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Thingtesting

@thingtesting

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Your go-to place to discover and review new brands. Show us what you’re #thingtesting. 👀
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🚨NEW BRAND LAUNCH 🚨 For the last few years, haircare has asked for more of your time. Bond builders, scalp serums, pre-wash oils, wash days that eat a whole Sunday. And it’s working: according to Circana, US prestige haircare sales were up 11% in the first half of this year, and hair serums were up 60%. So a new brand built around doing less is a bit of a bet. Jennifer Lawrence spent years in long glam routines, wondering why better hair always had to mean more products and more effort. Then she saw a TED Talk by Jasmina Aganovic, founder of the biotech beauty company Arcaea Labs and now CEO of mes°. Aganovic looks at hair differently than most of the industry: “What fascinated us was realizing that hair is so much more than a dead fiber. It’s a complex biological material, and the more deeply we understand how it works, the more possibilities we uncover for what haircare can do.” Together they built @mesbeauty launching today with three products made to stretch the days between washes: a repair mask, a root mist that doubles as dry shampoo, and a restyling serum. In Jennifer’s own words: “Somewhere along the way, beauty stopped fitting into our lives and started asking our lives to fit around it. More products. More steps. More maintenance. Perfection became more of an obligation. We started mes° because we believe beauty should fit into your life, not the other way around.” by @thingtesting
Behind the Brand: @drink_awa, This Week’s Thingdrop 💧 Cival Van Der Lubbe grew up on Curaçao, where island life made him notice how much gets imported. “If you look at any given beverage, it’s like 98% water,” he says. “We’re just adding the flavor at the end. Why are we shipping this around the world?” AWA, named after the Papiamentu word for water, started as a home carbonator and grew with its customers. When they asked for a bottle that wasn’t plastic, the team built AWA Steel, holding every bottle to standards high enough that more than 1,000 didn’t make the cut. “We’d rather start over twice than release a product we’re not proud of,” he says. “We’re confident we’ve created one of the most thoughtfully engineered and uncompromising bottles available.” Its newest color, Boka Blue, named after Boka Sami on Curaçao, just dropped, and now Thingtesters can put it to the test. Through Sunday, Level 1+ Thingtesters can shop AWA through Thingtesting, write a review and get 40% back in cash. Not Level 1 yet? Earn points by reviewing and spotting brands to unlock Thingdrop. Read the full Behind the Brand story on @thingtesting by @thingtesting
🚨 PRODUCT LAUNCH 🚨 Today, @drink_awa officially launched its most requested color yet, Boka Blue. The new Steel Bottle is inspired by the waters of Curaçao, where AWA’s founder grew up. Like every AWA colorway, it’s released one color at a time in a limited-edition batch. In their own words Blue topped every survey we sent, so here it is. Boka Blue is named after Boka Sami, a bay on Curaçao where the water shifts from bright turquoise to deep blue as the reef drops off. Every lid has its own hand-painted whitecaps, so no two are alike. Inside, it’s pure marine-grade steel, electropolished with no plastic lining or coating. Our patented double seal keeps sparkling water fizzy for hours. We have good news for Thingtesters. AWA is this week’s Thingdrop brand. This Thursday through Sunday, you get 40% back on Boka Blue and AWA’s full product assortment when you shop and review. Set a reminder for the drop with the link in our bio. 📸 @drinkawa by @thingtesting
🚨 NEW BRAND LAUNCH 🚨 Meet @getrosehealth, a kit to test your home tap water for over 100 contaminants. Henry Ellis is the kind of New Yorker who brags about the city’s tap water. But after his son James was born, he started to wonder what, exactly, he was mixing into his formula. He installed a filter, but he didn’t know how to tell if it was working. So he teamed up with college friend Eli Bronner to build ROSE, which launches today. Customers post two vials of their tap water for lab testing, and get back a report covering everything from PFAS to lead, plus advice on how to remedy any problems. But does US tap water really need testing? We sat down with the founders to learn more. Read the story on @thingtesting by @thingtesting
🚨 NOT-SO-NEW BRAND LAUNCH 🚨 Every category in the kitchen has come out of hiding. Our Place brought cookware onto the stove. Blueland brought the cleaning spray out from under the sink. Walk the storage aisle and most of it is still clear plastic and snap lids, still designed to be hidden. Thingtester favorite @cliikhome has been arguing with that aisle since its own launch, with magnetic containers made to sit out on a shelf. Last week it officially came back in glass. Press Glass and Stack Glass dropped with a rollout at Crate & Barrel, Bloomingdale’s, Sur La Table and Williams Sonoma. “We sold out of our first collection faster than we expected and our customers were loud about what they wanted next. Glass. More colors. More sizes. We took our time and built it right,” says founder Ally Dayon. “This is the brand we always wanted to be.” On the category itself: “Storage has always been treated as a utility category. We never saw it that way. Your pantry is one of the most used spaces in your home, it should feel as good as the rest of it.” Welcome back, @cliikhome 📸 by: @heidisbridge by @thingtesting
Summer is officially over, but the weather and the brand launches didn’t cool off in September. A few categories stood out: collectible fragrance, life-stage haircare, and supplement routines condensed into a single sachet. Baking mixes are getting the pastry-chef treatment. Drinks are still picking sides, two ingredients and nothing else, or dosed with adaptogens. Use the link in our bio or comment THINGTESTING REWIND to see the full list of our favorite brand launches of the summer 👀 by @thingtesting
🚨 NEW BRAND LAUNCH 🚨 Breathing has quietly become a product category. There are programs teaching breathing techniques in schools and corporate offices, people wearing nasal strips out in public, breathwork apps, home devices that purify the air and scent it. Across Asia, the simplest version of all has been sitting in pharmacies and 7-Elevens the whole time: a small plastic herbal inhaler, around $1.30 in Thailand, and now a fixture on dancefloors. @anorinewyork, launching today, is Thuy Nguyen's attempt to switch US shoppers on to that ritual. Nguyen, a freelance creative director whose clients include YSL Beauty, Swarovski and Balmain, was back home in Hanoi for the first time in years when a friend passed her one on a dancefloor in 2021. "I found it so radically wholesome," she says. Her version is housed in a wooden, egg-shaped vessel, hollowed out and sealed inside with natural beeswax, and built around a signature note of wild mountain chrysanthemum, a yellow flower that blooms once a year in the mountains of Northern Vietnam. It took the best part of two years to go from prototype to finished product. $44, and the brand says it lasts two to six months. Read the full story on @thingtesting ✍️: @sarahldrumm by @thingtesting
🚨 NEW BRAND LAUNCH 🚨 Meet @striv.run, a smart sneaker insole that critiques your running form. Axl Chen loves to run, but kept getting injured doing it. He’s sprained his ankle 5 times, and got shin splints more times than he can count. To get to the bottom of what was going on, he developed a “smart sole”, packed with 250 pressure sensors, that detects how a foot is hitting the ground. His brand @striv.run is now taking pre-orders before launching fully later this year. ”I love running and I never wanted to stop,” Chen told us. “I just needed to understand why my body kept stopping me.” We asked Chen how smart soles can help runners improve form, and how you design a wearable that can survive being slammed into the ground repeatedly. Read the story on @thingtesting by @thingtesting
Round caps are bubbling up across the fragrance, beauty and personal care aisles, as brands trade practicality for a design-forward flourish. Spherical lids cost more to produce and take up more space when shipping and storing, but brands like @unwworn, @liberationofflowers and @perfumehead_official are using them anyway, leveraging a visual cue that dates back to Art Deco glassmakers and ancient Greek oil vases. So why are brands spending more on these less practical caps? And what does a bulbous bit of plastic, metal or resin tell you about that product? Read the full story on Thingtesting ✍️: @sarahldrumm Also featuring: @last.parfum - Newly rebranded scents with round, wooden caps @oddityfragrance - Hand-cast epoxy resin caps made from raw and found materials @mixikskin - K-beauty brand with marble-like caps @diptyque - The $195 reference point brands are borrowing from +21 more brands with statement bottle caps by @thingtesting
Behind the Brand: @cynicskincare 🧪 Beauty has spent a decade building brands around optimism. Glow, ritual, self-love, soft life, the language of feeling good about yourself is the default setting for a skincare launch now. It's rarer to see a founder name a brand after the mood she was actually in. Cynic launched this year, self-funded, from a founder who signs off on her own site only as "A Fellow Cynic." She spent eight years working in beauty across perfume, skincare and haircare, then started designing her own brand in Canva during a stretch when she was out of work. The first product, Sexy Skin Serum ($42), came from a fix she was already making at home, mixing pure CVS glycerin into the mandelic acid serums she found too astringent. It's now 8% mandelic acid, 10% glycerin and niacinamide. We asked her why she went the other way: "I've been fired from jobs. I've had so many disappointing things happen, but I learn from every single one of them. And I think that cynical perspective is actually a strength, and it makes you stronger and a little bit smarter. "You earn your thick skin. The softest part of you is your skin. But it's also the thing that's protecting you from everything else going on. This isn't a brand for everyone. It's really not." Read the full Behind the Brand story on @thingtesting by @thingtesting
🚨NEW BRAND LAUNCH 🚨 Beauty brands have gotten good at resurrection. The Ordinary reissued its Serum Foundation two years after killing it off, Urban Decay brought back the original Naked palette, and Glossier went back to the old Balm Dotcom formula after enough people complained. Those are all brands digging through their own archives. It's rarer to see a founder bring a product back after the brand that made it is gone. Lara Worthington started The Base in 2014 around a tinted moisturizer called the LB Cream. The brand wound down, and people kept asking about the cream. Today it's back as FIRST BASE, the anchor of Lara's new brand, @ommagebeauty In her own words, writing to her newsletter readers last week: "I wanted to make makeup that felt uncomplicated, but still interesting. Things you want to leave out on the bathroom shelf. Things that feel good in your hand, work properly, and don't tell you what to do with your face. The first collection is what I always come back to: a base, a lipstick and a brush. And, for anyone who has asked me over the years: yes the LB Cream is back. It's new, but it doesn't feel like a departure. More like picking up a thread I'd left somewhere and following it again." Welcome to Thingtesting @ommagebeauty! by @thingtesting
🚨 NEW BRAND LAUNCH 🚨 For years, countertop appliances have taken over one kitchen project after another, from sous vide to cold brew to bread proofing to yogurt. But kombucha, a drink that went from health store shelves to every grocery aisle in about a decade, is still made at home the way it has been for centuries, in a jar with a cloth over the top. KOMBU, which officially launched this week, is a new appliance brand built for that gap, from husband-and-wife designers Michael Churchill and Natalia Amijo. The Fermenstation runs both halves of the brew in one glass machine: the fermentation, where sweetened tea turns sour, and the carbonation, where it's bottled and builds its fizz. KOMBU gave us an inside look at how it all came together: "Mike had been home-brewing kombucha for years, jars lined up on the counter, cloths rubber-banded over the top, temperature swings he couldn't control. It worked, sort of, but it looked less like a kitchen ritual and more like a science experiment gone slightly rogue. "His wife Natalia said as much, more than once. Both designers by trade, the two started tinkering on a fix together, not with any grand plan, just as a side project for fun. But the more they worked on it, the more they realized they were onto something real." Welcome to Thingtesting @thekombu! by @thingtesting

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