By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Touch Ups

The era of the med spa is booming, as the number of medical spas offering laser hair removal, skin resurfacing and all manners of well-technically-it’s-medicine services increases. You don’t have to look too far into our immaculately sculpted faces to see the growth; the industry blew up from 2010 to 2023, increasing from 1,600 locations in the U.S. to over 10,000, with the average annual revenue per spa hitting $1.4 million and the overall revenues reaching $15.8 billion as of 2023.

Amanda Mull, Bloomberg

Achievement

What is art? The ancient Greeks believed in the muses, daughters of Apollo, those who would stoke inspiration in those they favored. They served as the font of creativity from which the works of drama, hymn, epic poetry and all manner of art thereabouts flow. Interestingly, despite Apollo’s status as the god of the arts, the creation of sculpture is not within his domain. No, it belongs to that of Hephaestus, the lord of the forge, sculpture and craftsmen, but also of fire and volcanoes. Legends like these force one to contemplate the very boundaries of art: what is a creative act, what is the result of fire made into stone and is the guide of a human hand necessary to sculpt art? I speak, naturally, of Cheetozard, a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto that is shaped like the Pokémon Charizard, which is up for auction at Goldin Collectibles. Discovered five years ago, the work (medium: extruded corn-cheese puff snack) joins several other comestible collectibles, including an Among Us-shaped McNugget (sold for $99,997 in 2021) and a Cheeto shaped like Harambe (sold for $99,900) on the auction block. After fourteen bids, the price is now at $2,562 with buyer’s premium.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Patents

A new and somewhat confusing form of academic fraud has emerged. Companies are attempting to sell intellectual property rights to unscrupulous scientists wanting to burnish their CVs in exchange for money. The companies have registered thousands of designs for medical equipment that investigators described as “bizarre.” They are essentially attempting to secure cheap and easy design registrations for medical devices that do not exist and then selling that I.P.’s “inventorship” for 2,000 to 30,000 rupees, or US$23 to US$398. This is both a pretty straightforward attempt to manipulate reputation — patent filings can give researchers a boost in rankings — as well as an inarguable scam since what is being sold ain’t a patent, it’s a design registration. Patents are expensive and annoying to get, and the “childish” designs for medical equipment aren’t even getting the pay-to-play scientists what they want. Nevertheless, companies registered 3,000 designs to sell in the past 2 years, representing 3.3 percent of all designs registered in the U.K. in that period of time.

Cathleen O’Grady, Science

Sandals

Birkenstock, the company behind the eponymous form-fitting sandal, attempted to stymie imitators by arguing in court that its sandals ought to be considered a form of applied art. A ruling in that manner would be a big boost for the company, which has been manufacturing shoes since 1774 and was seeking to prevent three competitors from selling similar sandals. In Germany, works of art get longer-lasting intellectual property protections than ordinary consumer products. Birkenstock getting its ordinary consumer product classified as art would give it legal grounds to push rivals out. Either way, although a court in Cologne thought the shoes counted as applied art, the Federal Court of Justice sided with a lower appeals court and dismissed the case.

Kirsten Grieshaber, The Associated Press

Kidman

Nicole Kidman has made good — and then some — on a promise made in 2017 to work with more women directors. Kidman’s original goal was to work with a woman in the director’s chair every eighteen months. Over the past eight years, she has worked with a female director as an actor or producer 19 different times. The Oscar-winning actress had observed that it was difficult for female directors to get funding or get their projects judged fairly. An effective strategy to ensure those projects have a good chance is for a high-profile star to attach themselves to a project.

Zack Sharf, Variety

Grow a Pear

A deep freeze in the Pacific Northwest means that the pear crop this year is expected to be the smallest crop in 40 years. As it stands, the harvest is down 31 percent from the five-year average. The Bosc crop, which produces pears with the dense flesh ideal for baking, is down 60 percent compared to last year. Consumers are being warned that they need to anticipate less fruit on the shelves, given that 80 percent of pears come from the Northwest.

Leah Borts-Kuperman, Food Dive

Spandex

The global spandex market was valued at $8 billion as of December, with stretch fabrics becoming a fixture across athleisure and shapewear that has become increasingly popular. Indeed, the market for spandex is projected to increase between 2 percent and 8 percent per year every year for the next decade. One issue, though, is that stretch fabrics shed microplastics, and even a tiny amount of stretch fabric in a garment can make it impossible to recycle. That’s one reason why the demand for a lab-grown elastic not derived from petroleum is coming to the forefront, with hopes for textiles that have the stretchy quality without the immortality. One promising material is silk elastin-like proteins (SELPs), which can create stretchy textiles that are biodegradable.

Megan DeMatteo, MIT Technology Review

This week in the Numlock Sunday, I spoke to Charlie Hall, who wrote Kickstarter’s post-pandemic tabletop slump slowed in 2024 and Gamefound finished 2024 with 6 of the top 10 tabletop campaigns for Polygon. We spoke about what “crowdfunding” has really become, what folks like Brandon Sanderson are up to, and the health of the business. Charlie can be found at Polygon, and on Bluesky.

Numlock Sunday: Charlie Hall on the state of the tabletop Feb 16 Read full story

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