The Digest 31

paddock princesses and panera lip balms

Jul 10, 2025

Welcome back!

If you didn’t catch The Spread last week, you can read it here. It’s a good one - we talk about the sudden ubiquity of bananas and lots of good book recs. Speaking of which:

This week at Glossier: They’re partnering with Magnolia Bakery, famous for their banana pudding, on a banana pudding flavored balm dotcom 🍌

PS: Bakery Tourism is on the rise

And…

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You heard it here first, folks. Stay tuned for more xx

At The Composite, we serve up a curated collection of culture and critique. Think of The Digest as your quick, thoughtful read to replace the doom scroll, offering a bite of everything you need to stay in the loop. Come hungry. Leave questioning everything.

Aperitif

A little taste of what’s to come

Trending Tidbits:

These trends are tracked not for following, but for what they reveal. Not necessarily an endorsement, but a thought starter

🥸 Skinny little mustaches

🥥 Coconut milk nails

… or pool water nails?

🍹 Caftailing

🧥 Peplum jackets

👙 Halter tops

… or is it a hammock top?

The Main Course:

A selection curated to keep you fed

Interestingly, after having written a couple times about swimwear trending in a more modest direction, it seems mens swimwear specifically is headed in the opposite direction

Kylie’s clothing line, Khy, just announced an upcoming collab with Frankie Bikinis, coming next week. Khy’s typical size range goes up to a 4X. Frankie’s is straight sizes only. I have a feeling I know which way this will go, but very curious to see

Multisensory marketing has been a cornerstone of Composite coverage since the beginning. WGSN says it’s on the rise

DedCool’s Erewhon smoothie is the first to be inspired by a fragrance, allowing gourmand lovers to “actually get a taste of one of their favorite perfumes”

Meghann Fahy is starring alongside Penn Badgely in You Deserve Each Other, an adaptation of Sarah Hogle’s 2020 novel. I am extremely hype for this

Big week for book adaptation news: Jennifer Aniston will star in the TV version of I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy and Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page will executive produce and star in adaptation of Eliza Sussman’s Funny You Should Ask

I got an advance copy of You Wanna Be On Top? a few weeks ago and need to crack it open. Out now - “plus size” model Sarah Hartshorne’s new memoir about her time on ANTM: '“Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model”

Dior flew book content creators out for their Paris show - this guy is my new fave

Lips on hips: Glossier dropped terry cloth shorts with a built-in Balm Dotcom holder just a few days after Rhode posted about this lip gloss belly chain

Also on hips: temporary brand tattoos. Think we’ll continue to see lots and lots of this. Related: “Logo tattoos: How late capitalism came for our body art”

UGG celebrated the return of their Mustard Seed colorway with a takeover of NYC hot dog staple, Grey’s Papaya. I love this

I know it’s likely just July 4th, but hot dogs are all over my feeds. Glizzy Mcguire? Say less. The Mark Hotel is selling fancy ones from a cart. To quote Jennifer Coolidge…

Blue Moon is on my radar lately - we’ve already talked about their EOS lip balm collab, and this week they dropped a comedic series featuring Colin Jost1. Their parent company’s revenue was down 11.6% in Q1, so the push makes sense

New food x lip combo2coming in hot (or cold, actually)

And then there’s this… What I *will* say though, is when I checked their IG yesterday, it had about ~4,000 followers. It now has over 30,000. Maybe they’re onto something

Wip is a new brand on the scene selling energy pouches3 that could be “the Zyn of caffeine”. Their IG scares me. An insane stat though: From 2018 to 2023, energy drink sales jumped by 73%

“Healthcare brands are quitting 'medical' branding”. Formerly clinical categories are leaning into the beauty brand playbook - take Jones, a nicotine cessation brand that puts a genuinely cool, youthful spin on what it means to be a quitter

Meanwhile… “‘The medicalization of beauty’ trend is capturing consumer attention”. The future of beauty is clinical and the future of medicine is beautiful… need to sit with this but I am very intrigued by the dichotomy

I spoke all about the rising Jell-O aesthetic in this week’s Spread, but if you haven’t had enough: “Brace Yourself for the Fancy Jell-O Shot Revolution” + “Jell-O With Natural Dyes? It’s Not Easy Becoming Green”

Everything is a bag charm these days - the latest trend? Mini water bottles. This feels very survivalist adjacent, very avant apocalypse to me

I missed that Tatcha debuted a bouncy little mascot and I gotta say, he's pretty dang cute - in bag charm form, in nail art form - I dig it

Cult favorite hand sani brand (and now fragrance brand) Touchland partnered with Crocs to make charm-ready cases for their sanitizers, complete with Jibbitz

F1 Is For the Girls Now. They’re crafting their “Paddock Princess” personas. Romance author Lizzy Dent’s next release is “Drive Me Crazy”, an F1 love story

Separately from that (I think), here’s a musing from my notes app: Is the car wash the next great branding frontier? Goldfish’s version from this weekend sparked this. Beis has done it and they tend to be ahead of the curve. If the diner + the laundromat are the current hot brand activations… I think car wash is a natural progression4

I’m extremely eager to watch Too Much5, out now on Netflix, starring Meg Stalter - I think it will be very divisive and I’m ready to see which side I fall on

RE: Too Much’s press tour, though: +100 points for Meg Stalter wearing Ester Manas. Extremely good cover for Glamour. Will be listening ASAP to this ep of Critics At Large: “Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com

Thrilled to see “Curated for Curves” store Berriez in this Vogue round of best places to shop in NYC

Digestif:

A download on this week’s hard pill to swallow

Nothing to report here. Consider it a good thing 🤷🏻‍♀️

Dessert:

A weekly book rec as the cherry on top

Rather than a single book rec this week, I bring you an author rec: Karen Thompson Walker. If you like Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility) or Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations, Wild Dark Shore) I think you’ll enjoy Thompson Walker’s work as well. Her books are speculative explorations of various disasters - a catastrophic slowing of the Earth’s rotation, a sleeping pandemic - and lay bare the way that regular, everyday existence carries on in the wake of a previously unfathomable circumstance.

I’ve read both The Dreamers and The Age of Miracles this month (slightly preferred the latter) and just picked up Jane O. from the library this week. Let me know if you’ve read any of her work or plan to!

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@trayreadthat Tray Taylor in @Dior from head to toe!!💌👏🏾Have you checked out Dior’s new tote bags by Jonathan Anderson?👀💌 #Dior #TrayTaylor #mensfashion #booktok

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