For $200, you can now invest in the eco-fashion label Christy Dawn. The label is selling "plots" in the organic, sustainable cotton farm in India that provides the raw materials for their clothing. At the end of the season, you're paid back with store credit. If the harvest is good, you might get back more than the initial $200 you invested. On the other hand, if it's a bad year for cotton, you could lose most or all of your money.
Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas has designed a high-tech face mask that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Called Xupermask, it has three dual-speed fans to keep you cool, and a design to keep you looking cool. The real money-grabbers are noise-canceling headphones, LED lights for nighttime, and Bluetooth capability. You can listen to music, take and make calls, and put on your own light show while wearing this thing. It doesn't come cheap, but at $299, it costs less than a set of Bose headphones, and a lot less than a mobile phone! And you can use the Xupermask for both, with a bonus face mask thrown in.
The look of the Xupermask was designed by Jose Fernandez. He created Elon Musk's spacesuits, and Marvel characters' costumes in the Avengers, Black Panther, and X-Men 2. So you know it's going to look out of this world.
Around 48 million people have some degree of hearing loss. Given the rise of wearing face masks in public, hearing-impaired people are struggling to understand those wearing ordinary masks as they muffle their voices. One way to solve this problem is to put on masks with clear windows.
When wearing such a mask, people can see your lips, which allows the deaf or hard-of-hearing to lipread and see facial expressions.
Alicia Austin teaches infants and children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Currently, Austin has many online lessons with her students, and she says that wearing a mask can make communication problematic. She says that children need to see facial expressions and recognition to learn, even if they do not have a hearing disability.
It comes in red, mustard and black, in sizes 6 up to 16; the Boohoo minidress is, according to the online retailer, "perfect for transitioning from day to play". It is not so much the styling and colour, but the price of the £5 dress which attracts thousands of the thriving retailer's U.K. customers to buy it.
The £5 dress epitomises a fast fashion industry that pumps hundreds of new collections onto the market in a short time at pocket money prices. On average, such dresses and other products are discarded by consumers after five weeks.
But behind the price tag, there is an environmental and social cost not contained on the label of such products. The textile industry creates more CO² a year than international aviation and shipping combined. It also creates chemical and plastic pollution—as much as 35% of micro-plastics found in the ocean come from synthetic clothing, not to mention the scrapped clothing piling up in landfills.
