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Dyson's latest Airwrap can curl your hair in both directions
The new Dyson Airwrap multi-styler can curl your hair in both directions without having to switch barrels.
Amazon is opening a hair salon with an AR color bar
Amazon is opening its first salon in east London to show off its augmented reality tech and beauty products.
Dyson's Corrale is a $500 straightening iron with over-engineered plates
Following the success of the Supersonic hair dryer and Airwrap curler, Dyson is ready to unveil its latest hair-styling device. The company is leveraging its experience in heating and cooling home appliances to make beauty gadgets that can style your tresses with less heat, therefore promising to be less damaging overall. The Corrale is Dyson's new cordless straightening iron, and it's supposed to provide "all the same styling with half the damage" of a conventional straightener. It's also the first Dyson beauty product to not use the company's air multiplier technology.
Becon's scalp scanner forces you to confront hair loss head-on
To quote the great Thanos: "Dread it. Run from it. Destiny still arrives." Like so many others, I don't want to think about whether my hair is thinning. For now, I'm happy to put my head in the sand (not literally) and pretend the problem doesn't exist. A startup called Becon takes a different view, though. The team, which is part of Samsung's C-Lab program, believes it's better to tackle the problem head on (no pun intended) and track your scalp meticulously. With the right data, they argue, you can identify the root cause (geez, so many puns) and possibly slow the hair loss process.
This smart mirror uses AR to let you 'try on' different hair styles
We've seen a slew of smart mirrors get introduced over the past few years, including one from Panasonic that's designed to analyze your skin. But for CareOS, a company based out of Europe, it wants to make an entire connected platform for the home and beauty salons out of its Artemis smart mirror. The mirror uses augmented reality to do things like "try on" a variety of different hair colors on your, which would come in handy before you decide to get a makeover. It can also integrate with brands to let you buy facial creme, as well as show you video tutorials on how to apply the makeup you're buying.
Dyson Airwrap can curl or straighten your hair using less heat
Having already worked on 1,600 kilometers worth of real human hair, Dyson obviously wasn't going to stop at its Supersonic hair dryer. In fact, the engineers have found a new purpose for the Supersonic's V9 digital motor. Announced in New York today, this rod-shaped Dyson Airwrap is positioned as an advanced curler that can also straighten or dry your hair, depending on which one-click attachment you put on. It's also fun to use, as you can watch your hair magically wrap itself around the curling barrel.
Disney reduces the chances of CG hair disasters
Movie studios often want computer-generated hair to have a specific effect, whether it's a seductive toss or a careless flick that knocks something over. But there's a problem: most rough-cut simulations don't realistically simulate hair, leading to a lot of guesswork and time-consuming edits. Disney (no stranger to hair-centric movies) has a solution, though. It developed a new system that can produce more authentic-looking simulations without an impractical boost to computation power. The trick, it turns out, was to use just a few cleverly controlled sample hairs.
What we're buying: Dyson's Supersonic hair dryer
This month, Associate Editor Swapna Krishna is singing the praises of Dyson's advanced but pricey hair dryer. Compared with her old model, it's like night and day.
Schwarzkopf’s smart salon personalizes your hair care regimen
As a woman whose long, thick hair has undergone several chemical treatments, I've always been concerned about the health and quality of my tresses. When I heard about Schwarzkopf Professional's new hair analyzer, I was naturally intrigued by its potential uses. The company is bringing its SalonLab Analyzer system to Schwarzkopf salons across the US and Europe in 2018 so you can get a better understanding of how damaged your hair is. Not only that, but salons can also use the information gathered to better cater their treatments to your needs, as well as create personalized shampoos on the spot. I went for a quick consultation at CES 2018, and so far I'm impressed by what it offers.
Color-changing hair dye responds to your environment
Just because you want to color your hair doesn't mean you want the same color all the time. Wouldn't it be nice if it could change with the weather, or whether or not you're inside? You might get your wish. The Unseen has developed a color-changing hair dye, Fire, that reacts to shifts in temperature -- it could be red outside and revert to a more natural color indoors. The carbon-based molecules in the dye alter their light absorption when they're subjected to temperature changes, producing different colors that you can reverse just by heading somewhere new.
Police could soon identify you by your hair proteins
Police and archaeologists regularly depend on DNA evidence for identification, but it has a serious flaw. DNA degrades under environmental conditions like heat and light, so it may be useless even if you have a ton of samples. However, Lawrence Livermore researchers have a better way: they've established a method of identifying humans based on hair protein markers. The markers are much more resilient than DNA (scientists found markers in remains about 250 years old) while remaining unique, with no one person sharing the same marker count and patterns. You only need a few hairs to get a result, too, and the ultimate goal is to pinpoint someone using a single strand of hair.
3D-printed hair leads to fuzzy machines and sticky blocks
A while back, MIT researchers found a way to easily create 3D-printed hair: smart software can create thousands of tiny polymer strands (smaller than 100 microns, if you want) that give objects a fuzzy texture. Now, however, they're finding practical uses for those natural-feeling surfaces. If you specify the right angles, density, height and thickness, you can make the hair do surprising things. On a basic level, you can create blocks that only stick to each other under certain conditions, or paint brushes that produce very specific effects. However, it really gets interesting when you vibrate the hairs -- you can create motors and sensors that are as baffling as they are clever.
Dyson's first beauty product is a hair dryer
Dyson teased its press event this week by sending out tiny, sharp motor parts to journalists (including this one). Now we get to see the rest of the thing. The company's first foray into beauty is, perhaps predictably, a hairdryer. The Supersonic, as it's called, has all the design hallmarks of a Dyson: It's circular and smooth, with a metallic finish and a splash of loud color. Compared to everything that's come before it, however, it's so... small.
Artificial skin grows hair and sweat glands
You've probably seen artificial skin before, but never has it been quite so... accurate. Japanese researchers have grown skin tissue that not only includes hair follicles, but all the glands that come with it -- including oil and sweat glands. The trick was to take cells from mouse gums, turn them into stem cell-like forms that generate skin, and implant those into mice with immune system deficiencies (which lets the new skin grow unimpeded). The resulting skin was a little creepy -- just look at the wart-like growth above -- but it was healthy, behaved normally and made connections with natural tissue.
3D printing hair is as easy as using a hot glue gun
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised an ingenious method for creating lifelike hair fibers the only requires a common, inexpensive fused deposition modeling (FDM) printer. The technique is surprisingly simple: the printer squeezes out a small dollop of molten plastic and then pulls away, stretching the material into a long strand -- much like the sticky strings that hot glue guns leave behind.
Salons of the future: New hair coloring technique etches patterns in your hair
Changing your hair color is easy enough: you can dye it, bleach it or rub some hair chalk on it. If you ask a research team from The University of New Mexico, though, they'll tell you that to get any hair color that remains as vivid as the day you applied, you need to etch your hair strands with nanopatterns. These scientists used focused ion beam in the lab to etch gratings on each hair strand that reflect light to show a specific color. They found that the technique works best for brown hair, but they've also successfully tested it on black and blonde hair. While the researchers have only been able to successfully etch nanopatterns in a lab setting (the image above is just a mock-up that comes with the university's blog post), they believe that in the future, people could use a flatiron with interchangeable paddles to color their locks. Since that might sound scary for some people (hey, you're permanently damaging your mane until it grows out, after all), the researchers suggest developing conditioner that coats each strand with polymers that mimic those gratings, so you can wash the color out afterward.
The future of beauty school is Google Glass
At least according to L'Oreal. The hair care giant (and purveyor of giant hair) just announced Matrix Class for Glass, which gives clients and beauty school students a stylists-eye view of your head. The three-part program includes a video series of in-depth beauty tutorials shot with Google's wearable; Matrix Eye for Style, an "exclusive" salon experience provided by George Papanikolas, who will record sessions with the headset; and a series of lessons for beauty professionals given by be-Glassed hair care superstars. This isn't the first or last time L'Oreal has taken advantage of the wearable; it used Glass to document Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in Madrid late last year and has plans to release a Glass app sometime in 2014. It might seem like an odd coupling considering most glass holes are more Super Cuts than Vidal Sassoon, but L'Oreal says there's an intersection between the early adopters of fashion and tech. According to a study done by its partner at Fashion Week, Nurun, "The futuristic nature of Google Glass appealed to the fashion-forward, tech-savvy audience..." When we start seeing years-old issues of Wired replacing copies of Southern Hair at Truvy's, we'll believe it.
The Elder Scrolls Online answers questions about character creation
Players have yet to really explore the character creation options available in The Elder Scrolls Online. How could they? The game isn't out yet. But when you release a trailer on character creation, people begin to speculate; when people begin to speculate, they start asking questions; when people start asking questions, the developers behind The Elder Scrolls Online generally take some time to answer some of those questions in a public forum. You see where this is going. According to this latest batch of answers, every race will have certain unique customization options in addition to sharing certain options with other races. How much is shared varies; Khajiit and Argonians obviously can't share hairstyles with humans, as the races are simply too different. There will also be more character options than were present in the original video, so those of you worried about the fact that the men could have beer bellies while the women could not will be appropriately mollified. For more details, peruse the full list of answers.
Because they're worth it: game characters get AMD to do their hair
Blocky, pixelated locks can really ruin a day of tomb-robbing, right? To put the feather back in those bangs, AMD's just announced TressFX, software that'll be seen in the 2013 release of Tomb Raider due on March 5th. The rendering tech offloads computation-heavy hair simulation to the graphics processor using Microsoft's DirectCompute language, and was developed by AMD in partnership with Raider developer Crystal Dynamics -- though it'll work with any graphics card that supports DirectX 11, including those from arch-foe NVIDIA. The result is a coiffure that can move realistically in response to motion and external forces, detect collisions between strands, accurately reflect light and even allow for matting from moisture or rain. Lara may have preferred that AMD omit the latter, but anything's better than the helmet-head look, no?
The Daily Grind: What hairstyle do you prefer?
Picking a hairstyle in an MMO seems simultaneously an intimate and futile choice. Futile in the sense of the second you wear a hat or helmet, your hair doesn't matter any longer (unless, of course, you disable the helm option). But I think that what you choose for your hairstyle may just be one of the most telling picks for your character's visual customization. Since many of us have remarkably dull hairdos, there's a temptation to go full-on exotic with the character creator. Maybe we want to just look cool, and pick whatever hits the spot in that regard. Maybe we want to be contrarian, and thus choose the most bizarre offering. Or maybe we want to express our emo, hipster, or middle-aged soccer mom sides with our hairstyles. Personally, I go for ponytails on my female characters. I pick this solely because the devs usually have to animate the hair, and I like my hair to move and bounce around. So what about you? What hairstyle do you prefer? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
