Need to Know
10 : 02 : 21

California – Aura is offering a personalised and adaptable hair colour range to inspire people to keep experimenting with their hair.

Its new range of shampoos, conditioners and masques include the option to add a semi-permanent pigment in tones of pink, lavender or teal, or customers can opt for classic shades to enhance or refresh their natural colour. Aura also gives the option to add neutraliser components to help offset unwanted tones.

As well as choosing their preferred colour, customers can also select from five different aromas, with the ability to adjust the scent strength or go fragrance-free altogether. In this way, Aura can adapt to customers' changing haircare needs and preferences, allowing them to easily alter the intensity of pigments and aromas. Graham Jones, CEO of parent company eSalon, explains: ‘[Our] biggest strength is our understanding of the client feedback loop over time.’

Hair colour innovators are making products and processes more malleable, with Aura showing how a one-product-for-all mentality is no longer necessary. For more, explore Colour Refresh.

Australia – Australia’s Billy Blue College of Design is pushing the boundaries of educational marketing with its first-ever augmented reality (AR) prospectus.

The campaign, dubbed Start Your Adventure, is an interactive alternative to traditional course guides, running across multiple billboards in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Taking a phygital approach, the AR experience is activated via a QR code, bringing to life various aspects of Billy Blue's design courses and the college experience. Among the activations are a TikTok advertisement and an influencer engagement initiative, tapping into the visual-first behaviours of its target youth audience.

Partnering with creative agencies SomeOne, VCCP and Unbnd, Billy Blue is connecting with prospective students in a way that feels familiar and engaging, while also showcasing its creative abilities as a design school. ‘AR advertising... offers a much more immersive and emotive experience that really captures users’ attention in a memorable way,' says Beth Duddy, customer experience director at VCCP.

While educational marketing traditionally relies heavily on print-based brochures and ads, Billy Blue is developing communications for the sector by allowing its audience to experience college life in a bold new way.

According to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the long-term effects of remote education will lead to huge monetary losses for British children.

For 8.7m children across the UK, Covid-19 could cut £350bn ($475bn, €392bn) from their lifetime earnings due to lost learning time away from formal classrooms, with even higher losses for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. According to the IFS, for someone earning £1m ($1.38m, €1.14m) over their working life – not far off the likely average in the UK – losing half a year of schooling will mean a loss of £40k ($55.4k, €45.6k) in income over their lifetime.

‘The inescapable conclusion is that the lost schooling represents a gigantic long-term risk for future prosperity, the public finances, the future path of inequality and wellbeing,’ explains Luke Sibieta, research fellow at IFS. ‘The lack of urgency or national debate on how to address this problem is deeply worrying,’ he continues.

In our youth macrotrend Reformation Generation we explore how this gap in education could affect young people’s future careers, with many likely to start their own business as a result.