Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

Happy Mother's Day! This is a great opportunity to celebrate all the wonderful moms out there. It's also an opportunity to give an extra hug to those who have lost their moms, to the moms who have lost children (sometimes before they were even born) and to those who wish they could be moms but weren't able to embark on that journey for whatever reason. Today is a tough day for many and a good reminder that it's always worth being kind to others.
Now, we can't tell you how to celebrate this special day, but we can certainly learn from a 27-year-old university student who showed us exactly how not to attempt something memorable. If you think you've done something silly before, then spare a thought for a Chinese national living in Tokyo who had to be rescued from Mount Fuji twice in the span of just five days.
According to police in Shizuoka prefecture, the climber was first airlifted from the summit on the 22nd of April after he lost the metal spikes that help you walk on snow and ice (crampons, for those of us not in the business of regularly scaling volcanoes). According to reports, he promptly fell ill with nausea and made a distress call.
That, in itself, is a dramatic enough tale. But then came the sequel.
Just days after his helicopter ride home, the student returned to the very same mountain that kicked his butt the first time, reportedly to recover his phone and a few other personal items left behind during the first rescue. Unfortunately, things didn’t go any better for him on the second attempt. Another climber found him lying on the trail, “shaking with abrasions,” and called it in.
Emergency crews hiked up to him, loaded him onto a stretcher, and carried him down almost 800 metres from a station sitting around 3000 metres above sea level. He appeared to be suffering from altitude sickness but was, thankfully, not in life-threatening condition.
No word yet on whether he actually got the phone back. Somewhere on that mountain, there's probably a Nokia 3310 that was lost 25 years ago, still on 2 bars of battery life.
Sticking with the Asian theme, this week's column by Dominique Olivier uses MSG as a perfect example of the Chinese bias that is so prevalent among Western consumers. With everything going on in the world right now, this is a valuable read. Enjoy it here>>>
Read on for a story on why our world seems less colourful these days, along with Fast Facts themed around Asia.
Have a great day!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

Now is a great time to question our Chinese bias

Is the world getting duller, or are we?

TL;DR: Step into a showroom, scroll through your feed or walk into a toddler’s bedroom in a hip suburb. Wherever you go, it’s starting to look a little… washed out. Colour hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it’s definitely taken a step back, probably to let greige have its moment.
No, you’re not imagining it.
Researchers at the UK’s Science Museum Group combed through 7,000 photos of everyday objects from 1800 to 2020 and found a clear trend: things have been getting greyer for over a century. The era of vibrant, joyfully saturated stuff peaked somewhere around the mid-20th century. Since then, it’s been a steady fade to black, white, and a thousand variations of beige with good PR.
Even if the study isn’t broad enough to declare a global beige takeover, the response it sparked online says plenty. Everyone seems to feel it. Yellow cars are basically endangered now. The UK’s favourite car colours since 2000 have been grey, black, and white. Every. Single. Year.
Dulux and Farrow & Ball’s most popular paint shades in 2020 were a mood board of greige. Sigh.
McDonald’s seems to have gotten the memo back in 2006, ditching its iconic red-and-yellow plastic look for dark wood tones and slate grays, in a move that screamed, “We’re grown-ups now. Please take us seriously.” Three years later, they changed their logo background to green in Europe (because if you can’t make a salad the star product, at least try to look organic).
Even birds in Europe are apparently less colourful now, thanks to climate change.
But is colour actually disappearing? Or are we just not looking in the right places?
Anthropologists reckon it depends where you’re standing. The Science Museum’s collection skews heavily Western, and if you zoom out, colour is still very much alive in many parts of the world. But in the West, especially in urban spaces, there’s a definite move towards neutrals. Italian designer Riccardo Falcinelli has a theory that we’re not ditching colour because we hate it. We’re just exhausted.
In a world of flashing ads, bright packaging, and screens screaming for attention, colour has become synonymous with commercial noise. And just like we critique fast fashion and consumerism, we’re now side-eyeing too much colour. People want calm. Predictability. Control. And apparently, nothing says take a deep breath like a nice taupe wall.
Of course it wasn’t always this way. When chemical dyes became cheap in the mid-20th century, everyone went wild with psychedelic prints and shag carpets in full technicolour. Colour was even political at times, a way to push back against post-war conformity. The punks of the 1970s used colour paired with black to scream frustration and rebellion. Colour only means something in context. And right now, the context has shifted.
So, are we stuck in greige forever? Probably not. Colour isn’t going extinct - our eyes are still capable of seeing around 10 million shades, and human beings still strongly associate bright colours with emotions like joy. The West’s current fixation on beige is really just a mirror that reflects who we are right now: overwhelmed, cautious, and desperately craving a little peace and quiet.

Dominique's Fast Facts: Facts about Asia

An assortment of facts that will only take you five minutes to read.

There are over 2,300 languages that are spoken across Asia, including Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, and Arabic.

Asia is home to two of the most populous countries on Earth, China and India, with populations exceeding 1.4 billion in each country. The continent holds 60% of the world’s population.

Asia is home to both the highest and lowest points on Earth - Mount Everest and the Dead Sea.

While Indonesia is generally referred to as one country, it is actually made up of over 17,500 islands.

Despite its size of 9,597 million km², China operates in a single time zone, which means that the whole of this country runs on a single date and time. In contrast, the United States, which is similar in size to China, is divided into six different time zones.

Dancing was banned in Japan according to the Fueiho Law which was implemented in 1948. This means that several public-gathering places needed to apply for a special dancing license to get their customers dancing, at least legally on their premises.

Also known as the "Goat-grabbing game", the national sport of Afghanistan is “Buzkashi”, which involves horse-mounted players attempting to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal.

In 2023, 92,139 people living in Japan were recorded as being 100 years old or older.