A retro Mac desktop that felt like 1985 Miami just started selling sunscreen

Your mom's cooking. Or your dad's cologne.

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The memory of your senses is a strange thing. It can send you on a trip through two decades in an instant.

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Story time: Have you heard of Poolsuite FM? Their whole premise was sense memory. A corner of the internet designed to feel like a specific summer. Not any summer. The summer. 1985, maybe. Miami. A pool that never closes.

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It looked like a retro Mac desktop, played endless vacation music over looping VHS beach footage, and asked nothing of you except to be in the mood for it. I found it the way you find many of the best things online, via Reddit. I clicked on the link and spent twenty minutes lost in a tropical atmosphere.In 2021 they announced they were making sunscreen.

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At first it seemed like one more inside joke, but then everyone realized it was real.Because by then the world was real enough that it needed a physical object. The sunscreen comes in a whipped cream canister. Their website lists a $250,000 hovercraft that is perpetually sold out. You can sign up to become the Director of Corporate Champagne Toasting and receive a personalized 80s-style business card. Their scientific research arm is called the Institute of Leisure Sciences.

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The products are developed with a board-certified dermatologist. They're sold at Ulta and Target. Their world is a glorious fantasy and the sunscreen genuinely works, which turns out to be the only combination with any staying power.

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What Vacation Inc. figured out is that the sequence matters. They built a world, let people live in it for years, and then made something the world needed.

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By the time the sunscreen launched, they had citizens who had been waiting for something to buy.