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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Sonay Kartal: The unlikely heroine flying the flag for Britain
With 14 tattoos, a retro range of baggy Adidas clothes, and a childhood spent around her parents' kebab shop while struggling to afford tennis coaching, the sense that Sonay Kartal's Wimbledon fairy tale could reach far beyond a traditional tennis fanbase is obvious. We also now know that it was almost over before it started, with Kartal revealing ahead of her big Centre Court debut on Sunday how her baby steps in tennis – at the Pavilion & Avenue club in Brighton – became tinged with fear and anxiety. 'We used to do this thing called the lines game, it's a little warm-up,' she said. 'They'd shout, 'service line', and all the kids had to run to the service line. That was always the first game and I was too shy for three months to actually come on court. My coach Julie [Hobbs] finally managed to get me to do it. I tried to run to the outside tramline, tripped over, burst into tears. Off I went, and I didn't come back for a couple of months.' It is a story that plenty of parents and children will relate to, with Hobbs, a former British No 1, eventually coaxing her back to the sport. Fast forward 17 years and you did not need long around a packed Court 16 on Saturday to feel the impact that Kartal is having. Fresh from three brilliant singles wins, she was in doubles action alongside her friend Jodie Burrage in front of a distinctly youthful audience. Kartal, who is now 23 and the last remaining British woman in the singles draw, hopes that her story can particularly inspire girls who are shy about sport. 'My coach has a daughter and she was super shy, got into tennis and has changed like a completely different person,' she said. 'She's got so much more personality, she's so much more talkative.' And is playing sport becoming cooler for girls? 'I think it's changing,' she says. 'I think now a lot of girls are getting more comfortable with having more muscle on their body. I think that's turning, which is obviously incredible. 'I don't think anyone should feel like girls have to look a certain way. I think that's changing in tennis as well. You look at the tennis players, everyone's all different physiques and sizes and heights. So, it's definitely getting more versatile. If I can inspire kids, whether that's boys or girls, then I'm obviously doing something good.' Kartal played football and cricket at a similar level to her tennis until she was 13 and is a self-confessed sports lover. 'I was a little bit of a tomboy and super sporty,' she said. 'I loved football. My school actually used to have a lot of girls football and I used to go to my local park with my dad. In cricket I was always the batter and just launching [the ball] as far as I could.' Saturday's doubles might not have gone to plan – Kartal and Burrage were beaten in straight sets – but her partner could sense the buzz. Kartal had been informed that she would be first up on Centre Court at 1.30pm on Sunday against the Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova just before stepping on court with Burrage. 'Her story shows there's not one way to do what we do – but multiple ways,' said Burrage. 'She has done incredible – and she is going to go a lot higher. For everyone out there, regardless of where you are from, you can do it if you put your mind to it – especially like this chick here. That's the moral of this story.' Kartal's ranking has risen from 864 in 2022 to the world's top 50 – she will overtake Emma Raducanu as the British No 2 once Wimbledon is done and dusted – and Burrage clearly does not think the story will end against Pavlyuchenkova. 'I've got full belief,' she said. There certainly seems little chance of the attention going to Kartal's head. She was six when she made that first trip to a tennis club following an invitation from a tennis official who had eaten at one of her father's two Turkish restaurants. And, while she was competitive against players like Emma Raducana through the British junior rankings, has largely progressed in senior tennis away from the limelight. Kartal's social media remains largely fixated with animals or food and, perhaps most telling of all, she has resisted inevitable pressure to change a coaching team that, as well as Hobbs, also still includes Ben and Martin Reeves from her original club in Brighton. 'I was hearing people saying, you know, 'Do you think you should get a coach that has already done that?' But I didn't want that. If I can have a coach that can take me from a six-year-old to the WTA Tour, I think that's obviously good enough. We just learned together. It's kind of doing this crazy thing together. Kartal did find herself being recognised during a 'tricky' trip to the shops near Wimbledon on Friday night and her phone has been flooded with suggestions for her next tattoo. They have included one of Centre Court itself, a vintage polo shirt in recognition of her distinctive Adidas playing top and, from Burrage, an image of fire and ice. 'I actually like that,' she said. She has, until now, remained a member of the same no-thrills High Street gym in Brighton, although wonders if she may now have to review that arrangement. 'It was getting a bit tricky prior [to Wimbledon]. But to be honest they were actually pretty respectful there [at the gym]. They would just say hello and then just let me get on with it. So maybe I'll have to test that when I'm back. I go to the gym and just kind of have a bit of 'me time', stick my headphones in and just forget about the world. 'People think I don't like [being in the spotlight], because I have gone under the radar my whole life but I don't have an issue with being in the spotlight or not being in the spotlight. I'll take it as a compliment.'
Times
3 hours ago
- Times
I watched YouTube for a week with my children. Here's what I learnt
At about 5pm every day, in the small window between after-school activities and dinner, my three and five-year-old daughters veg out in front of a screen. Sometimes they'll watch a cartoon on Netflix; occasionally they'll ask for CBeebies. The majority of the time, though, it's YouTube. The show they chose — or rather, that was algorithmically suggested — to watch one recent afternoon follows the adventures of a real-life brother and sister. They'd watched it before, as have many other children, since it's one of the most popular kids' channels on YouTube. While my daughters love the slapstick humour, to me it's like white noise, the background soundtrack to my multitasking. But the video they watched that day made me pay attention. In it the brother tricks his sister into thinking she has gained weight. Visibly upset, the little girl changes into a skimpy workout outfit to do star jumps, and later turns down a sandwich in favour of a plate of raw carrot sticks, before heading to her bedroom to weigh herself. I was horrified, both at what we were watching and at myself for letting my impressionable daughters access it. How was it, I wondered, that this type of content was being promoted on a platform marketed as family-friendly? And what else had they watched that had flown under my radar? According to Michelle Neumann, a professor of childhood education at the University of Sheffield who has carried out research on children's YouTube content, this is precisely the problem with a lot of what our kids are watching. 'On the surface many of these channels seem OK, so if a parent glances over their shoulder, they might think, that looks fun,' she says. 'But when you dig deeper, you realise there's a lot of problematic content.' So I set myself a challenge: for one week I would dig deeper, intently watching everything that my girls were looking at on YouTube to see what I would learn. I should preface my little experiment with a disclosure: my husband and I used to work for Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006. I joined in 2017, the year it emerged that bad actors were circumnavigating the platform's filters to run creepy, violent and explicit videos on YouTube Kids, the version of the app for under-12s. But the company's response to the scandal had been solid, I thought — introducing new guidelines for creators about what qualified as good children's content, beefing up its moderation and mass deleting inappropriate videos. • YouTube and the rise and rise of trash TV for kids In the years after the scandal, after we became parents, my husband and I found ourselves turning to the platform more and more for educational and entertainment purposes. The depth of content is simply unrivalled. For example, around the age of four, after reading a lift-the-flap history book in our local library, my eldest daughter developed a morbid fascination with the bubonic plague. Her endless curiosity quickly exhausted my limited grasp of 14th-century history, but I knew YouTube would have the answers. Sure enough, I found what seemed like an age-appropriate video that taught her everything she needed to know about the Black Death. She watched it repeatedly for months, until the next obsession took over (Egyptian mummies). This way of using YouTube is what Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media, the age-rating forum for parents, calls intentional — knowing what you're looking for and being deliberate about identifying it. The problem is, he says, it's just not reflective of how people actually use the platform. 'You could stay within a playlist that perhaps a parent has curated and have really good, high-quality content,' he tells me. 'But it's not how kids use YouTube, and it's not how it was designed.' When a carefully chosen video finishes, algorithmically powered suggestions on what to watch next can take kids down a rabbit hole of low-quality — even harmful — content. This became clear within about ten minutes of my week-long challenge. After watching a video where a monocle-wearing cartoon professor explained evolution (fuelled by another question that had left me stumped), what followed was a flurry of content that, had it appeared on terrestrial television, would have had the Ofcom complaints line ringing off the hook. In one video, which had more than a billion views, two young brothers showed off a homemade vending machine that spat out boxes of sugary cereal, fizzy drinks and chocolate bars. In another, a child played with what the video title described as 'girl' toys: a pretend sewing machine, a nail salon and a pink play kitchen (all things my girls love, I should add — but so, too, do lots of boys). • Apart from these (and other) examples of content that flouted UK broadcasting guidelines or featured dated stereotypes, most of what we watched might generously be called clickbait: content that promised to teach children to learn new words, say, but that ended up being a thinly disguised toy promotion. Many of the videos we watched had titles packed with educational-sounding buzzwords, but turned out to be garbage with no narrative arc, out-of-sync dubbing and, all too often, an undercurrent of consumerism. A spokesperson for YouTube told The Sunday Times: 'On YouTube Kids we provide parents with robust controls to decide what content to make available, whether approving specific content, choosing from age-appropriate categories, or the ability to block specific videos or channels.' They added that, after reviewing the links we shared, it had found no violations of its community guidelines. My experiment stacks up with what other (more rigorous) studies have found: the platform has a few gems, some quite shocking content and a hell of a lot of rubbish. 'We did some research a few years back and found that, while YouTube says it has a lot of educational, high-quality videos, really only a small percentage of the content could be classed that way,' Robb says. 'A lot of the videos that position themselves as being high quality or educational are very shallow.' By the end of the week I realised it was these types of videos that bothered me the most — content that Neumann described as 'wolves in sheep's clothing'. I feel well equipped to have conversations with my children about media content that very obviously challenges our family values. After watching the video that first triggered this article, I spoke to both my daughters about what we had just seen — how no food is inherently good or bad, about how we exercise to feel, not look, good. But knowing how to deal with the other, more innocuous-seeming content has left me as confused as when one of my kids asks me how birds evolved from dinosaurs. Colin Ward, a Bafta-winning former children's TV producer and member of the Children's Media Foundation, agrees that, like me, most parents are struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff. But he questions whether that type of pressure should be put on us in the first place. 'Parents can't be expected to police this — it's just not possible,' he says. Neither should we put our faith in the platforms to self-regulate, given their main concern is their bottom line. 'It's a very competitive market and they are focused on monetisation, so they're not going to change.' YouTube told The Sunday Times: 'We have strict advertising guidelines on YouTube Kids, and don't allow paid promotional content.' If we can't leave it to individuals or the free market to tackle, that leaves just one actor that might make a difference: governments. Ward knows that might not be popular with some people, but makes a point I think most parents will agree with. 'We all accept that there are some things that are important as a public service, whether it's the armed forces or parks, and that those things need taxes to support them and sometimes regulations,' he says. 'When it comes to our children having access to high-quality content and not just utter drivel, that too is surely a social good?' The present government has already indicated it will take action. Late last year the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, wrote to YouTube urging it to make high-quality programming more visible on its platform. She also suggested that, if this doesn't happen voluntarily, regulation might force its hand. YouTube told The Sunday Times that it 'continues to engage regularly with the culture secretary, as part of our ongoing efforts to support the UK's high quality children's content creators'. But while she and others work on that, what are parents to do? Ban our kids from accessing YouTube? Co-watch at all times? Neither seems realistic, at least not in my household. I have promised we will continue to apply a little more of that all-important intentionality. In other words, relying on our gut when deciding what might be an appropriate video for our kids, rather than ceding control to an algorithm.
Times
5 hours ago
- Times
Six hot new lash treatments for summer 2025
When it comes to our lashes we've come a long way from just swiping on a bit of mascara. In recent years the fake look has become big business — although, happily, the current trend is more about low-maintenance effortlessness. On TikTok the masses go mad for lash growth serums: Glow For It made six figures in just 12 hours from a live shopping stream in April, while according to UKLash one of its lash serums is sold every 20 seconds globally. Lash lifts and extensions are also on the rise. The beauty app Secret Spa reports 60 per cent faster growth in lash treatments than any other category, including mani-pedis and waxing, while the UK trade body the Guild of Beauty Therapists says lash treatments are now the most popular salon services, with roughly 129,000 carried out a week. Lash extensions have come a long way from the 2010s (think Russian mink lashes, as seen on the cast of Geordie Shore). 'Lash technology and artistry have evolved. These days they're soft, subtle and undetectable, thanks to ultra-fine fibres that mimic the texture and movement of natural lashes,' says Asma Docrat, a celebrity lash artist whose clients include Mandy Moore and Lily Allen. 'By fully customising the length, curl, colour and weight of your lash extensions, they can look like your own, but on a really good day.' Whatever your vibe, there's a lash look for that. • Read more beauty product reviews and advice from our experts Slightly bolder and more glamorous, volume lashes will give you a seriously impactful flutter. 'Multiple lashes, or a cluster, are applied per natural lash to create more volume,' Docrat says. They look fluffier and fuller, but if you can't quite commit to drama, you can also get hybrid lashes. 'These are a mix of classic and volume for a more wispy effect,' she says. 'For the best results — and this goes for any type of lash extension — avoid caffeine before your appointment as it can make your eyes flutter, making precision work trickier.' Expect to pay £80-150 for a full set, and £60-80 for infills, which are needed every two to three weeks, depending on how well you take care of them. 'Avoid oil-based skincare,' Docrat says. 'Use lash-safe foaming cleansers to remove make-up around the eyes, and never use cotton wool pads.' Gently combing them through daily with a clean spoolie and sleeping on a silk pillowcase are also on her list of do's. • The best luxury lash serums Lynk-Gel lashes are the longest-lasting extensions, with only a handful of lash artists in the UK trained and certified by the company behind the process, Illumino. 'This clever new technique uses a safe, focused LED light to instantly 'cure' a gel-based adhesive, creating a bond between the extension and your natural lash that's as strong as it is flexible,' says Camilla Kirk-Reynolds, the A-list lash artist whose clientele include Naomi Campbell and Angelina Jolie. According to Kirk-Reynolds they can last for up to eight weeks (that explains the heftier price tag, usually sitting somewhere between £300 and £600 for a full set), plus there's no downtime — so you can jump in the shower or pool or wash your face straight away without a second thought. As with many beauty innovations, the Koreans are one step ahead. 'Instead of glueing lashes on to a curling shield [as for a traditional lash lift], the Korean method uses a healthier, lash-softening cysteamine-based paste,' explains Haya Alhoush, a British-based Korean lash lift educator. 'A two-step shield system creates the most natural and smooth curl. First, a flat shield softens the lashes, then a curved one perfects and sets the curl.' Lasting about eight weeks, it makes mascara redundant. The no-mascara make-up trend has been making the rounds, thanks to the cool girls of Instagram (hello, Hailey Bieber). Coloured lashes such as brown extensions add subtle length and volume without the starkness of black. 'They're softer, work for most skin tones and are undetectable but still make you look polished,' Docrat says. The barefaced aesthetic usually goes hand in hand with a great skincare routine, but Docrat recommends skipping eye creams, which can migrate to the lash line and affect your faux lashes' longevity. Like classic lashes, these cost anywhere between £100 and £200 for a full set, and should last up to three weeks. • This article contains affiliate links that can earn us revenue The trendy lot on TikTok and Instagram are getting 'anime lashes' that take their cue from manga characters. Think spiky, doll-like lashes that make eyes appear brighter and doe-eyed. 'Anime lashes use a variety of length and dimensions, with spaced-out, longer individual spikes that stand out among shorter, wispier lashes,' says the LA-based lash artist Alanah Sahaba, who counts Megan Thee Stallion as a client. 'To balance the look, you can also add bottom lashes, which makes eyes look wider.' A word of warning, though: 'You might be in the chair for up to three hours, as anime lashes are more intricate and detailed, so have your favourite podcast downloaded!' A full custom set will typically set you back anywhere from £100 to £200, and they should last three to four weeks before needing infills or removal. A slick of mascara is like a shot of espresso for the face: it instantly brightens and makes your make-up look, well, better. Imagine that — glossy, defined and sleek lashes — but without the effort of actually applying mascara every morning. 'Unlike classic lashes, which are designed to be softer and mimic individual natural hairs, wet-look lashes have a more dramatic, glossy finish and are usually spiked to perfectly mimic the look of freshly applied mascara,' Docrat says. The technique involves applying closed fans of multiple extensions to each natural lash. This creates those distinct, slightly clumped, high-shine spikes that give the illusion of lashes that are perpetually hydrated and freshly coated. As for volume lashes, expect to be in the chair for up to two hours. • Hello dollface: the 'glass skin' trend that's everywhere £38, looking sparse and thin and feeling brittle? This strengthening and lengthening serum will nourish lashes between treatments, but it's also great for anyone struggling with eyelash loss. It's so good, in fact, that users claim to see results in just four weeks. £18, scrap of oil, make-up, dust and dirt is removed with this gentle foaming cleanser that's packed with prebiotics to help keep bacteria at bay. Simply pump the foam on to the back of your hand, swirl through the cleansing brush, which is designed to get in between every lash, and softly massage into your lashes, brushing away from the root, before removing with a damp cotton pad. £2, from your fingers can break down the lash adhesive,' says Docrat, who recommends using a spoolie to comb through instead. This reusable one has supersoft bristles and comes with a lid to keep the brush dust-free. £66, with delicate lash extensions in mind, this celebrity fave, pure mulberry silk sleep mask has a contour on the inside for crease-free lashes while you snooze.@chanelleho The Sunday Times Style Beauty awards are back for 2025. You could win a luxury five-star holiday at Sani Resort in Greece, plus we have more than £25,000 worth of beauty prizes up for grabs. To be entered into the prize draw, vote for your favourite products at
