Bonjour,
Me and every woman I know this summer:
You might have noticed this newsletter taking on some new topics and themes. I’m coining it the optimization economy, looking at what trends from your face to your feed say about money and power. A previous boss recently called me a beauty influencer (complimentarily, I think and satirically, I hope) but I nearly kms, just wanted to give an FYI on what I’m up to here and here and here.
ily,
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If you spend enough time on the internet as a 30-somethings woman, you will inevitably come across an onslaught of content like this:
Endless scrolling of cosmetic before and afters, that show the modifications both big and small that have optimized one’s face and body to IG perfection.
These cosmetic mods are a surface-level look at a much broader trend, rooted in the body, built around predicting and intervening in biology earlier and earlier. It’s a mirror to our growing comfort with self-modification, paired with today's rapidly increasing technical capabilities.
Starting with the earliest possible intervention: a good ole infrastructure play, predicting the behavior of molecules digitally through an AI model that could change drug development forever. The picks and shovels company, Chai Discovery. By far the realest of the bunch here, Chai just announced a $400 million raise, putting the company at a $3.8 billion valuation in just over two years. It's a drug discovery startup that's already working with the largest pharma companies in the world, building something that could eventually one-shot a drug to cure Alzheimer's.
Then there's a whole group of companies going a bit higher in the stack, pre-birth, headline-grabbing, controversial, and often lumped together as the 'designer baby' startups.
The least credible, Origin Genomics, which claims it's not only going to be able to do genetic testing, but actually rewrite the genetic makeup of the embryos and 'correct them.' Origin is still in the research phase, but the founder's ex-husband was imprisoned in China in 2019 for illegally modifying and mutating the genomes of twin girls. So yeah, I get why people are watching this one closely.
Or there are companies like Orchid that do embryo screening for disease and chromosomal abnormalities.
And Nucleus Genomics, which claims to screen for over 900 hereditary conditions and 40 additional traits that read more Hinge profile than medical record, think male baldness, BMI, IQ, eye color, etc.
The top of this stack is consumer health tech. It puts preventive care in the hands of the consumer, turning the body into a dashboard, looking at hundreds of biomarkers and giving normal people the tools to create their own protocol and hopefully catch medical flags before they become diagnoses. Function Health and Superpower are the clearest examples of the category, and heroes to many who feel traditional healthcare systems have failed them. BTW they are suing each other.
All of these companies, though varying in their degree of scientific legitimacy and the capital available to them to actually execute on their plans, speak to a completely new way of relating to your body and your health, not as something God-given, but as a DIY project you can predict, price, and edit at every stage, your face included.
