There are many ways of measuring a stars staying power. But one of the best barometers must surely belong to Marilyn Monroe whose used lipstick is expected to fetch up to US$20,000 when it goes up for auction in November, 54 years after her death.
The 1947 Revlon lipstick in pink Bachelors Carnation, complete with smudges around the rim, was discovered in a secret compartment of one of the actresss evening bags by auctioneers who had spent years hunting down Monroes possessions for a once-in-a-lifetime auction.
Such is the Marilyn factor that we estimate the lipstick will sell for $15,000-$20,000, or probably much more. Its so personal, explains Martin Nolan, executive director at Los Angeles auction house Juliens. Its one of 500 of Monroes personal effects that are set to smash records when they are auctioned in Los Angeles.
But before then and in honour of what would have been the actresss 90th birthday today the sale items are being exhibited at Londons Chelsea Harbour Design Centre. They include everything from her Gucci address book (containing a whos who of celebrity telephone numbers) to beloved clothes, personal correspondence and artworks.
Meanwhile, an exhibition of rare shots of the star, ranging from her days as Norma Jean Baker to the famous Last Sitting images by Bert Stern, taken six weeks before her death, opens at The Showroom Presents in London tomorrow.
Why is Monroe still so fascinating 54 years after her untimely death? Shes this blonde bombshell who has been frozen in time, Nolan says of the actress, who overdosed at her LA home in 1962. We still think of her as that elegant 36-year-old who everyone feels they know and love.
Nolan has been orchestrating the auction for a few years now, and will bring together two private collections. The first is from the estate of Marilyns acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who along with his wife Paula, was Monroes closest confidante and was left all of her personal effects in her will. The second collection comes from David Gainsborough-Roberts, a British man who became enthralled by Marilyn in 1988 and began investing in items owned and worn by the star. Now hes decided, says Nolan, that Marilyn is bigger than him and that his collection should go to good homes.
Nolan believes the auction will be record-breaking because it includes some of Monroes most personal items. My favourite piece is a miniaudiere evening bag, which is gold and bejewelled in amber with a black velvet lining, says Nolan. He describes how the bag is still filled with all the accoutrements of a night out on the town: theres a gold tray containing loose powder, eight Phillip Morris cigarettes in perfect condition, and even two dimes, which is what youd need to call a taxi home its a true picture. Another handbag contains a matching set of comb, compact and cigarette lighter all exactly as you imagine Marilyn left them when she flung them aside after an evening out.
We still think of her as that elegant 36-year-old who everyone feels they know and love
Despite the fact that Monroes films grossed $200 million by the time of her death, Nolan says she owned surprisingly few lavish items. She actually had very few fine jewellery pieces of her own. For her it was all about the costume jewellery, but obviously when she wore it, it had that wow factor. Among the paste necklaces and bracelets by costume jewellery specialist Albert Weiss is only one piece that does include real diamonds: an elegantly dainty cocktail watch from Swiss watchmakers Blancpain. Its face value is $80,000 to $100,000 but Nolan says the skys the limit when you know that it graced the wrist of Monroe.
No other celebrity has achieved the collectability of Marilyn. She has fans all over the world and she transcends age groups, with fans from five years old to 95 years old, says Nolan. Its very rare to find items from her life or career, and this is the last auction of its kind.
Some of the most touching items in the auction are actually the ones that emphasise the mundane. There are receipts for bacon and lard, an insurance document scrawled over with a recipe for stuffing and a journal in which shed written that she was Alone!!!!! All alone.
Marilyn created this public image around herself as the humorous blonde bombshell. It made her famous, but she couldnt escape it, says Nolan, of the woman who spent most of her childhood in foster homes after her mother was hospitalized for schizophrenia. She had a hard life, getting married three weeks after her 16th birthday. There was no one who loved her unconditionally, but she was always searching for that. It was very sad.
It was Calvin Harris who ended things with Taylor Swift, a source tells Us Weekly. As previously confirmed by Us, the How Deep Is Your Love producer and the Shake It Off songstress recently called it quits on their relationship after 15 months of dating.
Taylor Swift (left) and DJ Calvin Harris attend the 2015 Billboard Music Awards at MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 17 in Las Vegas. Jeff Kravitz/BMA2015/FilmMagic PHOTOS: Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris Romance Timeline
Taylor is doing OK now, but she was upset, the insider adds, explaining that the duos relationship just simply ran its course.
It just wasnt working anymore, another source previously told Us.
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According to the first insider, the pair were having issues before Harris May 20th accident, but Swift, 26, was there for him.
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She was worried, an insider told Us of the Grammy winner, who rushed to the 32-year-old DJs side after he was involved in a car accident in Las Vegas.
The pair first stepped out together in April 2015 after hitting it off at the 2015 Brit Awards. They recently celebrated their one-year anniversary with a tropical getaway, where they shared rare PDA photos of their sunset kisses via social media.
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Im in a magical relationship right now, Swift had gushed in Vogues April 2016 issue.
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It"s official: Prince died of an overdose from opioid painkillers, becoming the latest high-profile victim of America"s opioid epidemic.
Prince died unexpectedly at his home in Minnesota on April 21. A law enforcement official on Thursday confirmed to the Associated Press that, based on autopsy tests, Prince died of an opioid overdose.
Prince had been reportedly trying to check in to drug abuse treatment but couldn"t get an appointment before he died. As my colleague Julia Belluz reported, that even a rich celebrity couldn"t access care in time demonstrates how difficult it can be to get into treatment. According to 2014 federal data, at least 89 percent of people who met the definition for a drug abuse disorder didn"t get treatment. Patients with drug abuse disorders also often complain of weeks- or months-long waiting periods for care.
The news of Prince"s overdose is absolutely tragic, but it"s also an issue that Americans are becoming more and more aware of. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, one in five Americans has a family member who"s addicted to prescription painkillers, and more than four in 10 Americans personally know someone who"s addicted. And in 2014, overdose deaths reached a record high, because of the increase in opioid deaths.
The opioid painkiller epidemic goes back to the 1990s
Back in the 1990s, doctors believed and many still do in the need to treat pain as a serious medical issue. There"s a good reason for that: About 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, according to a 2011 report from the Institute of Medicine.
Pharmaceutical companies took advantage of this concern. Through a big marketing campaign for doctors and by backing advocacy groups, they got doctors to prescribe products like OxyContin and Percocet in droves. The drugs proliferated, landing in the hands not just of patients but also teens rummaging through their parents" medicine cabinets, other family members and friends of patients, and the black market.
As a result, opioid painkiller deaths skyrocketed. In 2014, nearly 19,000 Americans died from overdoses linked to opioid painkillers.
Seeing the rise in opioid abuse and deaths, doctors, clinics, and governments began to crack down on prescriptions for painkillers. Law enforcement, for instance, threatened doctors with incarceration and the loss of their medical licenses if they prescribed the drugs unscrupulously.
Ideally, doctors should still be able to get painkillers to the many patients who truly need them after, for example, evaluating whether the patient has a history of drug abuse. But doctors who weren"t conducting even such basic checks are being told not just through the crackdown but by health care organizations and public education campaigns to give more thought to their prescriptions.
But many people who lost access to painkillers were still addicted, so they looked for other ways to satisfy their habit. So some who could no longer access prescribed painkillers or perhaps could no longer afford them turned to a cheaper, more potent opioid, heroin. Not all painkiller users went this way, and not all heroin users started with painkillers, but statistics suggest many did: A 2014 study in JAMA Psychiatry found many painkiller users were moving on to heroin, and a 2015 CDC analysis found people who are addicted to prescription painkillers are 40 times more likely to be addicted to heroin.
So heroin abuse increased, and so did overdoses: In 2014, more than 10,000 deaths in the US were linked to heroin.
That doesn"t mean cracking down on painkillers was a mistake. It appeared to slow the rising number of painkiller deaths, and may have prevented doctors from prescribing the drugs to new generations of potential addicts. So the crackdown did lead to more heroin deaths, but it will hopefully prevent future populations of drug abusers, which could have suffered even more overdose deaths.
But ultimately, the likely solution is to get opioid addicts into treatment to ensure they don"t resort to even more dangerous drugs if painkillers are restricted. So the Obama administration, for one, is asking for more funding for treatment programs, including medication-assisted treatment like methadone and Suboxone. Some states have also talked up treatment programs, although others, like Louisiana and Indiana, have taken a "tough-on-crime" approach that focuses on incarcerating drug traffickers.
Whatever the approach, based on Kaiser"s polling, most Americans don"t believe that the government is doing enough and many of them are being personally affected.
Faced with angry users complaining of hacked accounts, TeamViewer has placed the blame on the "careless" use of credentials rather than internal issues.
Founded in 2005, TeamViewer provides software which can be used to remotely control PC systems and conducted meetings. The company caters for over 200 million users across the globe -- and some of which have recently taken to forums to complain of alleged hacking thanks to the firm"s software.
On Reddit, users have flooded the forum with complaints over the alleged hack, complaining that their accounts were compromised and attackers have been able to infiltrate their PCs for the purpose of stealing financial data, accessing other accounts and making purchases ranging from designer clothes to Amazon gift cards.
One common thread in the story appears to be a file called "webbrowserpassview.exe," which trawls through systems to find stored passwords for use.
In a series of tweets, TeamViewer said it was "experiencing issues in parts of its network," but within a few hours managed to boot the majority of the platform back to regular service.
In a statement, TeamViewer said the outage was caused by a denial-of-service attack (DoS) attack aimed at the company"s infrastructure, but claims there is "no evidence" that the DoS attack was linked to any data breach or user account compromise.
TeamViewer said, "the truth of the matter is TeamViewer experienced network issues because of the DoS-attack to DNS servers and fixed them, there is no security breach at TeamViewer, regardless of the incident, TeamViewer continuously works to ensure the highest possible level of data and user protection."
Instead, the company blamed recent account hack claims at the feet of "careless use of account credentials." As we"ve seen in the last year, countless credentials are now being traded and released online, and coupled with the fact many will use the same passwords across different services, one loose set can lead to the compromise of multiple accounts.
"In addition, users might unintentionally download and install malware programs," the company said. "Yet once a system is infected, perpetrators can virtually do anything with that particular system -- depending on how intricate the malware is, it can capture the entire system, seize or manipulate information, and so forth."
The timing of the account compromises and DoS attack is interesting, but in fairness to TeamViewer, it is entirely possible that the users affected may have had their details stolen and used through other means than breaching TeamViewer servers. Just by checking Troy Hunt"s HaveIbeenpwned search engine you can see if credentials belonging to you are available freely online, and if so, you should immediately start changing your passwords.
Some users have suggested the recent MySpace and LinkedIn data dumps may be to blame, whereas others have denied their credentials were weak or used elsewhere.
The takeaway? Using the same credentials across multiple online services is risky, and while remembering different sets is a pain, it prevents attacks from accessing your complete digital profile should one set be stolen. It is not a full proof solution but will certainly help.
SAN JOSE (CN) Hard times have come to Silicon Valley biotech company Theranos. Forbes magazine is reducing its founder"s estimated net worth from $4.5 billion to nothing, and the company faces two class actions about its blood-testing devices.The consumer class actions, filed May 25 and 26 by attorneys with McCune Wright, and Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, claim the company misled customers about the accuracy of its "revolutionary" handheld blood testing devices and its compliance with federal regulations.Lead plaintiff M.P.B. and McCune Wright beat lead plaintiff Casey Jones and Hagens Berman to the same federal court by a day."Theranos was focused more on press and market value than the health of its customers, and it achieved the opposite of its mission: it obfuscated its actions and tests to where no reasonable consumer can rely on the results provided or make health care decisions based on them," Casey claims.Theranos spokesperson Brooke Buchanan said the lawsuits are "without merit."In its June 21 issue, already posted on the Internet, Forbes magazine said Theranos" founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes topped its list of America"s Richest Self-Made Women last year with an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion, but "Forbes is lowering our estimate of her net worth to nothing."Forbes said its estimate is "based entirely on her 50 percent stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market." Theranos shares are not publicly traded; investors bought stakes in it in 2014 "at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company," Forbes reported.Theranos sold its Edison handheld blood-testing gadgets as a quicker, less invasive way to perform more than 200 tests on a few drops of blood pricked from a finger.But on May 19, the company voided all results from blood tests performed on its Edison machines, several months after it received a warning letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services threatening to impose sanctions for lab deficiencies, according to M.P.B."s complaint."At the very time that Theranos was advertising compliance with federal regulations, it had been repeatedly sanctioned by federal authorities," M.P.B. claimed.Theranos began partnering with Walgreens in 2013, offering its blood testing services to customers at pharmacies in Arizona and California. But Theranos never received FDA approval to conduct blood tests outside of a laboratory setting, so it had to ship blood vials to a lab in Newark, Calif., for analysis, according to the complaint.Although the FDA lacks authority to regulate blood testing developed through proprietary methods, it has the power to regulate medical devices, such as the company"s nanotainers containing blood samples, that are shipped across state lines.The company did not have FDA approval to conduct the 205 blood tests it offered to Walgreens customers, so under pressure from the FDA, the company in October last year stopped collecting blood samples for all but one test, herpes simplex HSV-1, for which it obtained approval in July 2015, according to the complaint.FDA inspection reports released in October 2015 found problems with how the company handled customer complaints, monitored the quality of its blood tests and vetted suppliers.Plaintiffs in both lawsuits seek class certification, restitution, an injunction and damages for false advertising, breach of contract, fraud, unfair business and unjust enrichment.According to M.P.B."s complaint, Theranos has conducted 6.1 million diagnostic tests since 2013, and that "tens of thousands of patients may have been given incorrect blood-test results, been subject to unnecessary or potentially harmful treatments, and/or been denied the opportunity to seek treatment for a treatable condition."
My JustFab Collection/Review: My Honest Opinion! | VICKYLOGAN
When Niccolo de Masi, chief executive at Glu Mobile, approached Kim Kardashian West with the idea to create agame based on her lifestyle and success, the celebrity wasn"t easily sold--at first.
"It took six months to go from the first conversation to a signed contract. There were many stages of her and I chatting by phone," saysde Masi.
Developed by Glu, Kim Kardashian: Hollywoodhas pulled in more than $157 million in sales since launching in 2014.In the game, users create their own avatars and compete to ascend the ranks of the Los Angeles elite.(Glu would not disclose how much of the app"s royalties are collected byKardashian West.)
The game is free to play, though users can pay toaccessa variety ofvirtual styles--fromdesigner clothes (i.e.,Balmain"s Olivier Rousteing,Karl Lagerfeld)to customized makeup. De Masi says that just about 5 percent of its global users actually pay for these features.
On Thursday, the company announced its first-ever integration with makeupbrandNARSCosmetics. Players can now access the "smoky eye" or "n**e lip" looks using virtual items from NARS"s "o****m Blush" collection, among others. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though it"s worth pointing out that NARSgenerates salesfrom links in the game itself, where users can navigate to purchase products.
The success of the game so far isn"t surprising, given Kardashian West"s business track record.In 2006, shelaunched DASH, a boutique clothing store,with sisters Kourtney and Khlo Kardashian. She laterco-founded ShoeDazzle, the online fashion subscription service thatraised $66 million in VC funding--withcontributionsfrom Andreessen Horowitz. (It was lateracquired by JustFabin 2013).
In 2015, she launched "Kimoji," the popular app that allowsusers access to over 500 themed emojisfor $1.99.The Hollywood socialite--who, last year, Forbes estimated to have a net worth of $53 million--hasalso endorsed a number of beauty brands.
Betting on the rapid rise of social media
As networking apps continueto trump more traditional gaming categories on mobile,Glu is now tapping into themassive (and highly engaged)social-media followings of high-profile celebrities. The idea is to leverage their marketing power to create simple, easy-to-play interfaces that are based more on personality than on a plot line. At present, just 32 of the top 100 free apps in the Apple store are games.
Later this year, Glu will launch games about Taylor Swiftand celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. It hasalready produced apps with Katy Perry and Britney Spears. Collectively, the company"scelebrity partners reach more than 1billion followers on social media.
"With the brand integration, we"re adding more authenticity to the product than you would have if it were pretend clothing brands," de Masi explains. "The world going mobile means you need to bring the whole world into your mobile product."
Games designed to feel like a social network
De Masi says he"s trying to build "communities" within the apps. Userscan take selfieson theKendall and Kylieapp,for instance, and thendirectly post themonTwitter or Facebook.
Not all of these ventureshave beensuccessful: Katy Perry Popreceived complaints of technical glitches upon launchingand presentlyhas fewer than 65,000 likes on Facebook. The company says it"s still brainstorming ways to try and improve the user experience.
"Our team had plenty of unforeseen challenges when it came to reducing load times in the game and making it a snappy experience," de Masi says. "The other mistake that we made with Britney [Spears] has been [not] integrating her music," he adds.
Yet Kim Kardashian: Hollywoodis still going strong, thanks in large part to the celebrity"s own creative direction: She approves every visual, character, and storyline on the app, and even alerts Glu Mobile to "new additions to the family," i.e., the birth of her daughter, Saint West, last December.
"So much of this game--from the outfits to hairstyles to accessories--are all inspired by looks that I love and hand selected," Kardashian West said at the time of the app"s launch. "We were able to record and include so much of my natural commentary throughout the gameplay."
