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Netflix Party App: Here's How You Can Watch With Friends While Social Distancing


Netflix just made social distancing so much easier. Since people have been practicing self-isolation to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, they’ve discovered a genius app that lets them watch Netflix content with their friends. It’s called Netlix Party.

OK, so it’s not an app, per se: It’s a Google Chrome extension that’s free to download. Click here to put it on your browser. From there, use is pretty simple.

After hitting “Install Netflix Party” on the above link’s homepage, you’ll be redirected to the Chrome Web Store. Click “Add to Chrome” to officially finish downloading the extension. Then, go to Netflix and select any show or movie you’d like to watch. After, hit the “NP” icon that should now be on your address bar. Hit “Start Party” to kick off your joint viewing, and share the specific party URL to the people you want invited.

If you’re the invitee, click the party link your friend sent you. You’ll be redirected to Netflix’s website, at which point you’ll hit the “NP” button next to your address bar. This should automatically add you to the Netflix Party. A TikTok user made a full tutorial on how to do this if you’d like a visual:

This is a game-changer for people struggling with the necessary social distancing that has to happen right now. Naturally, the response on Twitter has been rapturous. “Friendly reminder for all the bored quarantined people, there’s an extension called Netflix Party that lets you watch synced up shows/ movies with your friends!!” one person posted.

Another wrote, “So Netflix recently launched this Google Chrome plug-in called ‘Netflix Party’ up to 500k ppl can watch the same movie/show in sync and has a chat room to allow for real time comments! I just added it to my chrome who’s down to do a movie night!? “

I know exactly what I’m doing tonight.



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Hannah Brown Says She Can't Get on the Celebrity Dating App, Raya


Hannah Brown is down to find love on Raya…if only they would let her on!

According to the former Bachelorette and winner of Dancing with the Stars, the popular “celebrity” dating app has completely ghosted her application. “I don’t know if you know this but I was the Bachelorette,” Hannah jokingly complained on her Instagram story. “And I can’t get on Raya. I’ve been on the waiting list for months now.” One Reddit user recorded the entire three-story rant for your viewing pleasure.

Apparently, Hannah’s friend Elyse Murphy, also featured in the video, is a pastor who was approved by the app. To be fair, Murphy has 20K followers on the ‘gram, which is nothing to scoff at. Plus, she even offered Brown her profile, which she says she’s no longer using.

“No no no, I’m done. Christian Mingle, here I come,” Brown declared in response. But will they approve? “I might not be allowed on Christian Mingle at this point, but Jesus still loves me,” she joked. This is probably referring to that time she boasted on national television that she had sex with current Bachelor Peter Weber four times in a windmill. “Jesus still loves me” has become a sort of slogan for Brown since that moment and appears in her Instagram bio and posts.

Many commenters on Reddit have already come to Brown’s defense. “Someone at Raya must still be in a denial den/cockpit/ballroom,” one poster wrote. Another said Raya is “so embarrassing” anyway, which launched a debate about the app’s users, which may or may not consist mostly of “Australian DJs, youtubers, semipopular podcasters, and macro-influencers.”

Maybe Brown should commiserate about the celebrity dating game with Lucy Hale. The Katy Keene star recently admitted that she swiped right on John Mayer on a VIP app that’s so secret, she can’t even say its name. Unfortunately, she doesn’t think he swiped back.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: If Alabama Hannah and the girl from Pretty Little Liars can’t find love, what hope is there for the rest of us?



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Your Pregnancy App May Be Selling Your Data—To Your Boss


Tracking health data has gotten intimate. Thanks to the booming femtech industry, there are now dozens of fertility and pregnancy apps like Ovia, which give moms-to-be an easy way to input daily health updates during their pregnancy journeys. The apps, designed in colors like purple and blue, create a fun and welcoming environment to track women’s most personal data—sexual activity, menstrual cycles, fertility, pregnancy symptoms and dates for delivery, even pregnancy loss—in a free, user friendly mobile app. The idea that these apps might be selling your data isn’t new. But what if your data wasn’t going to some third party advertiser but rather someone much closer to you—like your boss.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post, reported Ovia Health, the parent company behind apps for fertility, pregnancy and parenting, is selling users’ data to their employers. The Post spoke with Diana Diller, a 39-year old Los Angeles-based event planner, who was using Ovia during her pregnancy to log daily activity such as bodily functions and sex drive. Her employer, Activision Blizzard, a video game company, was following along.

Activation Blizzard is part of a program offered by Ovia Health where employers can pay to offer employees a special version of the app as an employee benefit. The catch? The company gains access to the aggregated, anonymized data shared by its employees. Milt Ezzard, vice president of global benefits for Activision Blizzard, told the Post offering “pregnancy programs such as Ovia help the company keep skilled women.” But experts worry employers could use the information to increase or decrease health coverage depending on what they see in the data. There’s also the fear that companies could use incredibly intimate details like whether or not a woman was having premature birth or suffering a miscarriage, in order to make business decisions. “The health information is sensitive but could also play a critical role in boosting women’s well-being and companies’ bottom lines,” Paris Wallace, chief executive of Ovia Health told the Post, pointing to rising rates of premature birth and maternal death as the reasons why they want to sell this information to employers.

“It feels like a very big breach of privacy, it makes me feel uncomfortable, and it feels like this company has preyed on women who are in the most exciting and vulnerable time of their life,” says Brianna Bell, 29, a writer based in Guelph, Ontario. Bell used Ovia’s pregnancy and parenting apps for 18 months without knowing the company could sell her information. (Ovia’s consumer apps—the free to download Ovia Fertility, Ovia Pregnancy and Ovia Parenting—“do not share any data with employers,” a representative of the company said in a statement provided to Glamour. But the apps’ terms of service do state that by agreeing to use the product users grant Ovia the right to “utilize and exploit” their anonymous personal data for research, marketing purposes, or sale to other third parties.)

The idea of your data—even if it has been stripped of your name—floating around out there for use is unsettling. But is there really anything to worry about? Users need to opt in to Ovia’s employer programs like the one offered by Activation Blizzard, according to the company, and of course, you can always choose not to input certain data. “An employer then only receives population level data once a certain threshold of users has been reached,” Ovia told Glamour, adding that they only work with large companies to reduce the risk of a specific pregnant woman being identified in the office. “We are not reporting personal, intimate information like cycle data or pregnancy symptoms to employers,” the company says.



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Taylor Swift Announces the Launch of Her Very Own Lifestyle App, The Swift Life


PHOTO: Taylor Swift/YouTube

Taylor Swift is finally joining the ranks of all five of the Kardashian-Jenner sisters, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears: She is launching her very own lifestyle app. Which probably means that, by the end of the year, the singer will be dominating the music charts and the app store.

T. Swift announced her app, called “The Swift Life,” in a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday. Launching later this year, it’s described as “a creative, inclusive, and community-driven place for users to better connect with each other…and Taylor!”

According to The Verge, The Swift Life was built in partnership with Glu, the firm behind mobile games from other celebs like Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian (interesting clientele list, all things considered). In a press release, Glu’s CEO vaguely described the app as “a new digital entertainment project” and “a deeply social environment.”

From the looks of the YouTube clip—which opens with Swift telling fans she’s got something “pretty awesome that we’ve been working on for a while” that she wants to share—it looks like the The Swift Life will be a social platform where Swifties can connect and soak up each other’s (and Taylor’s) awesomeness. Users will have access to exclusive T. Swift content, including pictures, videos, and some pretty badass looking Taymojis (she’s coming for you, Kim K). Most importantly, the app gives Tay ample opportunity to engage in one of her favorite pastimes: sliding into unsuspecting fans’ DM’s and liking and commenting on their photos.

“I think you guys are really gonna like this,” she says at the end of the YouTube announcement. “I mean, I hope. It would be preferable if you did.”

So it seems the only questions left to answer is, are we ready for it?

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I Was Skeptical, But This Couples' App May Have Saved My Relationship


Like a lot of couples, my boyfriend and I tend to repeat the same fight every few months. In our case, I feel frustrated that he doesn’t agree with some of my deepest values, and he feels like I try to impose them on him. A few weeks ago—surprise, surprise—we had this fight again, but this time I was determined to do something to address it and hopefully make it better. Though I’m generally skeptical of couples’ apps that claim to bring you closer or solve your issues (mostly given that the majority of the ones I’ve tried are just annoying to use), I’d recently learned about the app We Did It, which guides couples through tasks that supposedly bring them closer. I figured anything was worth a try if it meant potentially saving our relationship.

When you download the app, it prompts you to rate how satisfied you are with different aspects of your relationship—housework, sex, communication—and then “build your dream week.” For the latter step, you choose which tasks you’d like to complete in the areas of your relationship that need the most work and how many times a week you’d like to do them. For example, if you rated your relationship low on communication, it’ll let you choose tasks like “talk about your dreams” or “discuss the needs of the relationship.” Then, it holds you and your partner accountable for doing these things with daily task reminders. Every time you complete one, you check it off on the app. Then, you rate your happiness in different areas again to determine what paid off, and the app has you pick more tasks based on that.

PHOTO: We Didi It

Peeter Lange, CEO of the app’s creator Olento Life Ltd., explained to me that We Did It uses artificial intelligence to determine what people need in their relationships and how they can get it. “The weekly relationship analysis makes people aware of the situation and progress, and the weekly actions bring the change that is needed,” he said. “There are two things that have led to improved couples’ relationships: The first is the exchanging of thoughts, and through this, improved observation of the state of one’s relationship; the second is an increased amount of attention to things that are important to each individual.”

It was surprising to see how each of us rated different aspects of our relationship. Even though he’s less inclined to talk about our shortcomings, it turned out he agreed with me on where we could use work. We had different ideas about how to go about it, though. I wanted “love letters” and “love notes” (I’m not sure what the difference is but, TBH, I just wanted a lot of nice emails), while he wanted runs, dinners out, and massages.

Of course, then you have to actually complete the tasks, and this was a bit harder than just setting up the app. My partner, for example, completed exactly zero of the tasks assigned to him (unless you count running together, which we do anyway). But while that would normally bother me, the app had put me in a game mindset, and I wanted to be the best player I could be, which often meant completing my tasks without expecting anything in return. I told him I loved him every day, gave him a massage, and took time out of an evening I would normally spend working to go to dinner with him. After seeing how happy he was around me when I did these things—and how happy I became as a result—I could feel myself becoming more content in the relationship as a whole. This increased when I later bought him ice cream on the way back from a girls’ night and got him a greeting card (though I’m still contemplating the perfect romantic message to fill it with).

There were other things the app told us to do that helped us feel closer. For example, we followed We Did It’s prompt to look into each other’s eyes once a day, starting with 30 seconds on the first day and eventually working up to several minutes. It felt weird, though not in a bad way. When we talked while also making direct eye contact, we found we paid more attention to each other. Jokes felt funnier, and “I love you”s felt more meaningful.

PHOTO: We Did It

Since completing this “dream week,” I’m surprised to find that I genuinely feel happier in my relationship. We’re smiling at each other, thanking each other, and saying “I love you” more often. I’ve been getting less worked up over little things because I realize that showing extra patience and appreciation pays off.

Did We Did It solve our problems? Of course not—every couple is different and no matter how much AI an app has, it can’t possibly troubleshoot every issue. The tasks We Did It prompted us to do were mostly surface-level improvements, with the exception of “Talk about the future” (though the app didn’t tell us how to approach this conversation and our attempts to do so often fizzled). Part of me even worries that by being extra nice to each other, as We Did It instructed, we’ve just postponed an inevitably longer, more difficult conversation.

But our We Did It experiment feels successful. Our “dream week” made us more conscious about how we treat each other, and treating each other well is the foundation of solving any other problems. Now it’s up to us to decide whether we want to take advantage of that foundation or continue distracting ourselves with massages and love notes.



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Makeup Artist Patrick Ta Has an App, and I Followed His Best Tutorials


Screenshots from Flawless app

Right now, I have a saved collection of Instagram beauty looks that catch my eye as I’m scrolling—a virtual bow around my finger to remind me to test them out later. When I looked back through what I’ve flagged, I noticed an overwhelming number of pictures have a single makeup artist in common: Patrick Ta. The industry pro is a master of both effortless-looking and bold beauty choices, and knows how to give his clients the gift of cosmetic confidence. (Including, by the way, Gigi Hadid, Shay Mitchell, Jenna Dewan Tatum, the Kadashians, and Chrissy Teigen. Casual.)

So when the makeup guru launched his own app “Flawless” back in June, I couldn’t wait to see firsthand how he executed the looks I’ve actually seen on Gigi and company. The digital beauty destination includes step-by-step instructions for looks he’s created with links to the exact products he used, video tutorials, product reviews and behind the scenes insights. (For $5.99 a month, you can access additional beauty content, as well.) So, I picked three of my favorite celebrity looks from the app and gave ’em a whirl. Here’s how it all went down.

1. Shay Mitchell

This siren-red lip on Shay jumped out at me immediately. Following Ta’s instructions, I prepped my skin with a light moisturizer. (I went with my no-fuss favorite Embryolisse Lait Creme Concentre instead of the pricier La Mer option that Ta lists. Girl is on a budget!) For even coverage, I blended out my BareMinerals Made-2-Fit Liquid Foundation around my T-zone and, per Ta’s instruction, went in with Tarte Double Duty Beauty Shape Tape Contour Concealer two shades lighter than my foundation to brighten my undereyes. Next, for my best attempt at those signature Shay Mitchell cheekbones, I went in with a creamy contour.

I drew a steady line with my NudeStix Sculpting Pencil in a downward diagonal from my ears towards the corners of my lips. Grabbing my Beautyblender, I buffed everything out as seamlessly as possible. Ta suggests using three different contour products for the glowy bronzed cheeks, but I stuck with just my creamy contour stick and a little Nars Laguna Bronzing Powder on top for a sun-kissed glow. (And, for time’s sake.)

After setting with a translucent powder, I added a warm peachy blush to the apples of my cheeks and brushed on my shiniest powder highlighter, Urban Decay 8-Hour Afterglow in Sin, down the ridge of my nose and applied with abandon. For the eyes, Ta details exactly where to apply your shadow, but it was tricky to figure out good product duplicates for the shades he suggested, since the app only lists the shade name and no real color descriptions.

But no fear! Referring to the image of Mitchell, I picked a Lancôme Petit Trésor Sparkling Color Eyeshadow in Rose Satin, a shimmery champagne shade, and pressed it at the inner corners of my eyes, then went in with Clarins Ombre Iridescente in Silver Rose for a warm wash of a neutral pink. (After that, a few thick coats of mascara.) And finally, the lip! I swiped on the Sephora Collection Liquid Lipstick in 01 Red (the same product Ta used on Mitchell), then let it dry before blotting my lips together. After a quick teeth check, I was done. The pop of red paired with shimmery, summer skin was bright and wearable, and way easier to do on my own than I thought it would be.

2. Jenna Dewan Tatum

Next up: Jenna Dewan Tatum’s amped-up, night-out, all-over nude palette. Similar to the first look, I moisturized my skin to start and applied a lip balm. Then, I applied Shiseido Synchro Skin Glowing Luminizing Fluid Foundation to the center of my face and blended out with my trusty Hourglass Vanish Foundation Brush, going back in under my eyes with concealer to brighten. To set the base, I went over everything with translucent powder on a fluffy, large brush for the most coverage. To contour, Ta suggests applying a creamy, warm bronzer to sculpt out the cheekbones, jawline, and nose, going back in over the same spots again with a touch of matte powder bronzer to intensify. (As a lifelong member of the Pale Irish Skin Club, I’m taking notes.)

Next, I grabbed a coral cheek color— Milani Baked Blush in Corallina—and applied to the apples of my cheeks. After filling in my brows with Benefit Cosmetics Precisely, My Brow Pencil, it was time for the eye makeup.

Using the shimmery bronze shade “Sidecar” from my Urban Decay Naked Palette, I went over the lids and blended up past my crease. With the slightly darker shade “Smog”, I blended out the crease even further for more depth. It wasn’t one of Ta’s steps, but I added a swipe of liquid black liner along the upper lash line for the illusion of a thicker lash base. For the lip, I outlined with the dirty rose colored MAC Lip Pencil in Whirl, (Ta suggests slightly over-lining, to get a fuller effect) then applied the creamy, nude-pink Cle De Peau Beaute Lipstick in Bamboo allover to finish.

The whole look was like a warm, nude wash that made my eyes pop and complexion glow. It’s a monochromatic vibe I can definitely get on board with, even if it’s a little more makeup than I’d wear on a typical day.

3. Olivia Munn

Lastly, I’m onto Olivia Munn’s vampy, romantic dark lip. I have to admit the reason I wanted to try this one is because it’s different from what I usually wear (I tend to go with softer, pastel tones), but the deep, wine shade and bright complexion had a certain intrigue. Getting the hang of the beginning steps now, I primed my face by applying a light, hydrating moisturizer and letting it sink it. Next it was time for the base: liquid foundation (mixed with some oil, per Ta’s trick for a more natural, effortless look) and creamy concealer under the eyes.

For a light contour, I went in with my NudeStix pencil, blended away, added an all-over glow with Nars Laguna Bronzing Powder, then dusted on highlight with a fan brush onto the high points of my face (brow bones, cheekbones, tip of the nose, etc.). For the oxblood lip, I mixed two shades from Avon: Power Plum and Bold Bordeaux. Finally, I lined my lips after lipstick for a clean, crisp finish. I immediately felt more adventurous, and plan to add a few new lip shades into my routine once in a while.

And there you have it! Worth noting: these are just three of many tutorials that the app offers. On deck for me? Sofia Richie’s emerald green smoky eye, Karlie Kloss’s barely-there daytime makeup, and Chrissy Teigen’s peachy flush. And while I’m still a mere makeup muggle, I found Ta’s instructions easy to follow, descriptive, and encouraging. (Though sometimes hard to find the best dupes for certain products.) My biggest takeaways from trying my hand at three of Ta’s looks: Blending’s a nonnegotiable, highlight away to your heart’s content, and never fear a bold lip.



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