kloss took viral ($60).
“Ordinarily, I just buy stuff off of Amazon and the drugstore,” said Guevara, the Coppola fan. “In many ways, Glossier is one of the first brands that I’ve subscribed to. When Boy Brow runs out, I order more.”
Glossier / Via Instagram
This afternoon, Apple sent out the invitation for its fall event, which will be held Wednesday, September 7th at 10:00 A.M. PST at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. In keeping with its yearly product cycle, the company is expected to unveil its newest iPhone models.
Reports suggest that the new models will be similar in design but with better cameras and a new, pressure-sensitive haptic home screen button. Multiple reports also suggest that Apple will eliminate the headphone jack on the new phones — a controversial decision.
Also rumored (but unconfirmed): an upgraded Apple Watch with built-in GPS and improved battery life.
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Of Fitbit’s many wearables, the most popular have been the heart rate-tracking Charge HR and its first wristband, the Flex. Now, the company is unveiling new versions of both with hardware and software features meant to address some of Fitbit users’ longest-standing desires: Water-proofness, and tools that give people a more comprehensive and personalized view of their fitness levels.
The Charge 2 and Flex 2, both of which are available for preorder starting today, also come in sleek new designs and with fashionable accessories designed to make their products look more like jewelry and less like typical fitness-trackers.
The Charge 2, which will ship in September, and the Flex 2, available in October, mark the first time that Fitbit has reimagined any of its existing devices. As it prepares to phase out their predecessors, it’s hoping that the second generation will be exciting enough to draw in first-time customers — and inspire current ones to upgrade. They come after the company had hits earlier this year with a pair of new devices. The Blaze, Fitbit’s first smartwatch, and the bracelet-like Alta were together so popular they brought in more than half of the company’s revenue in the second quarter.
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The Charge 2 still has continuous, automatic heart-rate tracking, but now boasts a display that’s four times bigger, which makes text previews, caller ID, and calendar alerts — all new features — easier to read.
The biggest changes, though, lie in the fitness-tracking software. One of customers’ biggest complaints is that the motivation to wear a Fitbit fades quickly, since the 10,000-step challenge is a non-personalized goal and represents just one facet of overall health.
This Charge tries to address that by offering a deeper and more personalized array of health information on the wrist. It can now spit out a score meant to approximate your cardio fitness level, based on your user profile, heart rate, and exercise data, and offer customized tips to improve your score by losing weight or changing up your workouts. The device can also show off real-time exercise statistics, shift into different tracking modes for runs, bike rides, weights, and yoga, guide you through high-intensity workouts, and link with your smartphone GPS to track things like the pace and distance of your runs.
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The review device Fitbit provided is still in beta, so the software may change when it ships. During our first workout with it, the large display made it easier to see stats like heart rate and duration while exercising. One gripe we had with the Charge 2 was that initiating a workout was buried under a series of taps. The app doesn’t have the option to prioritize which types of workouts to display. So, for example, if you’re a cyclist, you’d need to click the side button twice and tap the screen five times before every ride.
The Charge 2 also steps into mental wellness, which is new territory for Fitbit. It offers deep-breathing sessions, two to five minutes long, that track your heart rate variability and guide you along with visualizations, animations, and vibrations. Guided breathing is an increasingly popular feature on apps and wearables — including the Apple Watch, which unveiled its own version this summer.
The Charge 2 costs $150 and lasts up to five days per charge (the same as its predecessor). It comes with both elastomer accessory bands and leather ones.
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The entry-level wristband has been completely redesigned, with a sleeker (or, dare we say, more Jawbone-like) band — making it the thinnest Fitbit out there — and a smaller removable tracker. At $100, the Flex 2 is also the most affordable wristband in Fitbit’s lineup. It has all-day activity-tracking without the heart rate capabilities of the Charge HR, Blaze, or Surge bands.
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The Flex 2’s most noteworthy feature is its swim-proofness, rated to 50 meters or about 160 feet deep, and new lap-, pace-, and distance-counting capabilities. The band is Fitbit’s first truly waterproof device. The company’s other offerings are merely water resistant and even showering is not recommended.
Fitbit has been slow to bring a swimmer-friendly tracker to market. According to product marketing manager Jamie Kelly, Fitbit began developing the Flex 2 in earnest 18 to 24 months ago. Waterproof activity trackers with swimming features, like the Moov Now $79, Garmin Vivoactive ($245), and Misfit Shine $120, have been available for a year or more.
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The Flex 2 does, however, have two key benefits over its competitors: an auto-tracking feature (both Moov and Misfit users must initiate a session before they swim) and an insane selection of accessories. Fitbit is offering elegant, Flex 2-compatible metal bangles ($90-$100) and lariat-style necklaces ($80-$100), in addition to classic bands in seven different colors and designer collaborations with Tory Burch, Simply Vera by Vera Wang, and Public School.
The band now has “smart” features, too. Like the original Flex, the tracker has an LED display that shows goal progress – but unlike it, those lights can indicate whether you’re getting a call or text. Fitbit has also integrated the SmartTrack automatic exercise tracking feature in the Flex 2, so it can detect whether you’re spinning, biking outdoors, on the elliptical, or, of course, on a swim.
In our test, the Flex 2, a “very beta” unit on loan from Fitbit, failed to log a 40-minute, 1,200-yard swim, which may be why its specific release date isn’t certain. It appeared as “light steps” in the app.
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In addition to the new trackers, Fitbit is introducing a slew of fancy new bands for the Alta and Blaze — including 22-karat-gold-plated bangles — from luxury designers like Public School, Vera Wang, and Tory Burch. (They’re not cheap, ranging from $100 to $150.)
And it’s unveiling a new motivational tool called Fitbit Adventures, a series of non-competitive challenges inspired by scenic destinations. Users can take steps that add up to the distances of real trails from Yosemite National Park, the first featured location, as motivation.
