Need to Know
22 : 02 : 19

Paris – The salon by En, a subsidiary of Lenor, will offer hyper-personalised skincare treatments that draw inspiration from east Asian skincare philosophies.

En comprises four spaces, designed to be used for skin counselling, treatment, massage and essence blending. Following a personalised consultation, the salon adapts each beauty product to the customer’s skin type, combining the solutions to create the best possible blend for treatment.

The flagship store will be a showcase for the brand’s 100 beauty essences derived from plant extracts, rock salts and Japanese tea leaves. The skincare products, branded by studio Canaria, use geometric shapes rather than words to translate the ingredients on the label, creating a New Bricolage way of communicating that is decipherable by all.

Japanese beauty has long been overshadowed by the success of its South Korean counterpart, but new brands are helping the sector to reassert its position on the beauty map.

London – The seating concept was created by design studio Layer as a way to improve the economy class flying experience.

Designed for Airbus, the Move concept uses a smart textile that would allow passengers to monitor and control their seat conditions using their phone. The chairs are created from a digitally knitted wool with integrated conductive yarn, which connects the seat cover to sensors capable of detecting the flyer’s temperature, tension and movement.

The Move app analyses the data and sends targeted messages to passengers, prompting them to move around the cabin, do in-seat stretches or stay hydrated. Users can also select different modes, such as ‘massage’, ‘meal time’ and ‘sleep’.

‘At Layer, we believe good design should be accessible to all,’ says Layer founder Benjamin Hubert. ‘All too often, new concepts for flying are focused on innovation in business class.’

To understand how brands can best use these types of material innovations, read our Material Far Futures report.

London – The independent perfumer wants to make open-source fragrances available to everyday consumers.

To make its scents, Ostens uses ingredients sourced from Laboratoire Monique Rémy (LMR) – the natural fragrance division of International Fragrance & Flavours (IFF) – which are typically only available to those in the industry. It offers scents such as rose, cedarwood and jasmine as perfume oils, which contain ‘the highest legally and technically permitted concentration of each carefully chosen ingredient’, as well as eau de parfum.

The brand encourages wearers to layer the fragrances with ones they already own to experiment with new combinations of scent. Bringing this concept into the physical world, Ostens has opened a pop-up gallery in London’s Marylebone that invites visitors to experience scent in a more immersive way than would be typically available in a retail space.

The perfume market is changing as consumers continue to shun mass-market fragrances in favour of premium, niche scents.

India is the biggest market for karaoke app TikTok, according to numbers by Priori Data. Having merged with musical.ly in 2018, the app is overwhelmingly popular with young people, many of whom have become minor celebrities with sizable fanbases. In 2018, TikTok was downloaded more than 119m times in the country, compared with fewer than 40m downloads in its second most popular market, the US.

According to Quartz, Indians’ adoption of TikTok is not surprising, given the country’s prominent Bollywood industry and passion for singing and dancing. The app offers an inexpensive platform for young people to perform, allowing them access to a much wider audience than they might typically be exposed to.

The social media and music industries are merging, as social networks and apps increasingly become spaces where music is not just shared, but also created. For more, read our microtrend.