Month: April 2024

Adolescence is a harrowing time for body image and self-esteem all around, but few milestones are as universally daunting as finding a prom dress. Whether it’s due to budget constraints, not being able to find a dress that fits, or both, what should be a fun event is often viscerally dreaded.

This was certainly the case for Summer Lucille. Lucille told Today.com that growing up, “if you weren’t skinny, there weren’t many options, and it was devastating for me because I’ve always loved fashion.”

She recalled, “I went to my prom looking like a church lady in a suit dress with a jacket because it was the only thing that fit. It was a very sad period in my life.”

Wanting to ensure a more positive experience for others, Lucille opened up her plus-size-only dress shop, Juicy Body Goddess, in 2016. The boutique, based in North Carolina, features mostly Lucille’s own designs of formal dresses up to a size 6X.

Juicy Body Goddess really started gaining traction when Lucille set up a TikTok account sharing truly joyful interactions with customers as they try on different styles.

Besides having an eye for fashion, Lucille is a masterful hype woman, making others feel beautiful with her enthusiastic, heartfelt praises. She clearly loves what she does. Here’s one of many, many examples:

@juicybodygoddess I had to get her number so she can model🤩 #plussizefashion #plussizeboutique #birthday #plussizetiktok #juicybodygoddess ♬ original sound – JuicyBodyGoddess

Juicy Goddess’s TikTok presence is how 18-year-old Elyse Monroe found out about the store. Monroe and her family drove nearly six hours for a consultation, determined to find the perfect dress.

Lucille shared with People that Monroe was initially “nervous and shy,” but after trying on a sparkly, form-fitting purple gown, everything changed.

“When she got into that purple dress, she lit up,” Lucille told People.

There was still a budget problem, however. Monroe’s family could only afford to pay $400. The dress was $700.

Thankfully, Lucille had one more surprise up her sleeve.

A now viral TikTok video shows the Monroe family approach the register, asking how much the dress would cost.

Lucille can be heard saying, “This dress is $700…but it’s free.”

Yeah, as you can probably expect, this leaves the teen and her family a bit emotional. Watch below:

@juicybodygoddess I didn’t cry until I did edit #plussize #plussizetiktok #juicybodygoddess #plussizefashion ♬ original sound – JuicyBodyGoddess

The video has had an overwhelming number of responses. Many commiserated with their own painful prom memories and applauded Lucille for her generosity. Some were even inspired to perform their own act of kindness by donating. Lucille told People that since posting the video, there has been $12,000 worth of gift card purchases. Yowza.

This is such an amazing example of what can happen when we celebrate uniqueness, spread generosity, and prioritize making everyone feel worthy of praise.

If you’d like to purchase a gift card from Juicy Body Goddess, click here. Or, if you wanna just follow along on some gorgeous fittings, you can find the Juicy Body Goddess TikTok here.

This article originally appeared on 3.15.23

The 2023-24 NBA regular season came to a close on Sunday afternoon, with every team in the East (sans Detroit) playing at 1 p.m. ET. While the Boston Celtics had long locked up the No. 1 seed in the conference and the Bulls and Hawks have been destined for the 9-10 Play-In game since January, the 2-8 seeds were all up for grabs on the final day of the regular season.

Seemingly no one wanted to land the No. 2 spot, as that meant you’d face the winner of Heat-Sixers in the Play-In, with both being dangerous potential foes. Still, there’s some danger (perhaps karmic, if nothing else) in hunting out the optimal opponent, and we’ll see if any teams pay the price for trying to dodge. Although all the games started at the same time, some went quicker than others and the first seeding to get locked up was Cleveland into the 4-seed as they worked particularly hard in the fourth quarter to blow a lead to the Hornets and ensure they were not going to find themselves in the 2-seed.

From there, the Pacers took care of business against Atlanta to lock down the 6-seed and the final guaranteed playoff berth. It also became quickly apparent in the second half that the Magic were going to roll past the Bucks to lock up the 5-seed, leaving the decision to the Knicks, who were locked in a back-and-forth overtime game with the Bulls in the Garden as to who would get the 2-seed. New York ultimately was able to grind out a one-point win, securing the 2-seed and bumping the Bucks to third.

That means the East Playoff picture is fully set, with the first round matchups below.

NBA Playoffs First Round

1. Boston Celtics vs. 8. Heat/Sixers/Bulls/Hawks
2. New York Knicks vs. 7. Heat/Sixers
3. Milwaukee Bucks vs. 6. Indiana Pacers
4. Cleveland Cavaliers vs. 5. Orlando Magic

Play-In Tournament (Wednesday, April 17)

7. Philadelphia 76ers vs. 8. Miami Heat (7 p.m. ET)
9. Chicago Bulls vs. 10. Atlanta Hawks (9:30 p.m. ET)

Whether you know him as Machine Gun Kelly, MGK, or Colson XX Blonde Don, each persona has a massive beef with Coachella.

Across the multi-day event, every influencer under the sun feverously posts their every move from the desert landscape. But don’t expect to see the “Death Around The Corner” musician in any of their footage. On April 12, MGK took to X (formerly Twitter) to claim that he had actually been banned from attending Coachella over a decade ago without a proper reason.

“Never been to a Coachella,” he wrote. “They banned me in 2012 for whatever reason. I was looking forward to finally going this year, but my daughter’s volleyball tournament ended up on the same days, so y’all will have to let me know how it is. She comes first .”

Just before users online could lace up their boots to go to war from MGK, an old post resurfaced where he slammed the festival. In the April 29, 2012 post, MGK took aim at the festival’s approach to curation and more.

“Coachella is a huge joke,” he wrote. “It’s corporate as f*ck, and they only accept the accepted but fake as they don’t. Sad that music is so trendy now.”

Welp, grand opening…grand closing. But hey, maybe the parties can work it out next year.

Coachella is arguably the biggest live music stage in the world.

Each year, festivalgoers pick the stars of the event and, sadly, the flops. Back in 2023, that was Frank Ocean. Only on its second day, Coachella 2024 attendees have already picked weekend one’s biggest loser—Grimes.

Yesterday (April 13), the “I Wanna Be Software” musician attempted to show off her deep love for technology, but it seemingly backfired. Grimes’ set was riddled with major technical issues, and she didn’t have a problem screaming about them while still on stage. Eventually, Grimes took to X (formerly Twitter) to issue an apology for the performance hiccups.

“I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight,” she wrote. I wanted to come back really strong, and I usually handle every aspect of my show myself. To save time, this was one of the first times I’ve outsourced essential things like Rekordbox bpms and letting someone else organize the tracks on the SD card, etc.”

She went on to say that she even had a premonition that a catastrophe would happen. “I had a bad feeling beforehand,” she wrote. “Not having run everything through the CDJs myself, and though I flagged it, I wasn’t insistent. The big lesson for me was a mix of if you want it done right, do it yourself. Be a c*nt, even if people feel bad. Probably pretend it’s fine and engage with the crowd rather than spend a whole show slumped over the desk trying to fix software when you’re meant to be entertaining…Please forgive me! Love, always.”

While some were sympathetic, others used the moment to flood their timelines with satirical clips, memes, and gifs. Below are a few of those responses.

Few species have been the victim of bad marketing quite like the pigeon. While its cousin, the dove (whose genetic makeup is nearly identical, mind you) is made the poster-bird for love and purity, pigeons have been dubbed as deplorable pests, aka “rats with wings.” Which, let’s be honest, sounds like the zoological equivalent of a mean racial slur.

And yet, a now-viral post serves as an important reminder that our attitude towards these creatures needs to change.

Coach and therapist Thaddeus Patrick shared on X, “My friend grew up in New England where they have pigeons. Apparently they also hate them. He was always saying bad things about pigeons.”

That is, until Patrick gave his friend a brief history lesson, which doubled as a lesson in empathy.

“We domesticated pigeons. They are (nearly) all over the world because HUMANS BROUGHT THEM THERE. And, they were more than pets. They carried messages. People raced them. They lived spoiled lives as honored human companions for centuries,” he wrote.

Indeed, humans have used the pigeon’s intelligence and natural homing abilities to communicate with one another since sixth century BC. Ancient Romans used them to announce winners of the Olympics. Genghis Khan had a whole flock spread across his vast empire.

via GIPHY

Among the most famous of carrier pigeons is Cher Ami, who delivered what may have been a lifesaving message to American commanders during World War I, despite a wound to his breast and a nearly severed leg. His courageous efforts got him the French military award, the Croix de Guerre With Palm.

And by the way, pigeons weren’t just appreciated for their communication skills. Some were simply bred for beauty.

And yet, any contributions are all but forgotten in the modern age. Or, as Patrick put it, “then we got telephones and we threw them out like trash. Literally, we threw them away.”

But by that time, “their species had already been fully domesticated and they could not survive in the wild; they lost all their survival instincts during the centuries that they lived caged by people,” he explained. It also helps that hard concrete buildings better replicate the pigeon’s natural habitat of rocky ledges and cliffs, rather than trees and shrubs.

So, okay, we no longer had “use” for pigeons. But pigeons stayed in the city…cause, the forest life isn’t for them. Okay. But why is there such universally visceral reaction towards them now?

That brings us back to marketing. Specifically a media campaign in the 60s by New York City Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving, who had such a disdain for pigeons that he created the “rat with wings” moniker (not Woody Allen, as some might believe) along with the association to disease.

In his paper, “How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals,” sociologist Colin Jerolmack also notes how our evolving hatred for pigeons reflects a wider disconnect between humanity and nature, sometimes referred to as “imagintaive geography.”

“In what sociologists call our ‘imaginative geography’ of cities, there’s a border that separates clean, orderly civilization and wild, uncontrolled nature. ‘That doesn’t mean there’s no nature, but ideally, the city is the place where we invite nature in in ways that we control,’” Jerolmack says. “Pigeons cross those boundaries frequently and visibly, inhabiting the spaces that we think of as our own.”

Essentially, humans created this situation for pigeons. “They don’t know how to live without us, and their instincts tell us that they should trust us. So, they continue to come up to humans and beg for food, because it’s the only survival skill left in their genes,” Patrick lamented.

And now, when we think of pigeons, we are more likely to think of disease-spreading vermin rather than the allies to mankind that they truly are. Even those of us that are familiar with the history of the carrier pigeon are likely to shoo them away and treat them as a nuisance more than anything else.

“They love us because they were bred by us to feel that way, and yet we hate them.”

“My friend grew up in New England where they have pigeons. Apparently they also hate them. He was always saying bad things about pigeons until I pointed something out that he never thought of before:

We domesticated pigeons. They are (nearly) all over the world because HUMANS… pic.twitter.com/sMlZEJtFwA

— ☦️haddeus ⳩atrick (@jacfalcon) April 10, 2024

Luckily there is still hope for humanity, judging the comments left on Patrick’s post.

“I used to be that way, but the more I learned about pigeons, and just growing emotionally mature, I realized that no animal really deserves to be hated and have been kinder to pigeons,” one person wrote.

Another added, “We forgot they were once our friends. But they didn’t forget.”

We forgot they were once our friends. But they didn’t forget. pic.twitter.com/FShdIZ8H92

— Hernan Cortes (@CyberPunkCortes) April 10, 2024

“Wow. I never thought of it this way,” a third said.

It’s not the most uplifting story in the world, but it’s an important conversation. The way society has used and discarded these creatures reflects how it tends to treat nature as a whole. We have to be better to the beings sharing a planet with us. Granted a lot of that is out of the average person’s control, but we are completely capable of shifting our attitude towards certain species.

Devyn Hales, 22, from California, recently moved to Sydney, Australia, on a one-year working visa and quickly learned that her name wouldn’t work Down Under. It all started when a group of men made fun of her on St. Patrick’s Day.

After she introduced herself as Devyn, the men laughed at her. “They burst out laughing, and when I asked them why, they told me devon is processed lunch meat,” she told The Daily Mail. It’s similar to baloney, so I introduce myself as Dev now,” she said in a viral TikTok video with over 1.7 million views.

For those who have never been to Australia, Devon is a processed meat product usually cut into slices and served on sandwiches. It is usually made up of pork, basic spices and a binder. Devon is affordable because people buy it in bulk and it’s often fed to children. Australians also enjoy eating it fried, like spam. It is also known by other names such as fritz, circle meat, Berlina and polony, depending on where one lives on the continent. It’s like in America, where people refer to cola as pop, soda, or Coke, depending on where they live in the country.

So, one can easily see why a young woman wouldn’t want to refer to herself as a processed meat product that can be likened to boloney or spam. “Wow, love that for us,” another woman named Devyn wrote in the comments. “Tell me the name thing isn’t true,” a woman called Devon added.

@dhalesss

#fypシ #australia #americaninaustralia #sydney #aussie

Besides changing her name, Dev shared some other differences between living in Australia and her home country.

“So everyone wears slides. I feel like I’m the only one with ‘thongs’—flip-flops—that have the little thing in the middle of your big toe. Everyone wears slides,” she said. Everyone wears shorts that go down to your knees and that’s a big thing here.”

Dev also noted that there are a lot of guys in Australia named Lachlan, Felix and Jack.

She was also thrown off by the sound of the plentiful magpies in Australia. According to Dev, they sound a lot like crying children with throat infections. “The birds threw me off,” she said before making an impression that many people in the comments thought was close to perfect. “The birds is so spot on,” Jess wrote. “The birds, I will truly never get used to it,” Marissa added.

One issue that many Americans face when moving to Australia is that it is more expensive than the United States. However, many Americans who move to Australia love the work-life balance. Brooke Laven, a brand strategist in the fitness industry who moved there from the U.S., says that Aussies have the “perfect work-life balance” and that they are “hard-working” but “know where to draw the line.”

Despite the initial cultural shocks, Devyn is embracing her new life in Australia with a positive outlook. “The coffee is a lot better in Australia, too,” she added with a smile, inspiring others to see the bright side of cultural differences.

Evian, Fiji, Voss, SmartWater, Aquafina, Dasani—it’s impressive how many brands we have for something humans have been consuming for millennia. Despite years of studies showing that bottled water is no safer to drink than tap water, Americans are more consuming more bottled water than ever, to the tune of billions of dollars in bottled water sales.

People cite convenience and taste in addition to perceived safety for reasons they prefer bottle to tap, but the fear factor surrounding tap water is still a driving force. It doesn’t help when emergencies like floods cause tap water contamination or when investigations reveal issues with lead pipes in some communities, but municipal water supplies are tested regularly, and in the vast majority of the U.S., you can safely grab a glass of water from a tap.

And now, a new study on nanoplastics found in three popular bottled water brands is throwing more data into the bottled vs. tap water choice.

Researchers from Columbia University used a new laser-guided technology to detect nanoplastics that had previously evaded detection due to their miniscule size. The new technology can detect, count and analyze and chemical structure of nanoparticles, and they found seven different major types of plastic: polyamide, polypropylene, polyethylene, polymethyl methacrylate, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate.

In contrast to a 2018 study that found around 300 plastic particles in an average liter of bottled water, the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January of 2024 found 240,000 nanoplastic particles per liter bottle on average between the three brands studied. (The name of the brands were not indicated in the study.)

As opposed to microplastics, nanoplastics are too small to be seen by microscope. Their size is exactly why experts are concerned about them, as they are small enough to invade human cells and potentially disrupt cellular processes.

Columbia researchers found that bottled water contains hundreds of thousands of previously uncounted plastic particlesu2014particles small enough to pass into the bloodstream and travel directly into our organs.nhttps://t.co/NoC70dLakV

— (@)

“Micro and nanoplastics have been found in the human placenta at this point. They’ve been found in human lung tissues. They’ve been found in human feces; they’ve been found in human blood,” study coauthor Phoebe Stapleton, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers University’s Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy told CNN Health,

We know that nanoplastics are making their way into our bodies. We just don’t have enough research yet on what that means for our health, and we still have more questions than answers. How many nanoplastics does it take to do damage and/or cause disease? What kinds of damage or disease might they cause? Is whatever effect they might have cumulative? We simply don’t have answers to these questions yet.

That’s not to say there’s no cause for concern. We do know that certain levels of microplastic exposure have been shown to adversely affect the viability of cells. Nanoplastics are even smaller—does that mean they are more likely to cause cellular damage? Science is still working that out.

According to Dr. Sara Benedé of the Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of Food Science Research, it’s not just the plastics themselves that might cause damage, but what they may bring along with them. “[Microparticles and nanoparticles] have the ability to bind all kinds of compounds when they come into contact with fluids, thus acting as carriers of all kinds of substances including environmental pollutants, toxins, antibiotics, or microorganisms,” Dr. Benedé told Medical News Today.

Where is this plastic in water coming from? This study focused on bottled water, which is almost always packaged in plastic. The filters used to filter the water before bottling are also frequently made from plastic.

Is it possible that some of these nanoplastics were already present in the water from their original sources? Again, research is always evolving on this front, but microplastics have been detected in lakes, streams and other freshwater sources, so it’s not a big stretch to imagine that nanoplastics may be making their way into freshwater ecosystems as well. However, microplastics are found at much higher levels in bottled water than tap water, so it’s also not a stretch to assume that most of the nanoplastics are likely coming from the bottling process and packaging rather than from freshwater sources.

The reality is, though, we simply don’t know yet.

“Based on other studies we expected most of the microplastics in bottled water would come from leakage of the plastic bottle itself, which is typically made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic,” lead author Naixin Qian, a doctoral student in chemistry at Columbia University, told CNN Health. “However, we found there’s actually many diverse types of plastics in a bottle of water, and that different plastic types have different size distributions. The PET particles were larger, while others were down to 200 nanometers, which is much, much smaller.”

We need to drink water, and we need to drink safe water. At this point, we have plenty of environmental reasons for avoiding bottled water unless absolutely necessary and opting for tap water instead. Even if there’s still more research to be done, the presence of hundreds of thousands of nanoplastics in bottled water might just be another reason to make the switch.

This article originally appeared on 2.2.24

Ryan Gosling is leaving his Kenergy behind to embrace his The Fall Guy era.

So, last night (April 13), during his long-awaited return to Saturday Night Live, the actor used his monologue to officially break up with the beloved fictional character via a song. However, that proved to be too difficult. But with the help of his latest co-star, Emily Blunt, through a few whackings (including a bottle to the head and chair to the back), things were temporarily back on track.

But the force that is Ken was simply too strong to contain. Eventually, the stars vocally duked it out through song to brag about their rival summer box office smashes. Ultimately, what was supposed to be a televised funeral for the doll turned into a revival of the Barbenheimer feud.

No battle is complete without backup. Blunt’s support took to her side of the stage in drab costuming similar to that of the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer. While Gosling, sporting his macho fur coat seen in Barbie, found a flurry of goons draped in Barbie‘s signature pink to assist him.

By the end, Blunt accepts that her time as Kitty Oppenheimer is long over. Gosling, on the other hand, screams: “Ken will never die.” Could that be a confirmation that Barbie 2 is in the works?

Watch the entire monologue above.

The Fall Guy will hit theaters on May 3. Find more information here.

Ryan Gosling has been a part of several notable box office smashes throughout his career. But during his latest appearance on Saturday Night Live, everyone’s favorite Ken doll used his onscreen time to focus on a franchise not listed on his resume.

Yesterday (April 14), Gosling reprised his role as Steven Wingdings to finally resolve his obsessive font feud with the film franchise Avatar‘s logo. In 2017, when the fictional battle began (watch here), Steven was considered loony for his anger over such a minor detail of the otherwise international smash.

But with the movie’s star, Zoe Saldaña, gushing about the world-building set to take place across the potential sixth and seventh parts, Gosling’s crusade is justifiable. Gosling unlocks his inner James Bond secret agent to gain access to the carefully guarded intellectual property fortress that is Disney corporate, even if that means tugging on the heartstrings of an IT support specialist.

Once the moment arises, Gosling directly confronts the head graphic designer in front of all Disney employees. Shortly after his carefully crafted monologue, with some persuading, Gosling accepts that all typography matters, including his long-despised papyrus.

If you are into thrillers and spy flicks or are extremely passionate about the visual arts, this sketch will surely make you chuckle.

Watch the full sketch above.

The NBA’s regular season will come to a conclusion on Sunday, as all 30 teams are in action, with teams in the East playing at 1 p.m. ET and teams in the West playing at 3:30 p.m. ET.

While we know the 10 teams in each conference that will continue on into the postseason, there is still an awful lot to determine when it comes to seeding and matchups. In the East, Boston has locked up the No. 1 seed and the 9-10 Play-In game between the Hawks and Bulls in Chicago is set in stone, but the 2-8 spots are all still up for grabs.

The 2-seed race is pretty simple. If the Bucks beat the Magic, they get it. If the Bucks lose and the Knicks beat the Bulls, they get it. If the Bucks lose, the Knicks lose, and the Cavs win, they get it. If all three lose, it’s the Bucks again.

The Cavs are most likely going to the 4-seed (6 out of 8 scenarios put them there), while the Knicks are the 3-seed in 5 of 8 scenarios). The full scenario board can be found below via the NBA.

For the battle for 5-8, well, it’s a mess. There are a number of tiebreakers that could be at play, but with the caveat that there are a few exceptions that get them there if they lose, Orlando and Indiana will be thinking “win and in” as it relates to a top-6 seed. Meanwhile, the Sixers and Heat will need some help to vault out of the Play-In.

Out West, things are even more fascinating as the top three teams are all tied for first at 56-25. The only seeds locked in are the Clippers and Mavs in the 4-5 matchup, as those two once again are destined to do battle in the first round.

If all three top teams win (or if all three lose) on Sunday, it’s the Thunder that land the top seed, Minnesota gets into the 2-seed, and Denver goes to the 3. If the Wolves beat the Suns and either of the other two lose, it’s Minnesota in the 1-seed. Denver’s only path to the 1-seed is for them to beat Memphis and then both the Thunder and Wolves lose, otherwise they are in the 2 or 3 spot. OKC, meanwhile, is the No. 1 seed if they win against Dallas as long as Denver doesn’t lose to Memphis.

The battle for the 6 or 7 seed is simple. The only way Phoenix gets the 6-seed is to beat the Timberwolves and have the Lakers beat the Pelicans. Any other outcome and it’s New Orleans getting the last guaranteed playoff spot in the West.

As for the rest of the Play-In, there is one scenario that gets the Warriors into the 8-seed, and that is for Golden State to beat the Jazz and both the Kings and Lakers lose. Otherwise, they’re in the 9/10 game. The Lakers earn the 8-seed with a win or if all three teams lose. The Kings need to win and have a Lakers loss to avoid the 9/10.