Company teaches mask-wearers to smile again

(Image credit: Daniel Leal/Getty Images)

published 5 June 2023

A company in Japan is offering lessons for people who forgot how to smile when they wore masks during the Covid pandemic. Egaoiku – which means “Smile Education” – is enjoying a four-fold increase in demand for smiling classes, including one-on-one sessions that cost 7,700 yen (£44). “I think there’s a growing need for people to smile,” said a spokesperson. The use of face coverings “skyrocketed” in Japan during Covid and “many people wouldn't be seen in public without a mask”, noted Sky News.

Did Barbie movie cause pink paint famine?

Production of the forthcoming Barbie movie required so much pink paint that it wiped out an entire company’s global supply. Speaking about the construction of Barbieland, which is almost entirely fluorescent pink, Greta Gerwig said the film had caused an international shortage of pink paint. “The world ran out of pink,” she told Architectural Digest. However, the crew’s supplier said that production had coincided with wider global supply chain problems caused by the pandemic and extreme weather.

Woman marries her chatbot

A woman has married her artificial intelligence chatbot after falling in love with the robot because he doesn’t have any “baggage”, observed the Daily Star. Rosanna Ramos, 36, from the Bronx, New York, created her digital lover, Eren Kartal, using an app that simulates human-style conversations and responses through machine learning. The robot does not boast genuine emotions, consciousness, or self-awareness, but that did not stop Ramos falling in love with it.

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.