It’s been billed as the lavish private men’s club where women cannot speak unless they’re spoken to and the annual membership fee can reach up to US$1.3 million per person.Locating it is also a mission as the Munich-based underground club does not welcome “normal people” and pitches its service on preserving the ways of London’s 17th century gentlemen’s clubs.For this reason alone, the Countenance Club has been on the receiving end of much outrage since it opened last month with local websites like Abendzeitung labelling it a “noble brothel” and “misogynistic macho club”, claims which the owners have strongly refuted.

“The women here just need to be elegant…and sexy”

According to Vice reporters who were granted access to the club, the exorbitant fee affords members VIP treatment like flights on a private jet from anywhere in Europe to the club.Reporters at the Countenance Club met up with a 63-year-old man named Michael (not his real name), who explained how the business is run.“Normal people simply aren’t welcome. They complain too much. I don’t want anyone in here who just sits in the corner all night drinking Coke and looking sour,” he reportedly said. “The women here just need to be elegant…and sexy”.Elaborating on that point, it was noted that the club warranted a rule where women were only allowed to talk if the were spoken to first. There was also a physical criteria in place which stipulated that the women working there had to weigh less than 58kg, be under the age of 35 and not be shorter than 5.7ft.Michael told Vice that he was shocked when a model turned down a job at the club.“She didn’t want to work for $250 a night…Ninety per cent of women prostitute themselves in one way or another.”The space itself features features a few gaudy touches including crystal chandeliers, erotic paintings depicting group sex and gold sofas complete with crowns and stone statues.This is complemented with an extravagant menu which seemingly offers up unlimited champagne, oysters, Kobe beef and Beluga caviar which retails for US$370/100g.“I’ve had so much of it – I can’t eat the stuff anymore,” Michael told Vice.Michael refused to reveal how many well-heeled members the club currently has but did admit that they were currently receiving about two enquiries per day. News further reported that only the club’s developer, Walter Dietrich, has been made public.One thing’s certain, Countenance Club certainly makes the North Korean dicatorship’s airline, Air Koryo, look subtle.

The post Inside The Private Men's Club Where $1.3M Membership Gives Access To Misogyny appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

The short story: shoot it into space on the world’s most powerful rocket.

Whilst the world watched in awe at SpaceX’s latest successful launch of Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral this morning, it was more so Elon Musk’s approach to viral marketing that really captured ours.

After almost seven years of planning and development, Elon Musk’s commercial space exploration company managed to launch a Tesla Roadster into space complete with a spacesuit-kitted dummy dubbed ‘Starman’.

Whilst the first stage of the rocket saw two of its side boosters successfully land back on Earth, the second stage of the rocket continues to orbit the planet with cameras in tow and a handy message on the dashboard’s screen reminding Starman, “Don’t Panic”.

Will the whimsical stunt help sell more Tesla Roadsters? Probably not. Does everyone know what a Tesla is now? Absolutely.

Elon Musk just pulled off the world’s greatest car marketing campaign and there’s proof.

According to YouTube, the Falcon Heavy launch became the second biggest livestream in history, pulling in over 2.3 million active viewers at any one time. This was further backed by social media livestreaming across Facebook and Twitter whilst Instagram served more as a behind the scenes platform for the launch. See below.

Printed on the circuit board of a car in deep space

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Feb 6, 2018 at 2:40pm PST

Conventional rockets tend to carry more practical payloads such as satellites and equipment but Musk and Space X spotted a different opportunity.

According to Bill Ostrove, an aerospace analyst at Forecast International, the stunt built huge publicity for the space industry and SpaceX’s sister automotive company.

“It’s a way for SpaceX to generate attention among people who may not be following space on a regular basis,” he said.

“While a little silly, the company has to put something in the fairing. Some companies put dead weight in there to simulate a satellite. SpaceX has put something that will generate attention for itself as well as the industry as a whole.”

Keen to send your junk into low orbit space? All you’ll need as a paying customer is US$90 million and you’ll have an allocation of 64 tonnes to play with aboard Falcon Heavy. SpaceX is also offering Mars options if customers are keen to see their inanimate objects go further.

You can check out the hilarious livestream of Starman floating around in orbit now.

The post Elon Musk Pulled Off The Most Outrageous Way To Sell A Car appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

Fries, chips, pommes frites… whatever you call them, connoisseurs of deep-fried potatoes agree: McDonald’s makes some of the best and most addictive around.

Just how good are they? So good that Kanye West once wrote a poem about them, and according to a newly released Japanese study, they may contain the secret to curing baldness.

Scientists at Yokohama National University published their surprising fast-food-meets-follicles finding in the journal Biomaterials. Their research discovered that dimethylpolysiloxane – an anti-foaming agent made of silicone added to the oil used to cook Macca’s famous fries – could be key to improving hair regrowth therapies and “may lead to a new treatment for hair loss.”

Reducing or reversing baldness requires the regeneration of hair follicles. To date, scientists have struggled to produce new follicles on a large enough scale to be effective. When using dimethylpolysiloxane, however, the YNU researchers were able to generate up to 5,000 hair follicle germs (HFGs) simultaneously.

“The key for the mass production of HFGs was a choice of substrate materials for culture vessel,” said study author Junji Fukuda in a statement. “We used oxygen-permeable dimethylpolysiloxane (PDMS) at the bottom of culture vessel, and it worked very well.”

Of course, Fukuda’s team didn’t just round up a bunch of bald guys and start experimenting. The initial experiment was conducted on mice who had the HFGs transplanted onto their backs and scalps. New black hairs sprouted up in the transplantation areas, and while it may not be as exciting as turning Bruce Willis into Fabio, the researchers say their findings bode well for human subjects later down the line.

“This simple method is very robust and promising,” added Fukuda. “We hope that this technique will improve human hair regenerative therapy to treat hair loss such as androgenic alopecia.”

Sadly, this is not license to gorge on McDonald’s greasy golden sticks. The company barely mentions dimethylpolysiloxane as a fry ingredient, including it only in small text at the bottom of a webpage:

“Our fried menu items are cooked in a vegetable oil blend with citric acid added as a processing aid and dimethylpolysiloxane to reduce oil splatter when cooking.”

Its relegation to the fine print might be because it’s also the primary ingredient in Silly Putty. And in caulks, adhesives, aquarium sealant, breast implants, and cosmetics. Call us crazy, but that ranks fairly low on the list of most appetising thing we’ve read today.

If you can get past that, there’s still a catch. The study concluded that dimethylpolysiloxane alone won’t stimulate hair growth, so simply going on an all-fry diet won’t transform your sparse pate into a luscious lion’s mane. A scientific miracle is needed before Super Size Me becomes a cosmetic treatment instead of a cautionary tale.

The post Scientists Think McDonald’s Fries May Hold The Cure To Baldness appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

It mightn’t be official, but it’s taken Italian tuning house Ares Design to finally announce the arrival of a long-awaited Tesla Model S Shooting Brake – and yes, you can actually purchase this conversion.

The tuning firm which specialises in modifying high-end vehicles like Porsche, Bentley, Mercedes-Benz and Rolls-Royce made the announcement alongside the concept image above which depicts a legitimate sports wagon silhouette complete with a sweeping rear hatch and vented front fenders. Whilst Model S shooting brake conversions aren’t exactly new in recent months, Ares Design’s approach is arguably one of the most complete packages which flows well with the original car’s lines.

In addition to this, Ares Design says that it will also give the Model S’ interior a proper luxury makeover that exceeds standard trim options. The birth of this audacious idea comes from the mind of Ares Design’s own CEO, Dany Bahar.

Bahar’s daily cruiser was a Model S and the company says that, “while he could appreciate its performance and technology, [Bahar] felt that it was somewhat limited by its hatchback design and what he felt was a lack of quality in the car’s execution.”

More specifically, Bahar felt that the interior quality was ultimately letting the car down and trailed behind its competition over in the Mercedes and BMW camps.

Ares Design is currently in the process of stripping down a 2017 Model S sedan in preparation for the drastic bodywork modification which will see components fabricated from carbon fibre and aluminium panels. The interior meanwhile will be completely overhauled and lined with soft Nappa leather for an extra touch of luxury.

Tesla’s power unit will be left untouched however Ares Design will equip their promo car with their own 21-inch wheels.

The post Tesla Model S Will Finally Get The Shooting Brake Treatment appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

Porn and cryptocurrency. Undoubtedly two of the internet’s hottest search terms of the moment which have never been uttered in the same sentence. Until now.

The Vice Industry is the latest tech startup and adult entertainment platform to pioneer the way viewers consume pornographic content – with benefits.

The site will function as two entities: firstly as a traditional porn site where users can access and watch videos, and secondly as a cryptocurrency where participants including those who view, add or curate content can be paid in ‘Vice Industry Tokens’ (VIT) – the company’s proprietary cryptocurrency.

The VIT can then be used to score discounts on premium content and other services provided by a host of leading adult entertainment websites.

Sounds ridiculous? Maybe not. The arrival of Vice Industry comes as the next revolution of online porn beckons.

What started life as a subscription or pay-per-view service before moving onto the popular “tube” based free-view sites of today is now becoming a tired business model. That’s the argument according to Vice Industry Token Inc. founder and CEO Stuart Duncan.

“The commercial model with sponsored content is broken,” Duncan says.

“People’s attention is a valuable and scarce resource. The Vice Industry Token platform upends the ad-driven commercial model to capitalise on the new ‘Attention Economy’, permitting porn publishers to actively engage with viewers by rewarding them with VIT for their genuine attention and authentic engagement.”

If this sounds like your kind of party then it’s probably best you understand the rules first.

Accumulating VIT involves producers asking users to perform specific actions outlined by the site curator on participating platforms. From here a user’s engagement will be tracked and converted into a portion of VIT. Additional VIT will also be provided to content producers and curators.

Given that adult entertainment is a multi-billion dollar industry, Vice Industry is betting on users who are keen to score a cut of it simply from watching porn.

The startup is earmarked to begin selling its VIT cryptocurrency on February 15 with two billion of the four billion available tokens open to the public to purchase.

The post You Can Now Get Paid Cryptocurrency To Watch Porn appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

Picture this. The roads are backed up to Satan’s doorstep. Your flight is leaving and there’s no way to get to where you need without one of those Mad Max trucks.

Enter Vahana, Airbus’ Silicon Valley venture firm which has just successfully tested its autonomous flying taxi in the real world.

The electric craft with big dreams made its maiden test flight at Pendleton, Oregon, last week where it took off for 53 seconds before safely landing. More importantly, the exercise was proof that the technology could be viable in the near future amongst an electric driven world.

Whilst it may look like a cross between a racing drone and a flying car for the moment, the craft’s developers at Vahana are serious about getting it off the ground and into service as “the first certified passenger aircraft without a pilot”.

The final goal will be for the craft to transport passengers or cargo autonomously between checkpoints like trains and stations.

The post Airbus Have Begun Testing Their Flying Taxi Service appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

They had us all for drongos (idiots). After much hype around a second Crocodile Dundee sequel following a 30 year hiatus, it turns out that the heavily-teased Danny McBride and Chris Hemsworth bush adventure is in actual fact a well-thought out ploy to bring more tourists to the land down under.

And they certainly did a damn fine job of it. The official trailer popped up on Youtube five days ago and featured a stellar cast of Australians including Hugh Jackman, Isla Fisher, Margot Robbie, Ruby Rose, Russell Crowe and more all playing their convincing part. See it below.

It wasn’t until today’s Superbowl though that two extra teasers were released, finally revealing that the movie trailers were in actual fact tied to Tourism Australia – featuring a cameo from Paul Hogan himself.

Many have praised the ad for its sneaky prowess but also lamented over the fact that there will be no Dundee sequel.

Crocodile Dundee sequel hoax leaves America devastated. #CrocodileDundee #SuperBowl #NFL #Tourism #TourismAustralia #Advertising #Marketing #film #Entertainment @Australia https://t.co/CeM95pspIl

— The CEO Magazine (@CEOMagazineAU) February 5, 2018

#crocodiledundee trailer just broke Australia’s collective soul @chrishemsworth #tourismaustralia #notafilm

— steven-christopher (@ThatOtherBailey) February 5, 2018

Damn we all got curved by #TourismAustralia

— Jess(ica) Layburn (@jesSLAYburn24) February 5, 2018

Watch it for yourself and let us know if these faux trailers pull at your green and gold heartstrings.

The post Tourism Australia Fools The World With Fake Crocodile Dundee Trailer At Superbowl appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

There’s expensive whisky for the rare occasion and then there’s one for the record books. As of January 30 this 50-year-old Yamazaki bottle just joined the latter, going under the hammer via Sotheby’s Hong Kong for a staggering HK$2.3 million – that’s a smidge over AU$372,000 for you local bean counters.

This latest sale sets the record for the most expensive Japanese whisky ever sold and also reaffirms a movement that has been compounding in recent years. The expansion of the luxury whisky market is growing at a rapid pace to a point where highly sought-after bottles can now fetch double its pre-sale estimate (and spawn ideas like whisky investment funds).

Paul Wong, who is a specialist at Sotheby’s Wine, Asia, expressed his excitement with the latest sale.

“We are thrilled with the new world auction record set by the Yamazaki Aged 50 Years NV, the highest price achieved for any single bottle of Japanese whisky.”

Japanese whisky in particular has seen a massive surge in the luxury drinks segment which kicked off with last year’s milestone of 296 rare bottles from the defunct Karuizawa distillery. That collection of Japanese whisky fetched over US$1 million at an auction and also took the crown as the most expensive collection of Japanese whisky ever sold.

So how strong is the demand for Japanese whisky exactly?

Japanese spirit retailer dekantā recently launched a ballot to win a chance to purchase one of 150 bottles of Karuizawa 35-year-old single sherry cask whisky – a bottle which retails for AU$15,000 each. That’s right – there are now ballots to earn the chance to buy expensive whisky – a move previously unheard of in the industry.

Read Next

• Fake Japanese Whisky Is Flooding The Market, But There’s A Way To Tell The Real Deal 

The post 50-Year-Old Yamazaki Crowned The World's Most Expensive Japanese Whisky appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

At this point you can recite the basics of good skin care by heart.

Eat healthy. Stay hydrated. Choose the right products for your skin type and concerns. Don’t pop or pick at acne. Limit your time in the sun and the tanning bed. Don’t skimp on – or skip – SPF.

But even if you’re nailing all that, you may still be wreaking havoc on that all-important outer layer. Beware of late-night ice cream feasts and other seemingly innocuous parts of your daily routine that are silently disrupting your epidermis.

Avoid these sneaky bad skin care habits to keep your mug majestic.

Passing On The Post-Workout Shower

Squeezing in a sweat session is hard enough. Squeezing in a shower afterwards might feel downright inconceivable. But disregarding your post-workout ablutions can land you in a sticky, not to mention smelly, situation.

All the perspiration that’s now coating your skin can lead to acne, rashes, clogged pores, unholy odours, buildup of bacteria, and other icky irritations. It’s always best to rinse off immediately after exercising so bacteria spends as little time on your skin as possible, but when a shower is absolutely not in the cards, the next best thing is to change out of your gym clothes ASAP and swipe down your most acne-prone parts with a cleansing wipe.

Scrubbing Too Roughly

You’re cleansing your face, not buffing a car. All of your skin should be handled with care, but the skin on your face is particularly sensitive. Always wash and exfoliate with a gentle hand. Harsh scrubbing can cause redness, blotches and permanently dilated capillaries, as well as encourage the formation of wrinkles. Be especially gentle under the eyes, where the skin is thinnest and most delicate.

Sinking Into Stress

Stress and anxiety raise the level of cortisol – aka ‘the stress hormone’ – in your body. Increased cortisol tanks your immune system and throws the rest of your hormones out of whack, causing flare-ups of issues like acne, rosacea, rashes, eczema, psoriasis, and hives. The facial expressions you make while under pressure, like pursing your lips or furrowing your brows, can also lead to deeper wrinkles in those areas over time.

Forgetting Your Glasses (Both Kinds)

Speaking of facial movements and fine lines… let’s talk about squinting. Whether you do it because your vision is shot and you refuse to get corrective lenses, or because it’s the middle of summer and you forgot your sunnies, the squinting you do as a result will most definitely lead to crepey, wrinkled undereyes as you age. Always carry sunglasses and don’t skip on regular checkups with your optometrist.

Frequently rubbing your eyes or sleeping with your face smashed into a pillow are also no-nos if you want to stall undereye creasing for as long as possible.

Getting Inadequate Sleep

We sing the praises of sleep quite a lot around here, and for good reason. Insufficient shuteye spells doom for a variety of physical and mental elements, including your skin. When you regularly catch fewer Zs than your body needs, your skin gets duller and fine lines become more prominent. Younger skin can bounce back from the occasional late night, but recovery becomes harder the older you get (just ask your hangovers).

If you find yourself facing a sleepless night, don’t start rewatching Breaking Bad or stalking an ex on Instagram. The bright light emitted by digital screens suppresses melatonin, a hormone that induces sleep and regulates the body’s circadian rhythm. Decreased melatonin levels prevent skin cells from turning over as efficiently, leading to even more wrinkles and dullness over time.

Being Chatty Charles On Your Mobile

Another reason to consider a device detox: constantly resting your face against a phone, whether mobile or old-school, can cause breakouts. Phones are serious breeding grounds for bacteria, which can sow the seeds of acne on the sides of your face and along your jaw. Even if you religiously wipe it down, simply pressing your skin against the screen can create friction, occlusion, and increased heat, all of which can cause spots to sprout.

Routinely Overheating

From scalding showers to tropical thermostats, acute heat does a number on your skin. The warmer the water, the more likely it is to strip your skin of its essential natural oils, causing dullness and dryness. Cranking up the heat in winter can also leave your skin parched, so load up on blankets and don’t forget the humidifier.

Neglecting To Moisturise Oily Skin

Ignore naysayers who claim you don’t need a moisturiser if you have oily skin. All skin types can benefit from added hydration, even the oily and acne-prone. The key is choosing the right moisturiser for your slick skin type. Pick a product that’s water-based, not oil-based, and that’s lightweight for speedy absorption. The right formula will provide long-lasting hydration while reducing excess shine to leave a fresh, matte finish. If acne is an issue, look for the word “non-comedogenic” on the packaging, which means the product won’t clog your pores.

Sleeping In Contaminated Sheets

It’s common to shower in the morning to start the day squeaky clean, but showering at night could be the better bet skin-wise. When you hit the sack without a rinse, your body sheds the day’s worth of dirt, oil, pollution, dust, dead skin cells, and other impurities straight onto your sheets. Then you marinate in them for hours, and wake up with all of that ick stuck right back to your skin. Consider switching up your shower schedule and, at the very least, keep up a regular laundry routine.

Overindulgence

To put it simply, almost anything you love overdoing is harmful to overdo. Alcohol, tobacco, sugar, salt, caffeine… all of these wicked indulgences dehydrate and inflame the skin, or break down essential proteins like collagen and elastin causing dullness and wrinkles as you age. Even cleansing and exfoliating are bad news if you go overboard. We’re not saying you should become a monk, but you should take time to consider what your ultimate priorities are.

The post Common Habits That Are Secretly Sabotaging Your Skin appeared first on DMARGE Australia.