Beauty

• Sephora, the French multinational retailer of personal care and beauty products, has made a comeback to the UK after an 18-year hiatus.
• Back in 2005, Sephora decided to close its UK stores due to market challenges and fierce competition from homegrown retailers like Boots and Superdrug.
• Sephora launched its online store in the UK in 2022 after acquiring Feelunique, a British online retailer.

The power of AI

• Another factor that may have influenced Sephora’s decision is the growing power of artificial intelligence (AI) in the beauty industry.
• Sephora has been at the forefront of this trend, leveraging AI to offer personalised skincare routines, virtual makeup try-on, and product recommendations based on individual preferences and skin types.
• By harnessing the power of AI, Sephora may be able to provide a more engaging and tailored shopping experience to its UK customers.
• The use of AI in beauty and fashion retail is a growing trend, with many companies recognising its potential to transform the shopping experience.

Back for good?

• The retailer has been opening new stores in various regions, including China, Russia and the Middle East.
• This international growth strategy could have given Sephora the confidence and resources to tackle the UK market once again.
• But its return to the UK market after nearly 20 years is a bold move that reflects the changing dynamics of the beauty industry.

Nisreen Ameen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Beauty is not, as it is often assumed to be, “in the eye of the beholder” – but follows certain predictable rules.
• The fascination for the perfect makeup or skincare is fired up by the impact of perfect faces displayed on social media and enhanced by image processing and filters.

Pretty privilege

• Numerous studies have shown that attractive individuals benefit from a beauty bonus and earn higher salaries on average.
• Beautiful individuals are consistently expected to be more intelligent and thought to be better leaders, which influences career trajectories and opportunities.

Does being attractive make you more trustworthy?

• In our recent paper Adam Zylbersztejn, Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki and I set out to find out.
• Previous studies presented different portraits of individuals to observers and asked them about their beliefs about these people.
• Each player’s payoff thus depended on their own actions and/or the actions of the other player:

If player A chooses “Left”, then regardless of player Bs’ choice:
If player A chooses “Right” and player B chooses “Don’t roll”:
If player A chooses “Right” and player B chooses “Roll”:

• To do so they were presented with the abstract choice scenario explained above while individually sat in a cubicle.
• If they decided not to trust, they were sure to receive a meagre 5-euro payout for their participation in the study.
• However, once an A player decided to trust their B partner, their fate was in the B player’s hands.

Does gender come into play?

• This implies that in our abstract economic exchange, beautiful individuals are more likely to benefit from the trust of others.
• However, when investigating actual behaviour, we see that beautiful individuals are neither more nor less trustworthy than anyone else.
• In other words, trustworthiness is driven by good old individual values and personality, which are not correlated with how someone looks.

Are beautiful people more suspicious of their peers?

• However, we might wonder who is more likely to fall prey to this bias.
• We constructed our study such that we could also investigate this question.
• Specifically, the participants we recruited in Lyon to make their predictions also had their photos taken.
• We thus knew how much they were influenced by the looks of others but also how conventionally good-looking they were themselves.

Astrid Hopfensitz ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

• New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - April 5, 2024) - Dr. Darby Koh proudly announces the 'Koh Aesthetics' official launch in aesthetic medicine.
• Koh Aesthetics debuted on December 1st, 2023, marking a new development in the aesthetic scene, domestically and globally.
• Spearheaded by Dr. Darby Koh, a board-certified nurse practitioner with a diverse background, this mission is all about redefining norms and sparking a confidence revolution in their patients.
• To achieve this, the clinic closely observes global best practices, merging advanced Korean aesthetic technologies (K-beauty) with American methods.

• The A1 botulinum toxin currently dominates the market and as a novel subtype, A6 presents itself as a challenger.
• Therefore, the future course of the A6 strain as a BOTULINUM TOXIN provides a new opportunity in the botulinum field.
• The company aims to capture the botulinum toxin market based on maximized utilization of its distribution network and experience.
• "We will enhance the global market, especially the U.S., with novel botulinum toxin products," said Choi Yong-hoon, the CEO of WizMedi Bio.