[ad_1]
Every time I see a high school student on TikTok flying through a tutorial on how to get perfect beach waves with the Dyson Airwrap Hair Wand, I think of the time my mom used to iron out my curly curls. remember. Like before a middle school dance in the 1990s, on the ironing board, in the kitchen. Or that first girlfriend’s Conair flat iron she bought with money she saved from her summer job, only to get hot enough to make her look like the lead singer of a hair metal band. Or the time you spent in your freshman dorm room trying, and mostly failing, to develop the dexterity and fine motor skills needed to operate the clamp on a Hot Tools curling iron. Dyson Airwrap is my version In my day, we walked to school uphill and back in the snow. Kids these days are soft, as evidenced by me rapidly heading into my 40s.
TikTok is full of tutorials featuring the $600 hair tool and one of its many camouflages. And hairstyling is just the beginning of TikTok’s love affair with gizmos and dudes. After air-wrapping your hair, you can prep your face for makeup with a red photocurrent, remove hair with a home follicle zapper, or mix together a salad with a vegetable chopper. Chatty, short-form video recommendations that are proliferating on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are algorithmically targeting a variety of interests and demographics, and are becoming popular with new tools designed to help with household and personal tasks. It helps guide customers. as a woman’s job. Some of these devices cost hundreds of dollars, such as Dyson’s hair tools and Dr. Dennis Gross’ at-home LED masks. Personal milk frother sticks and electric scrubbers are also quite inexpensive.
These products represent something of a reversal of fortune for gadgets as a concept. For years, technology industry observers and experts have wondered if the end of the gadget era is near. After all, our cell phones have enabled us to use most of the consumer high-tech products that have recently filled electronics store shelves, including GPS systems, digital cameras, CD and DVD players, and iPods. People won’t need it anymore. Traditional consumer electronics companies have been hit by weak demand after a brief resurgence during the pandemic, when Americans stocked up on ring lights, game consoles and tablets to entertain their children. But it’s not everywhere in the market. On the flip side, we’re in a golden age of girly gadgets.
Dyson, which launched an extraordinarily popular and extremely expensive vacuum cleaner in the US in 2002, suggests that women may actually be interested in high-tech gadgets, or that their engineering advances may be a selling point. It probably deserves a lot of credit these days for convincing other brands that it can’t do that. Refers to the typical feminine area. After winning the vacuum cleaner market, Dyson released a series of electric fans and a motion-sensing hand dryer. Although these products had useful uses, they were not the type that captured the public’s imagination. Then, in 2016, a product appeared that seemed a bit off-the-wall at the time. Dyson’s Supersonic Hair Dryer is the first of his three products that reimagine the basic physical reality of common hair styling tools. In 2018 he followed with Airwrap and in 2020 he launched cordless irons. All three of her products have been huge hits among a demographic of affluent young women who are particularly influential in shaping beauty trends online. Hair tools now account for nearly one-third of Dyson’s business in the United States.
In technology industry parlance, a gadget is a piece of hardware. Your smartphone is probably a gadget, but none of the apps on it are gadgets. In more traditional terminology, a gadget is a device with a narrow purpose, usually designed to perform or simplify a specific task. While not all gadgets are technology products, many are the result of certain types of technology becoming cheaper to manufacture and more widely available to the general public. The idea that women will buy tech products that seriously consider their needs is so obvious that it seems foolish to even bother explaining it, and yet tech companies keep repeating it to themselves over and over again. It’s like they’re trying to tell you something or just forgetting. . This industry is dominated by men, and they decide which new ideas gain traction and which products get passed over for improvement. Indeed, some gadgets of the past were designed with women and girls in mind, most obviously as tools used in the kitchen, but alongside personal computing. The gadget boom that occurred did not focus on the household and personal care areas. The curling iron I had a hard time learning how to use in college was called the Marcel Iron. It was given this name because its complex hinge-clamp mechanism was little different from the one patented by hairdresser Marcel Grateau in 1905.
Dyson’s development of this demand for improved vacuum cleaners and hair tools may reflect less the company’s ability to innovate than its ability to identify obsolete markets and aspiring consumers. unknown. Or perhaps I should say it’s a market that was once stagnant. At the end of 2022, Dyson announced that it would invest approximately $600 million to develop 20 new beauty devices over the next four years. There will be much more competition for these gadgets than there was a few years ago. Dyson’s existing hair tools alone have spawned enough copycats and ducks to inspire a cottage industry of tutorials and recommendations. In Airwrap’s case, this cycle has been going on for over a year. New and similar tools are coming to the TikTok Shop, Amazon, and Temu, perhaps with new lower prices or new accessories. Influencers try them out, often because they received the product for free (sometimes with an additional cash payment on top of that).Create a demonstration video that promises this In fact, it’s the best duck. We provide shopping links for which we earn a commission. Small creators and regular users buy whatever new things are surging in popularity and post their own reviews. Many of them are hoping their accounts will become even more famous as others try to figure out what’s going on with this new thing they’re suddenly seeing everywhere.
Much the same thing is happening elsewhere on the internet. CleanTok, where creators exchange house-cleaning tips and hacks, has links to a seemingly endless number of battery-powered scrubbers of all sizes and lengths, all from companies with the mysterious Amazon brand name. We are committed to keeping your kitchen and bathroom clean. Chinch. Skincare enthusiasts have discovered a genre of devices that cost less than $10 and shine red light onto your face to give you a “tighter” jawline. Fitness influencers are extolling the benefits of compact steppers and walking pads that can be stored under a standing desk.I have seen So There are plenty of close-ups of hairless armpits thanks to Ulike’s home epilator.
The promise of any kind of gadget, beyond the specific tasks it performs, is its ease of use. Most of these new gadgets marketed to women are, at some level, something—Usually easier to meet certain aesthetic or national standards. With less time and skill needed to perfect your hair and less effort spent making your bathroom fixtures sparkle, potential buyers finally have the potential to get it all done. Perhaps most importantly, these gadgets offer the possibility of relief. If not from the standards themselves, then perhaps from the implication that it is impossible to meet them all.
However, convenience does not last long when compliance with cultural norms is at stake. When current expectations become too easy to achieve, those expectations change. Consumer history is full of examples of how this happens.in her book Things you should never do: A history of American housework, historian Susan Strasser traces the path taken by household appliances during the process of industrialization and discovers the consequences, both intended and unintended. For example, electric washing machines have really made home laundry tasks less physically demanding and more productive. It has also changed where and how laundry is integrated into women’s lives. Laundry became less communal and more isolated within the home, and the ease of use of electric washing machines changed hygiene standards and required clothes to be washed more frequently. Over time, the hated weekly chores turned into a constant burden. Strasser found little evidence that the time women spent doing laundry had decreased at all.
Innovations in housework and personal care techniques, even if they reduce the physical strength and skills required for some of women’s labor, tend not to pave the way for more leisure and personal time. Rather, it paves the way for even more onerous expectations about how we perform, both domestically and aesthetically. The results promised by many of these gadgets were until recently available only to the wealthy, and are therefore not what most people expect by default. This means your hair and skin will look as if they were freshly grown. It looks like she’s seeing a cosmetic dermatologist, and it looks like she has a maid at home. You can see on social media how the bar of expectations is raised in real time as young women think about how they should groom themselves and organize their living spaces. Ideas about how perfect skin should look and how unmolested a home should be become increasingly bizarre, with Botox, buccal fat removal, expensive home renovations, and rapidly changing furniture trends all the time. Things like compliance that cannot yet be replicated with gadgets become new. Baseline among the wealthy and influential. No matter how hard you run, the goal line always moves away little by little.
[ad_2]
Source link
