Markets, mothers, scams, and a few things worth your money

Six straight weekly highs while Hormuz stays closed. Mother’s day started as a women’s strike. The GLP-1 patches your friend is buying off Instagram are federally illegal. Whey protein is attacking your face. And four beauty staples that actually deliver on reactive skin.

Markets keep pretending not to notice what's really happening

Trump is still trying to project control over Iran, but the facts keep moving the other way. On Sunday, he rejected Iran's response to a U.S. peace proposal, calling it "TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!" Iran's counter focused on ending the war, lifting the U.S. blockade, reopening safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions relief, and the release of frozen assets. The U.S. wants the fighting to end before talks move to Iran's nuclear program. Tehran is calling its own proposal reasonable.

By roughly 10:30 a.m. ET on Monday, markets had absorbed the headline and still mostly shrugged. After opening slightly lower, the major U.S. indexes were flat to slightly higher: the S&P 500 ETF was up about 0.1%, the Nasdaq 100 ETF was down about 0.2%, and the Dow ETF was up about 0.2%. The broader read was still complacency, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq sitting near record highs after six straight weekly gains. Oil was where the risk actually showed up: Brent had traded above $104 earlier, while WTI briefly pushed toward $100.

Hormuz has now been largely shut since the war began on February 28. That is more than 10 weeks of one of the world's most important oil and LNG corridors operating at a fraction of normal capacity, while U.S. equity markets keep pressing toward records. Reuters reported that only three crude tankers exited the waterway last week, with trackers switched off to avoid attack. That is not a normal market backdrop. It is a market that chooses to look past the problem.

The next pressure point is Trump's trip to Beijing on Wednesday, where Iran is expected to be part of the discussion with Xi. Trump wants China to use its leverage with Tehran, since China is the biggest buyer of sanctioned Iranian crude. If a deal lands this week, the AI Capex rally we covered on Friday probably gets more room to run. If it slips past Xi, the bubble framing starts to look more credible: investors stop reading this as temporary geopolitical noise and start reading it as energy inflation sitting underneath record equity valuations.

We are still in a market that decides, every morning, that AI infrastructure is more interesting than Hormuz, but eventually that is wrong because the geopolitical pain of a long-term shutdown is inevitable. We just can’t seem to predict when.

Mother's Day was supposed to be a strike

Right now, somewhere in San Francisco, Seattle, or Cambridge, a mostly male team of engineers is finalizing the training data for a model that will be making decisions about hiring, lending, healthcare access, and the legal system within five years. The data they're training on is based on the world we live in: a world where mothers earn 35% less than fathers, where Black and Native American women face a 20% per-child wage penalty, and where image generation models still default to white men when asked to draw a "CEO" and to women in scrubs when asked to draw a "nurse."

If this doesn’t infuriate you enough to take action, it warrants some deep soul searching. If the people in the room and the data on the table are both biased, what comes out the other side will be the most efficient discrimination engine ever built.

This is the moment Julia Ward Howe was trying to head off in 1870.

Heather Cox Richardson's Saturday essay put the original Mother's Day story back together. "Mothers' Day" started in the 1870s with Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation, calling on women to organize. Howe's diagnosis was that the men in charge were making decisions that hurt women, and the answer was women taking power directly. It has been 156 years. The diagnosis still holds.

Full-time working mothers earned 35% less than fathers in 2024, per Bankrate, a wider gap than in 2023 (31%) or 2022 (32%). The per-child motherhood penalty is roughly 15% for every child under age 5. For Black and Native American mothers, it runs 20%, for Latinx 18%, for Asian 13%, and for white 10.2%.

These are the numbers the AI systems are being trained on. Models trained on lending, healthcare, and housing data from a system that has historically discriminated by race, gender, and sexuality are going to be the most polished, most defensible, most neutral-sounding version of that discrimination and easily deployed at scale. The bias that comes out is the bias going in.

It is shocking that society is still getting away with this bullshit. Howe was right then and she is right now: women taking direct political and technical power is the correction that works. The AI buildout is the next round of who gets to decide. The wage gap and every other gap are the training data. We are running out of time to correct it.

The illegal GLP-1 "workaround"

The transdermal "GLP-1" patches and gels marketed as Ozempic are a federally illegal scam. They are also a continuation of the supplement industry tricking consumers like it has been doing since 1994.

This is what happens: a pharmaceutical category goes viral, the supplement industry creates its own version, sells it aggressively through DTC and telehealth channels until the FDA bans it, then moves to the next. The reason it works is DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which classified supplements as a subset of food and freed them from the pre-market approval process required of drugs. The FDA will only step in once damage is done.

We have watched this happen before. Ephedra was marketed as a weight-loss and energy supplement through the 1990s and early 2000s. The FDA received more than 18,000 adverse-event reports before banning it in 2004. That ban took seven years of litigation. Next came the Dr. Oz era of raspberry ketones, garcinia cambogia, and green coffee extract. Dr. Oz himself testified before Congress that his miracle pills "don't have the scientific muster to pass as fact." When ephedra was finally banned, manufacturers switched to 1,3-DMAA, which the FDA then spent another seven years banning.

The current iteration uses berberine, glutamine, cinnamon, pomegranate, and other ingredients to suggest a GLP-1 effect, a claim the science does not support. A peer-reviewed pharmacology paper this year named the entire category as a violation of DSHEA. The law requires supplements to be ingested by mouth; transdermal patches and gels are legally drugs, and these products are not approved as drugs. The FDA has issued 30 warning letters to telehealth GLP-1 compounders. The agency is moving to permanently restrict mass-marketed compounded GLP-1 products.

Congress hasn't amended DSHEA in thirty years. Until that changes, every breakthrough drug will get a supplement-aisle scam selling promises the molecule cannot deliver, and the FDA will spend a decade catching up.

If you would benefit from a GLP-1 but cannot get one from a licensed prescriber, wait. The alternatives are ripping off your wallet and risking your health.

It is important to note that we are not saying that every supplement is bad or ineffective; the overarching point is: know exactly what it is you are looking for and do the research to ensure you are choosing a brand that actually delivers.  

Your protein powder might be fighting your face

If you have rosacea, acne-prone skin, or any inflammatory skin pattern, your morning shake is probably doing a lot of damage. Whey protein actually raises insulin-like growth factor 1, a hormone that increases sebum production and inflammation. Dairy in general is a known rosacea trigger. Whey, as a concentrated dairy isolate, hits the hardest.

An alternative that’s worked for us is collagen protein. Collagen peptides are amino-acid derivatives that don't trigger an IGF-1 spike and have supportive evidence for skin barrier function: they improve hydration by reducing transepidermal water loss, which is what compromised, rosacea-prone skin needs. 

Beauty and skincare products worth your attention

After ten-plus years of trying products that promise more than they deliver, here are a few favorites that perform consistently on highly sensitive, reactive skin. Each product delivers on its own, and together they make up a complete routine on the days you don't feel like doing the most, plus the foundation for a polished face on the days you do.

A list of must-try beauty products for women with extremely sensitive, rosacea, and eczema-prone skin:

1. ZO Skin Health Sunscreen + Primer Broad-Spectrum SPF 30. As someone who has spent ages trying to be diligent about sunscreen and is very anal about skin texture and clarity, I finally found something I actually want to use. At $54, this mineral sunscreen contains 20% zinc oxide and 1% titanium dioxide, and doubles as a primer. The texture is the first thing I noticed: it feels like applying liquid silk without the sticky weight typical of zinc formulas. It finishes matte. It has no scent. Underneath, a 12-hour antioxidant complex of vitamins A, C, and E defends against UVA, UVB, infrared, and visible blue light. For combination skin caught between sun protection, skin radiance, and a wearable canvas for makeup, the product collapses the choice into a single morning step.
2. ZO Skin Health Hydrating Crème. My holy grail product. If I had to get rid of everything else in my skincare routine, I am confident this cream would be enough to carry my skin. At $125 a tube, the benefits justify the price without question. It carries the National Eczema Association's Seal of Acceptance and combines glycerin, shea butter, colloidal oatmeal, and beta-glucan with the same 12-hour antioxidant complex used in the sunscreen. On extremely sensitive combination skin, including skin actively reacting to perioral dermatitis, it does not sting, redden, or destabilize the barrier. From dry to oily to sensitive skin, the women in my family are all obsessed with this cream. Even on the nights or mornings when you forget to wash your face, one application in a 24-hour period is enough to hold hydration. It also serves as the perfect base for a textureless makeup look.
3. Saie Glowy Super Gel in Starglow ($35) is a liquid translucent luminizer with the body of a serum, designed to deliver glow without glitter or the heaviness of traditional highlighters. Squalane and vitamin C give the formula its skincare backbone; mica gives it its diffused, lit-from-within shimmer. For skin that turns oily fast and requires powder to set, the product's technical achievement is that it keeps its glow under powder. It can be worn alone, mixed into foundation, layered under makeup, or taken to the collarbones and shoulders. Starglow is the cool, champagne-toned version of the three shades, perfect for tan or pale skin. It has recently become a staple in my makeup routine.
4. MAC Glow Play Cushiony Blush in True Harmony. At $32 a compact, this is the most versatile makeup product I have encountered. It is a cream-powder hybrid that does not fit into any category. Marketed as a blush, it works across the face: I use it as a bronzer, eyeshadow, and even lip color in a pinch. The texture is genuinely cushiony, somewhere between a soft paste and a velvety powder, with jojoba, grape seed oil, and vitamin E built into the formula. True Harmony, the shade I use, reads cooler than most bronzers but adds warmth to the face, making it usable across a range of skin tones. It does not irritate. It does not crease. It does not require its own brush. For anyone willing to think of a so-called blush as a tool that travels and is wary of makeup that irritates their skin, this is the one.