Are you a Londoner? Will you be travelling through a London-based airport this week?

If this sounds like you, and you’re happy to document your experience through a 10-day online community, then we have an exciting project for you to get involved in (and great way to earn £150)!

If interested, simply fill in your answers to the questions by clicking this link and we will contact you with more details if you meet the necessary criteria.

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you!

The Mindbubble Team

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So why not take a break and help us with a survey. We know the word “survey” is not your favourite thing but in less than 10 minutes you will be free to continue surfing the web.

It is entirely anonymous and the best part, you can say whatever you want. We love sincere opinions.  If you are wondering if there is a juicy prize, we just want to talk to people to get some feedback and there is no compensation. No sad face, you don’t charge your friends to give your opinion. Come on!

The only people who can change the world are people who want to. Do you?

http://tinyurl.com/onlinecommunitysurvey

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Are you a creative individual between the ages of 19- 54 years old?

If so, then read on because we have a couple of opportunities for you to get involved in either in an online community or a full day co-creation workshop with GENEROUS £££ rewards!

If interested please send an email to contact@myfacecommunity.com with the following details:

1. Name:

2. Age:

3. Email:

4. Contact No.:

5. Occupation:

6. What type of mobile phone do you currently own- make and model?

7. Do you own your own camera? If so, does it take both video and still pictures?

8. How involved are you in deciding which payment types/ financial services you use? Are there any financial services brands you are particularly loyal to?

9. How tech savvy do you consider yourself on a scale of 1-5 (1 being EXTREMELY and 5 being NOT AT ALL)? Please explain why you’ve rated yourself the way you have in 2-3 sentences.

If you’re answers meet our criteria, we will contact you directly so please make sure to include a mobile number, which we can reach you on!

If you are flexible in terms of being able to attend a full day workshop during the week please let us know.

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you!

The Mindbubble Team

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If you’re appropriate for this research you’ll be invited in for a brief selection day session at our offices on Monday 11th or Tuesday 12th July 2011. This will only last half an hour in the late afternoon/early evening and is just an opportunity to meet us face-to-face, find out a bit more about the project and undertake an example task like you’d do at the workshop so we can see who’d be best suited to take part.

For this piece of research, we’re looking for working Mums aged between 35 and 49 who have children living at home and use hand or body lotion regularly. If this is you, and you’d like to take part and can be free all day on 14^th July in London, please e-mail contact@mindbubble.com with the following details:

1. Your name

2. Your telephone number

3. Your occupation

4. Your age and the ages of your children living at home

5. How many times a week would you say you use body lotion or cream on your body?

6. Which body lotion/cream brands do you use currently?

We look forward to hearing from you!

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It’s Sunday morning, and as I type this, I’m watching the cast from Made in Chelsea get more-than-slightly ridiculed on T4. The presenters are asking them to perform such complicated and thought-provoking tasks such as ‘Name the members of N Dubz’, ‘Guess the flavour of the pasty’ and ‘Put the pin on the map where Newcastle is’. Because of course, wealthy inhabitants of Chelsea would never have a clue where their Geordie counterparts live. Or how to open a can of beans. They have butlers for that, darling! ‘Wow Binky, look how fast you opened that can of beans!’ says one of them.

Is this really where entertainment has taken us? Not content with poking fun at ‘the wide ranging demographic’ of the British Public in shows such as Big Brother – which in the end descended from being a mildly fascinating social experiment to little more than people on the fringes of society being gawked at like animals in a cage – we now have this strange new genre of the ‘docu-soap’. It’s a strange, reality-but-not-really based, fly on the wall type of show which offers insight into what I can only describe as grossly caricatured and two-dimensionally depicted lives.

It’s not the cast of Made in Chelsea/Geordie Shore/The Only Way Is Essex’s fault – they are victims of not only harsh editing and scripting but also the current obsession with fame for fame’s sake. The cast of The Only Way Is Essex are now celebrities in their own right; because they were depicted as ‘normal people’ on their programme. Is that right? The draw of shows such these is either a) These people are just like me, I like that or b) These people are nothing like me, I like that. You don’t watch them because they’re famous, you watch them because they’re not famous. It was meant to be the antidote to celebrity saturation; the idea that these people like you and me (if you wish to be regionally stereotyped) are within our own scope of aspirations – if you live in Essex and have your own beauty parlour, this was you. If you live in Chelsea and like to say ‘gosh’ and ‘totes’ a lot, here you are. So as soon as they start getting invited to and appearing in all the things you’re not invited to – aren’t they just the same as every other celebrity in the weekly magazines? They are famous because they are on a TV show which was supposed to be about un-famous people.

The worst part of these docu-soaps are the stereotypes they are pedalling, and the inevitable prejudice that the media are only making worse. Only recently, Baroness Hussein-Ece has been berated for using the word Chav in a tweet; considering she is the minister for equality, it’s not particularly a good move. But is calling someone who is from a working class/lower income background a Chav worse than calling someone a Toff if they went to Oxford and own some horses? It’s still ignorance, and it’s still prejudice, even if that prejudice seems to be widely accepted and even sometimes glamorised and perpetuated in the media.

So what do you think about the new docu-soaps? Do you love The Only Way is Essex for its tongue in cheek and occasionally unintentional wit, or does putting the inhabitants of Chelsea on our screens only worsen the perceived class divide? How would you feel if you were being represented by the cast of Geordie Shore? How far will our obsession with celebrity and fame go?

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We at Mindbubble are always trying to improve the experience for you lovely Mindbubblers. We want Mindbubble to be the best damn community on the world wide web, but we can’t do it without your help. Right here you’ll see that there’s a little questionnaire that we’d really appreciate you filling out. What’s in it for you, though? Well, you’ve got a chance of winning a £100 Amazon voucher in our random draw, plus of course we’ll take on board all your feedback and use it in making sure Mindbubble’s as good as it can be for you. Please click here to complete the survey. Thank you all!

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Hello Mindbubblers,

We have an exciting, new project coming up and would like as many of
you to get involved as possible!!

But first we’d like to know if you match the following criteria…

Are you German or Indian living in the UK?
Do you have a child aged between 0 – 36 months?
Are you available on 05th & 06th July 2011?

If you answered YES to the above questions and would like to participate in a really cool project and earn up to £230, then GREAT because we have
the perfect project for you!

We are running a co-creation workshop in London on 05th & 06th July
2011 and are looking for Indian or German Moms that have lived in the
UK for the past few years.

It will be a fun, interactive and an interesting two days, so if this
sounds appealing to you (and you meet the above criteria) please fill in this form!

If you don’t meet our criteria, but think you know someone who does,
feel free to pass this email on!

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you!

The Mindbubble Team

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Most people I know would say they were totally against bullying whether it be in schools, in the work place or out and about. Yet of late, I’ve started to notice a big divide between what people say they believe about bullying and what people do about it.

The first instance happened at my daughter’s school where a mother of a girl accused of bullying (and fairly justly accused if you look at the evidence) announced to the playground that if her daughter pulled someone else’s hair or called them horrible names she wasn’t bullying but just having a laugh.

The second instance happened at a birthday party where I heard an eight-year tearfully tell her mother she was being excluded by X. It was a situation made worse by X’s mother’s response that her daughter liked to be ‘in charge’ so it was lucky she was so popular.

These two instances are not just cases of parents sticking up for their offspring, but examples of adults who seem to think bullying is something else entirely.

So it doesn’t really surprise me that new figures show there has been an increase of bullying at work in the UK with one in 10 employees experiencing harassment, and one-third of workers saying they were bullied in the past six months.

I recently did a talk to a group of parents about teen bullying and was amazed at not only what many of them thought about bullying but also at what so many of them put up with in their own work lives.

It made me think that if we want bullying to be stamped out it’s not only kids that we have to educate. We have also start a wider discussion with parents, employers and employees about what bullying consists of, and why we should stand up to it.

If you think that would be pretty obvious take a look at the list below. It’s my responses to the Q&A at the end of the session:

1. Bullying is not a rite of passage that all kids have to go through.
2. Bullying doesn’t make a person stronger
3. Victims don’t need to ‘learn how to take a joke’
4. Bullies aren’t always cowards that can be scared off
5. It is possible to do something about bullying
6. Bullying isn’t just a kid phase
7. You can prove workplace bullying
8. Cyber-bullying is ‘real’ bullying

For help and guidance about bullying go to Directgov

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Getting your first silver grey hair is a defining moment. I spied mine a few days after I hit 40.  Perhaps it was coincidence, or the fact I was just looking a bit harder for signs of ageing but soon after that they seemed to appear at a daily rate.

Having very dark hair I decided that being streaked with silver streaks made me look bonkers and crazy rather than chic and sophisticated so I choose to colour my hair. Personally, even though I have to do it every 6 weeks I feel it’s worth every penny but that doesn’t mean I hate my grey bits or hate seeing grey hair on others.

On some of my friends grey hair looks amazing and even fashionably edgy so it does irritate me when I hear women freaking out about going grey and commenting on those who dare to go the whole hog.

Jennifer Aniston being one such person who apparently ‘flipped out and cried’ when she found her first grey hair and poor old Nicole Kidman who got media slammed when she dared to hit the red carpet with her grey roots on show a few years back.

Which is why I am loving Jennifer Lopez who has not only dared to appear with her 3 inch roots on show but who has just readily admitted that she has had to have her hair dyed every two weeks as she began going grey at age 23.

“My mom and my dad both went grey at a young age and I did too. And once I got started doing movies I started to grey. It was the stress, the pressure.”

All of which means if you want to go about your business with long roots do it with pride. If you want to dye it and pluck the odd grey hair with tweezers (Demi Moore’s rumoured guilty secret) go for it. And if you decide to become a silver foxtress then rest assured you’re in very good female company.

Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada, model Kristen McMenamy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dame Judi Dench, Sarah Jessica Parker, Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Lopez – the list of grey haired beauties is thankfully endless.

So what do you think? Does grey equal sexy or ageing? Let me know on Twitter

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Late last month, as all eyes were on the last AW11 fashion weeks, the world was shocked by allegations of John Galliano, Creative Director for Dior, hurling ant-semitic abuse at a couple in La Perle, Paris. Galliano was arrested, and Dior subsequently suspended him. At time of writing, Galliano is protesting his innocence, but there’s a video now surfacing of further allegations, all based around similar anti-semitic abuse. It was truly shocking, and made me consider the fashion world’s general outlook at other races/cultures, and if it is truly as all-inclusive as it should be.

My gut reaction is that while fashion isn’t overly racist or flamboyantly prejudiced, it is still an industry with predominantly caucasian ideals of beauty. While you can say that there are many ethnically diverse designers all contributing to multiculturalism within fashion, the ‘face’ of the industry, as it were, is the model, and she is still nearly always white. Galliano’s comments were directed at a religion rather than a skin colour, but it hints at a darker side of the industry, which can still be extremely prejudiced.

‘Right now everyone is scared – they think, if I take that risk, will she sell my products? So they go with the tried-and-tested white girls’ says Carole White, Premier Model’s founder, whom Channel 4 have been following round for their new fly-on-the-wall series, The Model Agency. Naomi Campbell herself agrees; she commented on the all-black edition of Vogue Italia; “That issue made some noise, but, unfortunately, we are the same as before. People, in the panic of the recession, don’t dare to put a girl of color in their campaign, full stop. Nor of any other race. It’s a shame. It’s very sad.” Annie Wilshaw, a model booker, goes further, addressing the stereotypes that can occur when black girls are cast: “When the client sends you a brief you know straight away they’re not talking about a black girl. They say they want ‘a girl with long hair, who looks like a fairy’ or something. When they want a black girl, they will say ‘looking for mixed-race girl, tribal-prints location, desert scene’” And I tend to agree.

It’s not that black or mixed race girls are never seen in fashion, but when they are, it has the feeling of making a statement, like the edgy, dark, rocky vibe in Burberry’s new S/S campaign featuring only Jourdan Dunn and a black male model. Editorials tend to be the ’strong, ethnic woman’, facing some form of vague unquantifiable diversity in the distance, whether in a desert or a jungle or looking tough on a street. However, on the other side of the argument, when black models are cast as ‘just another model’ in a group shot, and their skin colour is not the focus or theme of the image, there are gasps that they are being shoved in the background. The blog Fashion Bomb Daily comments on Chanel Iman’s recent appearance in a Dsquared2 ad: ‘I really had to squint my eyes to find her. She was almost unrecognizable, stuck in the back, and looked super pasty and almost colorless…why use a model of colour if you can’t tell she has any?”

There is a sense that there are too many extremes going on. Either featuring ethnic models to make a point (artistic or otherwise), or shoving them in the background, lightening their skin colour, or just not casting them at all. There was uproar over Vanity Fair – and later L’oreal – apparently lightening Beyoncé’s skin tone on the cover and in the ads respectively. Is this because society itself still seems to accept that to be beautiful is not black? Or at least, not very dark? We don’t live in a perfect society; there unfortunately is, and probably always will be, some forms of racism; Galliano is a prime example that people still hold prejudices which most of us cannot fathom. Is it that fashion is an age behind the rest of society; or does it just hold up a mirror and reflect a more concentrated form of that society?

So what about Naomi Campbell, then? Tyra Banks? Jourdan Dunn? Well, yes. But these are supermodels, exceptions in that they’ve made it to the top of their game. We forget that there are hundreds, thousands of ‘ordinary’ black, mixed race models vying for campaigns, with brands that are frightened to take ‘risks.’ There is a Facebook campaign called Black But Invisible where the Mahogany Models agency is campaigning to get more black models in the mainstream. Annie Wilshaw spoke to the Guardian recently on Leomie Anderson, an up and coming black model. “I explained to Leomie when we took her on that she won’t get the options as easily as the white girls, because it’s true, it’s so much harder to develop the black girls. She has to work twice as hard to get picked up on.”

But how can this change, if the industry itself does nothing to change these perceptions? I don’t have that answer. But I’ll leave you with a quote from Nick Knight, founder and director of ShowStudio, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue.

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