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Plenaire is a grown-up beauty brand for Generation Z

Plenaire

UK – The direct-to-consumer brand reinvents the classic coming-of-age skincare rituals for a more pragmatic generation.

Plenaire aims to provide teenagers with a range of clean, sustainably designed products that meet their everyday skincare needs and encourage emotional wellbeing. With the tagline ‘take pleasure in your skin chemistry’, the range has been created for delicate and sensitive skin, and includes a gentle makeup remover, overnight blemish treatment and self-foaming cleanser.

The brand believes that Generation Z, who are maturing at an earlier age, seek beauty products that are created with consciousness in mind. In response, Plenaire is 100% ingredient transparent and sources and makes its products in the UK. While many skincare brands target this age group with a sense of playful juvenility, Plenaire hopes to stand out with its sophisticated and transparent branding.

As the Teen Beauty Market becomes oversaturated, brands are creating youthful skincare rituals fit for an age of Sensitised Living.

Winston allows users to protect online privacy

Winston

US – Winston has designed an anti-tracking device that helps internet users take control of their personal information online and opt out of data sharing.

The US start-up's Privacy Filter is a piece of hardware that can be plugged into modems and routers to protect consumers’ data. Promising to prevent online tracking and profiling across every device on a household’s network, the device scrambles, encrypts and anonymises all online activity. Its creators refer to Winston as a ‘zero-knowledge platform’, meaning even the team behind the product can’t access or sell users’ personal data.

While software such as anti-spyware, anti-malware, firewalls, ad-blockers and virtual private networks can perform similar functions when combined, Winston is the first company to package all of these into a simple plug-in device with added benefits, such as intelligently filtering cookies and decreasing data usage by as much as 45%.

As privacy concerns among consumers grow, innovators continue to explore solutions to the moral dilemmas that have arisen within the technology sector. For more, read our Morality Recoded macrotrend.

A crowd-funded forest is being planted in Brazil

Brazil – Offset.Earth is planting a ‘protest forest’ named after Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro.

The subscription service, which allows individuals to pay to plant trees and lower their impact on the environment, is behind the crowd-funded forest. With people all over the world protesting Bolsonaro’s treatment of Brazil’s rainforests, the platform invites people to help reforest the area by paying £9 to plant 100 trees.

According to Offset.Earth, thousands of trees have already been donated. ‘Of course, we can’t undo all the devastation caused by the rainforest fires in the Amazon, or by Bolsonaro’s policies,’ says co-founder Elliot Coad. ‘But together we can make a positive difference while also making our voices heard. Our mission at Offset.Earth is to eventually overtake deforestation with reforestation and plant a crowd-funded forest big enough to be visible from space.’

As an unstable political and environmental climate prevails, brands are stepping in to provide solutions to global problems.

Photography by Filip Zrnzević

Stat: Millennials feel disillusioned about their lives

As Millennials mature, many feel their lives are not living up to their expectations. In the US, 65% agree that their life isn’t where they thought it would be at this point, according to Mintel. One of the main factors contributing to this sense of disillusionment appears to be economic circumstances, which have left this generation with less wealth than previous generations had at the same age.

In fact, Mintel research shows that 51% of Millennials say their financial situation is one of their top three stressors, and 23% say it is the most stressful thing. As a result, 68% say improving their finances is a top goal for 2019 – ranking above advancing their career (39%) and trying new things (35%). With Millennials anxious to ensure their future financial stability, there is a market for brands and businesses to show support for the challenges this generation faces.