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Inside the world of one 13-year-old girl.

Discover the life of an actual 13 year-old: her hobbies, her friends, and most importantly her phone.

A flat-out awesome support to emancipate women from heels

The case of a receptionist sent home from PwC for not wearing high heels has sparked online conversations. Her petition calling for the removal of gendered dress codes in offices has picked up more than 139,000 signatures in a matter of days. Encouraged by The Fawcett Society, a charity promoting women’s equality, people massively tweeted their ‘best foot forward’ with the hashtag #FawcettFlatsFriday. They also highlighted the complete nonsense of the situation, which goes like: “Just off to trustee board meeting. Will I be able to cope in flats?“

In line with these reactions, several initiatives are paving the way to question the pressure around the wearing of heels for women. In response to the storm, Stylist invited the men from its team to do so in a hilarious video. The obstacles they encounter will be familiar to most women: stairs, cobblestones, a grassy lawn, running after a bus. While watching men trying (and failing) to wear heels to make it through a workday wearing heels, one can only question the complete nonsense of the wearing of such instrument of torture… for men as for women.

Google proposes new set of emoji to better represent professional women.

A team of four Google employees has developed a set of 13 emoji designed to better represent women in the professional world. The goal is to highlight the diversity of women’s careers and empower girls everywhere.

The professional fields include business, healthcare, science, education, technology, industry, farming, food service, and music, with the latter category featuring an homage to the late David Bowie.

#google #emoji

David Beckham partners with Biotherm Homme for men’s grooming line.

L’Oréal Luxe’s brand Biotherm Homme, N°1 in men’s premium skincare, and famous footballer David Beckham announced an unprecedented long-term partnership to develop a men’s grooming line. The collection, of both skincare and daily grooming products, will launch in 2017. To promote this partnership, the brand published a commercial which aims to impact male behaviour with regard to skincare.

#skincare #biotherm

Lively: lingerie that doesn’t compromise between style & comfort

Either sacrifiying style for comfort, or oozing with sex, overloaded with frills, lace and push-up, underwear is a very polarized choice to make for women. Lively aims to change the narrative about lingerie. This recently launched brand’s approach is to create a new category and point of view, inspired by “women with wild hearts and boss brains”. The brand calls this movement Leisurée - that is, athleisure for lingerie. Introduced as a “work-to-workout” line, the items are meant to be versatile enough to be comfortable in every situation. A paradigm shift that is reflective of the multi-faceted life of todays’ women and their desire not to choose between ‘granny’ or ‘sexy’.

#underwear #lively

Two Harvard-trained researchers, who bonded while battling epidemics in West Africa, are developing diagnostic technology to help women monitor their own health and fertility.

Harvard-trained researchers Ridhi Tariyal and Stephen Gire created a smart tampon system that can detect the warnings signs of infection and other anomalies in menstrual blood. Because Ridhi Tariyal was convinced women shouldn’t have to go to the doctor’s and go through clinical tests to get information that is theirs, she decided to develop a system that uses blood from tampons and provides digital results at home.

Behind this innovation, the young woman promotes the idea that periods are not actually “trash” but something really useful. She says: “it’s such a rich biological matrix that you’re shedding every single month.”

The duo is now working on an endometriosis test by extracting and sequencing the genes present in cells found in period blood.

This innovation shows that the period movement is turning into social awareness. More and more, scientists confirm the period blood can be paired with useful information, a proof that the period movement is slowly trickling into medicine issues.

#period #tampon #femcare #innovation

“No blood should hold us back” - Bodyform

Women bleed, but it doesn’t stop them competing. The goal of the new Bodyform campaign is to break down taboos around the menstrual cycle and exercise. To do so, the brand boldly shows blood in its commercial, which is quite rare and disruptive in the femcare category. However, this is the umpteenth time a brand portrays women in a combative manner. Could it be time for a change? Is this a realistic portrayal of these women’s daily lives?

The campaign underlines the physical benefits of the products - enabling women to do sports - rather than the emotional ones. It comes to life through an online hub, under the name of Red.fit programme, which provides consumers with direct access to exercise videos, nutritional information and motivational podcasts for different phases of their menstrual cycle.

P&G’s Secret connects “stress sweat” to generational and gender struggles

Secret deodorant has launched a new campaign, divided in 3 commercials, which illustrates different situations involving stressful situations for women : ask a boss for a raise, say “I love you” first, or propose. The goal is to show what it means to be a woman today, fighting against cultural and traditional barriers to achieve something.

Sofy BeFresh locks your period in

The Australian brand Sofy promotes its BeFresh pads with a new series of videos. After the bad buzz of its last commercial, which was accused of sexism and “fat-shaming”, the brand positioning leans on humor and puts the stress on product demo rather than consumer insight.

The pad is leading edge in its ability to draw the period away from the surface and lock it under the surface for good. The problem is that most people don’t really find pad technology all that interesting. But instead of shying away from talking about the technology, Sofy makes the decision to embrace it. The new videos consequently show funny period people who cannot escape from BeFresh pads. An unexpected way to hero the demonstration and take itself a little less seriously.

Always wants girls to keep playing during puberty

According to Always’ research, half of girls quit sports by the end of puberty. In such a context, the brand decided to foster an encouraging message to its audience, launching its new spot, ‘Keep Playing’, partnering with soccer star Alex Morgan.

Always continues its battle in favor of young girls’ empowerment. To drive awareness around this new spot, the brand positioned on sport, which plays an essential role in building girl’s confidence, during a critical period, the Olympic Games. The partnership with the athlete Alex Morgan made the launch more impactful and embodied, thanks to the star’s own story of discouragement on social media.

With this latest spot, Always keeps on building its strong positioning towards girls empowerment.

#always #girls empowerment

Dove launches new campaign: My Beauty My Say

Dove is transitioning out of its traditional territory of self-esteem to move into the “challenging stereotypes” zone, à la Always. Its new campaign #MyBeautyMySay features women who have all gone against society’s expectations in how they live, dress, work: people think Marcia is too pretty to be a lawyer, that Rain is too masculine to be a model, that Heather is too weak to be a boxer, that Jessica is too fat to be a fashion blogger…

Dove encourages women to live their beauty and their femininity on their own terms, and not through what other people think.

Our takeaway on this: it’s interesting to see Dove move away from unconfident women to unapologetic women, and thus becoming less patronizing.

Mila Kunis goes make-up free on Glamour cover

GLAMOUR: What did the male writers (of the movie Bad Moms) get right about women?

Mila Kunis: The desire to be perfect. Women innately have this weird thing where they try to have a perfect persona—to look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, have their kids look a certain way. Women put so much pressure on themselves.

GLAMOUR: Along those lines of looking perfect: The photo of you that’s on the back cover of this magazine is very clean-faced—

MK: We had, like, no makeup.

GLAMOUR: How did it feel to be photographed that way?

MK: Fine! I don’t wear makeup. I don’t wash my hair every day. It’s not something that I associate with myself. I commend women who wake up 30, 40 minutes early to put on eyeliner. I think it’s beautiful. I’m just not that person. So to go to a shoot and have my makeup artist put on face cream and send me off to do a photo, I was like, “Well, this makes life easy.”

#nomakeup #makeupfree #beautynorms

To further embody its Just Do It campaign, Nike releases a visual manifesto aimed at Indian women as a wake-up call

Supported by the testimonials of leading Indian athletes, the brand wants to spark a movement in the country to encourage women to break conventions. In doing so, “Da Da Ding” recalls sociological evidence that bringing sport into one’s life helps foster a greater self-image and builds on a sense of control. In a country in which athletics has remained male-dominated, the current paradigm represents an interesting challenge for a brand like Nike. “What we set out to do is give it a complete makeover by making sport cool, accessible and fun” one brand manager says.

Speaking about the importance of sports in her life, one of the featured athletes, Padukone states: “Everything I am today and everything I have achieved comes from my years of playing sport. My goals, my commitment, my focus, my dedication, my discipline, my sacrifices, my hard work. All of it, I’ve learnt it all through sport. Sport has also taught me how to handle failure and success. It has taught me how to fight. It has made me unstoppable!”.

#nike #india #female empowerment

MACMA hijacks female nipple censorship !

While social media seem to be the perfect place to communicate about breast cancer detection, female nipple censorship imposes a major problem.

For their latest breast cancer detection campaign, the MACMA (Movimiento Ayuda Cáncer de Mama) achieved a significant milestone, with a parodic demonstration of self-palpation daily actions. Featuring Enrique, a chubby man – who obviously doesn’t cause any problem towards censorship policy – the association got two critical points across: gender discrimination and self-palpation sensibilization.

freethenipple breast censorship cancer detection

#freethenipple #breast #censorship #cancer #detection

After our in-depth investigation of the issues faced by young adults, Noreena Hertz takes a look at the lives of today’s teenagers, after interviewing 2,000 of them in the past 18 months – and finds a generation who feel profoundly anxious and distrustful

Generation K speaks : what’s it like being a teenager today ?

In this article, Noreena Hertz analyzes Generation Z, which she calls “Generation K”, after Katniss Everdeen, the determined heroine of the Hunger Games. This generation coming after the Millenials is very different from those that preceded it and full of paradoxes : selfie-taking yet not selfish, anxious yet pragmatic, risk-averse yet entrepreneurial… Gen K appears to be profoundly distrustful, lonely and pressured by the society. It is also a generation of makers, creators and inventors who want to build a better world.

#young people #society

Dove wants you to love your hair

The Dove brand has been a trailblazer for self-acceptance for a very long time. Its latest campaign encourages women of all ages to love their hair : real women explain how they feel pressured to wear it a certain way. Dove thus encourages us not to conform to outdated notions of what is beautiful and do things our way.

SK-II : Marriage Market Takeover

The luxury cosmetics brand SK-II tackles social issues by addressing China’s leftover women in its new ad campaign. Indeed, Chinese women are put under huge social pressure to get married. This film is the latest installment of SK-II global #changedestiny campaign, which encourages women to take control of their future.

#SK-II #cometics

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