Here’s a few links I found interesting this week:

1. “Fast Beauty” is now a thing.  Makeup brands are taking cues from fast fashion brands and churning out limited edition beauty products at a faster pace.  Brands are simply driving up sales and costs by slapping a celebrity’s name on it and telling consumers they better get it while it’s hot.  And people are actually falling for this marketing scheme!  Sounds like a big waste of money to me.  With such fast beauty cycles, what happens to the quality and safety of these products?!  People are paying more for a crappier product!  At least with fast fashion, the trade off is a lower price tag.
2. I’m currently reading Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki, a book about Japanese minimalism.  Sasaki talks about the societal and technological influences on why people are adopting this lifestyle in the modern era.  He explores his own psyche in the process of minimizing and articulates very clearly the mental changes that happens along the way.  There’s some helpful tips in it as well but it doesn’t feel like a “how-to” book like Marie Kondo’s.
3. The New Yorker put out this short faux documentary about “Millennial Hoarders” (warning: there’s a 30 sec ad preceding the video).  It’s kind of stupid but got me thinking about my own experience of feeling over saturated by digital content.  In Goodbye, Things, Sasaki talks about this very issue and how the endless stream of digital content has driven people to seek out ways to create mental calm in their physical environment.