Halle Berry’s birthday routine just went viral, and it is doing a lot more than showing off a good SPF. Berry turned 60 on 14 August, celebrating at the Kokomo private island resort in Fiji with her fiancé Van Hunt, and the mirror selfie she posted to Instagram was less a vanity shot and more a quiet product manifesto. The Respin × Joylux Products Taking Centre Stage Two products in Berry’s line-up come from her wellness platform Respin’s collaboration with intimate care brand Joylux. The Joylux × Respin Juicy Like a Peach Moisture-Rich Vaginal Gel is a hormone-free vaginal moisturiser…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
A Wondermind securities fraud lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware is accusing Selena Gomez, her mother, and the founders of their mental health startup of concealing a years-long collapse from the investors who funded it. The plaintiffs say they put in nearly $1.2 million and got nothing back. According to Forbes, the two plaintiff groups are Wondermind SRS 44 and Bespoke Wondermind SPV, both Florida-based limited liability companies. The defendants are Gomez, her mother and Wondermind co-CEO Mandy Teefey, former co-founder Daniella Pierson, and Wondermind Global Inc. The charges are broader than the headline suggests. As Inc. reports,…
The Carmen Busquets Parsons Award for Disabled Fashion Students will hand a $12,500 annual grant to a student in the school’s MPS Fashion Management programme, running through the 2027/2028 academic year, with applications opening this autumn. Behind it is Carmen Busquets: Venezuelan-born entrepreneur, co-founder and founding investor of Net-a-Porter in 2000, and someone who has worn hearing aids her entire career. Busquets has described being drawn to fashion precisely because ‘it’s so visual, so creative’, a field where partial deafness was less a barrier than a redirect. That personal logic is now the rationale for the grant. What the Carmen…
Julia Roberts had a Julia Roberts Thrasher Magazine moment in New York this week, stopping by her local newsstand in a breezy all-black boho look that ended with a skateboarding monthly tucked under her arm. Say what you like about physical media being finished: Roberts is apparently unconvinced. The Outfit: Posse Blouse, Birkenstocks, and Bronze Headphones Roberts built the look around a billowy blouse from Posse, the Australian-designed label with a boutique on Bleecker Street in the West Village, paired with balloon trousers featuring pleats down the leg and a cinch at the ankle. All black, head to toe, which…
Cardi B colour coordination has a way of doing the heavy lifting, and at the Old Navy denim drive in New York City, it quietly stole the whole show. The rapper turned up for the brand’s newly launched ‘Most Wanted Denim’ campaign looking like she’d run her wardrobe through a colour wheel before leaving the house. Which, honestly, she might have. The base of the outfit was a layered cold-weather situation: an open royal blue cardigan worn over a sunny yellow sweater, buttoned to the top. A double cardigan sounds like a lot, but the combination read as more pulled-together…
The Disney Mickey Mouse Tuxedo has found its unlikely celebrity moment, courtesy of Paul Anthony Kelly, the actor who spent 13 years grinding through modelling jobs and acting auditions before landing his breakout role as John F. Kennedy Jr. in FX’s Love Story. A joint Instagram carousel from Disney Weddings and Allure Bridals dropped this week, showing Kelly in the Mickey-lined blazer, dancing with a bride through a drift of dry ice in a manor house, and posing among rosebushes with the practiced ease of someone who has absolutely done this before. The post didn’t tag him or name him.…
The Claude AI watermarking policy is now live, inserting invisible marks into the chatbot’s text and file outputs to flag them as machine-generated, and predictably, not everyone is thrilled about it. Anthropic’s stated reason is regulatory. The EU AI Act’s Article 50, which became applicable on 2 August 2026, requires providers of generative AI systems to mark synthetic text, images, audio, and video in a machine-readable format. That deadline also triggered a grace period: AI systems already on the market before 2 August 2026 have until 2 December 2026 to comply, according to Faegre Drinker’s compliance analysis. Fines for failing…
Access as a status symbol has become the organising principle behind some of the most interesting moves in luxury, retail, and finance right now. Forget the limited-edition drop or the It-bag. The flex that is hardest to fake in 2025 is being in the room. That shift is more than a vibe. It is being engineered, tiered, and quietly monetised by brands from Sephora to American Express, at the same moment that the broader luxury consumer base is shrinking. The Loyalty Ladder Gets a Makeover The mechanics are not new: airline tiers, credit card levels, beauty points programmes. What is…
The autumn/winter 2026 bag trends arrived on the runway carrying more backstory than usual: a high-profile creative exit, a 60-year-old tuxedo getting its flowers, and a 50-year-old handbag being reborn for a brand anniversary. Seven silhouettes cut through the noise. Mulier Bows Out, but His Bags Stay Pieter Mulier’s final show for Alaïa was, by his own account, deliberately bag-free. ‘To reduce, reduce. No bags, no jewelry. Only beauty and clothes and a naked shoe. Because that’s what Azzedine was,’ he said. The Impression reported that Alaïa confirmed his departure on 30 January 2026; no successor has been named, and…
Bluesky monthly active users have fallen to 10.4 million worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year, according to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb. That is not the alarming part. The alarming part is where that figure sits relative to the peak. In Q4 2024, when Bluesky was the obvious escape hatch from Elon Musk’s X after the US elections, the platform averaged around 22.1 million monthly active users. By Q2 2026, that had dropped to 10.7 million. A decline of around 52%, long after the post-election surge should have subsided. The app did not just give back its bump;…