No. In the big chain store right across the road from me, there’s a bunch of brand new Xiaomis, Realmes, Samsungs and Motorollas for as low as $70. Admittedly the cheapest ones are a complete e-waste, but the ones in $150-200 range are perfectly capable of doing anything you’d need a phone to do for the next 3-5 years. Phones have became an appliance these days, you don’t really need to buy the best microwave in the market every year, just buy the second cheapest when previous breaks after a decade and it’ll be just as fine. Same with phones, the only real differences I see in top-end vs budget phones is like just a slightly faster cpu, slightly better displays, slightly better cameras and wireless charging. But that’s to me sounds like a 900W microwave with moisture sensor and app control versus a 800W one without any any of that, but at 4X the price difference.
This of course doesn’t apply if you’re like playing competitive Fortnite or PUBG on the phone or something, to which I would say: 1) WHY? get a console, ffs, or better yet, a proper gaming pc, and 2) you’re not really buying a phone at this point, but a handheld console that just happens to fill that role as well. Same goes if you buy Apple for things locked in their ecosystem.
PS. And yeah, nothing of it has any relation to Europe, it just happens that 3 out of 4 phones in that image are way overpriced for what they’re worth.
As another middle-aged long hair guy who has been approached numerous times by women asking about my haircare routine, I think there are multiple components to this:
Hair is most definitely affected by hormones, multiple women told me that their hair becomes straw-like during periods or how they lost a lot of hair after pregnancy and I was like sorry can’t relate 😅 I honestly believe if more men didn’t cut their hair short they’d be generally better looking than women’s, well, until they start balding.
Some kind of pink tax or whatever. Every shampoo that I tried in a cute semi-transparent colored bottle that boasted some bullshit like lavender extract, durian aroma, ginkgo biloba seeds and such, has always destroyed my hair and took months to recover. Cheap shampoos in plain-ish looking packaging(pantene, head&shoulders, syoss) have worked well for me, with no noticeable difference from the fancy 5x pricier shampoos that my girlfriend has forced me to try. My cousin even uses plain soda bar and his hair is looking even better than mine.
Less is more. It seems like every other woman I know are constantly fucking with their hair all the time. Wash two times a day, apply conditioner, then another conditioner, then a spray, and serum, a gel, and mousse, add perfume on top, mix a whole chemical lab on top of their head, then curl them, then straighten them back up, apply a different tightly knit hairstyle every day, then cut them short because of a break up, then color them, then bleach and color them again into another color, then cut them with a guillotine because that’s the trend nowadays, then straight up rip chunks of them out because of stress. Like girl, all you need is to fuck off your hair and just wash them once every 3-5 days, and only rinse on others. Then just let the nature do it’s thing, and if it doesn’t, you need to pay a visit to a trichologist, dermatologist and probably also gastroenterologist and therapist, not yet another bottle on the shelf.