Do I have seasonal allergies or is it the common cold?
Ah, spring. A time of thawing and rebirth, of blooms bursting forth from frost. Days become longer, warmer and – oh no, what’s this? A tickle in your throat. Pressure building in your sinuses. A runny nose. A sneeze. Another sneeze. Was there ever a time before sneezing?
But is it allergies or a cold? Beautiful as springtime may be, the emerging greenery can also expel waves of allergens. So how can you tell if your runny nose is the result of unruly pollen or a virus? Are you infectious or is your immune system overreacting to an outside stimulus?
People often get the two confused, says Dr Jesse Bracamonte, a family physician with Mayo Clinic Family Medicine. In both cases, he explains, there is “nasal stuffiness, a runny nose and sneezing”.
The “allergies or cold question” is now relevant for more of the year. As average global temperatures rise, allergy seasons are getting longer and more intense. According to one study, between 1990 and 2018, the US pollen season got 20 days longer and pollen concentration increased by 21%. In the UK, the Health Security Agency (UKHSA) warns that pollen allergy season, which typically started around March, could now start as early as January or February.
So how can you tell seasonal allergies from a cold? We asked experts to explain.
What are seasonal allergies?
Allergies happen when your body’s immune system overreacts to a substance that it thinks is dangerous, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Seasonal allergies, sometimes known as hay fever or seasonal allergic rhinitis, affect roughly one-quarter of adults in the US and the UK. Symptoms tend to spike as seasons change and plants release pollens that send vulnerable immune systems into overdrive.
“In the spring, tree pollen is the primary allergen,” says Dr Neeta Ogden, director of the Allergy, Asthma and Sinus Center in Edison, New Jersey, and spokesperson for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. In the summer, she says, the primary allergen is grass pollen, and in the fall, it tends to be ragweed.
In the UK, according to the UKHSA, trees like hazel and birch kick off allergy season in the spring, followed by grass pollen from May until July.
Weed pollen, such as dock and mugwort, usually floats around from June to late autumn.
What is a cold?
“The ‘common cold’ typically refers to a virus that affects individuals during particular times of the year,” says Bracamonte.
Most commonly, he says, the term refers to the rhinovirus, which tends to be most prominent in the spring and summer months. He adds that other types of viruses, like the flu or RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) can also result in cold-like symptoms.
How are cold and allergy symptoms different?
In the case of both colds and allergies, many symptoms require the sufferer to keep plenty of tissue paper on hand due to congestion, nasal discharge and sneezing. Experts also say that both can cause fatigue.
Still, there are differences. Bracamonte notes that allergies tend to cause itchiness around the eyes and in the throat, while a cold may cause a sore throat, but usually not itchiness.
If you feel like you’re “swallowing glass”, Bracamonte says, “it’s probably a cold”.
Cold symptoms also usually resolve themselves after several days, says Ogden, while seasonal allergies “continue throughout the season”.
A cold is also infectious, while allergies are not. A cold can be passed onto others through the air, or by droplets left behind on surfaces. “If you’re actively sneezing and having those symptoms, typically you’re contagious,” says Bracamonte.
In most cases, he says, a cold can last anywhere from three to seven days, though symptoms may last longer or be more severe for those who are older or have weakened immune systems.
What are the most effective treatments for seasonal allergies?
There are a variety of ways to treat seasonal allergies, says Ogden. She explains that saline nose rinses can cut down on mucus and rinse allergens from your nose. Eye drops can help with red eyes and itchiness. And overthe-counter corticosteroid nose sprays and antihistamines can help reduce many allergy symptoms. For the latter, she recommends looking for a “longacting, non-drowsy” variety.
Decongestants can also be helpful, she says, though you should check with your doctor before using one if you have high blood pressure, glaucoma, thyroid disease or trouble urinating.
Ogden also suggests downloading a pollen app “so you can track pollen count and stay indoors on those high days”. And if your symptoms don’t improve with over-the-counter medicines, she recommends seeing a doctor.
What are the most effective treatments for a cold?
For most healthy individuals, Bracamonte says, the answer is pretty straightforward: “Time, rest, staying hydrated and staying home.” It’s also important to keep away from others, “so you don’t get them sick”.
Did you write this article because you had a runny nose for three days and you couldn’t tell if it was allergies or a cold?
sition – the alleged practice is called a “prespend”. Debates about how much that “prespend” actually is (some say $20,000-$30,000; others say it’s more important to show “appreciation” of different merchandise categories), whether it exists, and whether it varies from store to store are all hot topics. Such forums offer other advice for wouldbe Birkin buyers: they decode the lingo (“quota” bags, for example, are the premier handbag styles, such as Birkins and Kellys, of which even favoured customers are only allowed to buy a maximum of two a year) and give tips for striking up meaningful relationships with sales associates (known as SAs) in the quest to attain what one Redditor called “the Scientology of purses”.
A lot of the forum obsessives seem to enjoy the process, even when they admit to having spent tens of thousands on homewares they might not have really wanted, and even if that enjoyment is grudging at times. “The thrill of the chase really gets people hooked, addicted, to the process of obtaining one,” says Pardoe, whose work as a celebrity hairdresser (he specialises in hair extensions for clients including Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton) funds his own Birkin habit.
Roxana Voica, a software developer who saved up to buy a Birkin for her 25th birthday, says the appeal is “artificial scarcity”. She was dogged in her quest, searching through Instagram for posts made close to the location of a Hermès boutique in Dubai, where she was going on holiday, to find an SA to DM before arrival. She says the SA advised her that she would need to spend $27,000 (100,000 AED, £21,000) to get a Birkin. On her first visit to the store, with another SA, she bought some sandals and a belt but was told that the store didn’t “really” have any Birkins “for tourists”. Then she reconnected with the original SA, whom she describes as “truly a gem”, who told her that the brand was due a restock before the end of her holiday – and eventually she was successful. Getting a bag feels “like winning the lottery”, she says. “It’s just like a game – it’s definitely psychological. Because it’s so rare and also very expensive, it is like becoming a part of a very niche group who ‘made it’. I don’t think the hype and the resell prices would be so high if the bags were more easily available.”
Literally speaking, the Hermès Birkin is just a bag: trapezoidal in shape, with two handles, a bit of glinting hardware and a flap, only materially different from other luxury handbags because it is still handmade.
Scarcity has been essential to the Birkin’s appeal since it first shot to popularity during the It bag days of the late 90s and noughties. It was inspired by Jane Birkin, after a chance meeting between the singer and actor and JeanLouis Dumas, then Hermès’ executive chairman, on a flight. The bag was launched in 1984 but didn’t become truly famous until a 2001 episode of Sex and the City, in which Samantha Jones’s thwarted attempts to get a Birkin were a big plot point. In the episode, Jones explains that the bag’s appeal is not its design but its significance: “When I’m tooling around town with that bag, I’ll know I’ve made it,” she says. On her first attempt to buy one, she is told there is a five-year waiting list. “For a bag?” She balks, to which the sales associate replies:“It’s not a bag, it’s a Birkin.”
Michael Tonello wrote a 2008 bestselling book, Bringing Home the Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the World’s Most Coveted Handbag, about his own experiences flipping Birkins in the late 90s and noughties. His business began when the singer-songwriter Carole Bayer Sager contacted him on eBay (he was selling Hermès scarves at the time) to ask him if he could source a Birkin. He believes the allegations in the lawsuit reflect the reality of Hermès’ business model, as he experienced it at the time, when the official line was that there was a waitlist for Birkins – something Tonello never quite believed. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, he says, “if I spent somewhere in the vicinity of $5,000 first, then asked for the bag, they would sell it to me”. Tonello’s impression was that the Birkin “was positioned as a reward for being a good customer”.
Tonello was eventually put on the brand’s infamous “no fly” list when Hermès got wind of his business. (The news was delivered with typically Hermès politesse: they sent a fax saying that they were cancelling his special orders “because there was a shortage of leather”, he says. “I was kind of like: this seems a bit fishy.”) He describes the Birkin-buying process as “a finely tuned ruse” – a way to maintain a sense of scarcity about the bags while getting “people to buy all that other stuff that, pretty much, people don’t buy at Hermès”.
Whether artificial or real (Hermès does not disclose how many it produces annually), it is a perception of scarcity that has helped Birkins endure, while other It bags of the noughties have long gone out of fashion. While the resale market has opened the market up beyond the stores, only high-rollers can access resale bags. Now perceived as an investment – bags bought in store often fetch double the price at resale; rare, diamond-studded iterations have sold for as much as $450,000 at auction – Birkins have been toted by every celebrity imaginable (Victoria Beckham has a huge collection; the Kardashians are awash in the totes; Kate Moss memorably used one as a nappy bag). Even rumblings of a turning tide in 2022, when Beyoncé sang that she preferred Telfar bags in the lyrics to Summer Renaissance (“This Telfar bag imported, Birkins, them shits in storage”) have yet to dent the bottom line. Last year Hermès reported €12bn ($13bn, £10bn) in annual sales; in April 2023, its market capitalisation rose to €210bn ($228bn, £180bn), surpassing Nike despite the vastly smaller number of goods sold. This success is owed to the “quality and scarcity of its leather goods”, according to the Business of Fashion.
The way Jeffrey Berk, CEO of a major Miami-based Birkin reseller, Privé Porter, tells it, there are two kinds of Birkin buyers: those who are prepared to do the required “grovelling at Hermès”, and the people who are not, who will come to him to buy Birkins for double the ticket price. His clients include Paris Hilton, Kris Jenner and a lot of rappers including Cardi B, Offset, Lil Baby, Gunna, Tekashi69 and “Kanye West – unfortunately, before we realised who he was”. Many of these clients (“a Jordanian prince, a Saudi royal …”) are people “who don’t want to walk into Hermès and be told what to do”.
Many customers are among the super-rich 2% of luxury customers who, according to Berk, drive 40% of luxury sales. Still, he says, his celebrity clients get turned down in Hermès all the time, though he won’t say it is ever about bias or snobbery. Rather, he claims, his clients don’t want to play the game: they want “to get the exact colour, size and hardware that they want”. They do not want to buy other Hermès products in order to be deemed Birkin-able. They have the affluence to buy “the $25,000 desk, or the $10,000 bicycle – these are real prices – or the $45,000 trash can” from Hermès, but they are not prepared to be “stuck with a whole bunch of stuff that they don’t want”. Or else they want more bags than Hermès will give them, he says, telling me about the day in 2015 that Kris Jenner walked into his pop-up shop in Aspen, Colorado, and told him that she and her daughters could not quench their Birkin thirst because “no matter how much they were spending, they could only get two bags a year – it was a hard and fast rule”.
Berk claims that 70% of his stock comes from Hermès’ VIP buyers, who will sometimes buy bags in colors they do not really want if SAs offer them. By that point, he says, clients are “so invested with the SA and with Hermès” that they are scared to say no, worried they will get the Hermès equivalent of a “negative Uber rating” if they don’t gratefully accept. So they will email Privé Porter, to double check that the company would be interested in trading or reselling (they will write: “they’re really pushing me on rose petal”, he says), before they make the purchase.
Clearly, a complex ecosystem has sprung up around Birkins that is making a lot of already rich people – customers flipping Birkins, Birkin resellers and Hermès itself – an awful lot of money. If the allegations are true, and lawsuit is successful, it could disrupt that ecosystem significantly. It seems unlikely that Hermès would flood the market with Birkins, given the brand’s dedication to scarcity. But it might have to find another way to cover the alleged loss of income from ancillary products, if clients suddenly felt less inclined to prove themselves as “loyal” by buying things they don’t actually want, as the suit alleges.
The lawyers I spoke to felt the suit was unlikely to succeed. Rania Sedhom, a luxury specialist attorney at Sedhom Law Group PLLC, said: “I just don’t think they can prove what they are complaining of – but even the complaint itself has some flaws. It’s not just that I think they’re going to ultimately lose it,” Sedhom added. “I don’t think the case is going to move forward.” Danielle Garno, partner and co-chair of the entertainment practice at Holland & Knight LLP, agrees that the suit looks like “a very tough uphill battle for the plaintiffs” in part because the plaintiffs would “have to prove that Hermès has sufficient economic power in the market with the Birkin and Kelly bags to essentially shut out competition in the market of the other ancillary products (belts, scarves, home goods, etc)”, which they do not seem likely to be able to do.
There’s a another fly in the ointment: Berk tells me he thinks the lawsuit will fail because he can’t see who would want to join the class action, given that the last thing most Hermès shoppers want is to risk being put on the blacklist.
Having covered the Birkin beat for decades, Tonello says he is still somewhat amazed by the endurance of these alleged sales tactics. They just seem “a bit rude. I have found it really odd that wealthy people that seem to be able to get what they want put up with this type of thing from a store.” He surmises that “there are a lot of people with self esteem issues that buy into this whole thing – there’s a whole psychology of this that Hermès has worked very well to their advantage”. Perhaps the truth is that many of those customers, for whom so much else comes easily, are hooked on the game of Birkin-hunting, and enjoy perceiving themselves as the type of people who can navigate unwritten rules. Berk, who scoffs at the lawsuit, calls it “a game of kings. If people are suing because they are not a king … I’m sorry – it’s just the way it is. It’s just reality.”
There are a lot of people with self esteem issues that buy into this whole thing
Michael Tonello
compelling story that convinces on its own terms”.
Still no. Brian Cox is in it.
Oh! Succession! No, The Game. Whatever, I get that you haven’t watched it. But just know that by not watching it, you have missed what some corners of the internet are calling the best hour of TV ever.
What happens? I’m not going to give much away, because spoilers, but I will say that Alan struggles with a discovery that could jeopardise his marriage, and Bobby’s world unravels.
Did you copy that off the internet? Shh. Anyway, it’s the best hour of TV and you can’t argue with that. The series has a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
OK, but Shōgun has a 99% rating. Is that better? Ah, Shōgun is pretty great. But it’s on TV right now, so it’s impossible to judge it with the same historical context that we’re using to judge The 100% rating, and that’s eight years older than The Game. Is that better? Well, obviously season five of 24 is perfect. Nobody can dispute that. But, specifically, episode four of The Game is pretty special.
Really? Because I just Googled it and the first review that came up only gave it three stars. Well, what can I say? Nobody ever built a statue of a critic.
There’s a statue of Roger Ebert in Illinois. Oh my God, would you just shut up? All I’m trying to tell you is that a decade-old spy show that few people seem to remember is having a wellearned critical resurgence. Is that honestly so hard to take?
At least tell me that The Game was the best British spy thriller of its year. That I can do. Unless you count London Spy, of course, because that was better.
Do say: “Watching episode four of The Game is the best way to spend an hour.”
Don’t say: “But still probably not as good as watching nine episodes of Bluey in a row.”
Barajas’s cellphone, keys, wallet and a cash box containing $2,000 were never recovered.
State investigators did not preserve radio call recordings, the lawsuit states, which they attributed to an unexplained issue with their system. There is no footage of his interaction with police from body-worn or dashboard cameras.
In the lawsuit, Laux contends that Barajas’s vehicle was never on the onramp and that the deputies profiled him and used excessive force, leaving him injured, disoriented and causing him to stagger on to the highway.
Raquel suspects Barajas would have pushed back against the deputies’ attempts to stop and search him.
“He would have refused because he did nothing wrong,” she said. “I would always talk to him about that – you have all these rights. He would have had no problem invoking those rights.”
The road where he was left was precarious, Barajas’s sisters said. They visited the area last year. The semis moved so fast it shook their car, Xexilia recalled, and there’s a bend in the road where it’s impossible to see oncoming traffic. The woods in that area are tall and dense, leaving everything pitchblack.
The deputies had no right to tell Barajas that he couldn’t drive, Laux said, and if they believed he was experiencing mental health issues they should not have left him there.
“If he was having a mental health crisis, or if he was on drugs, which he wasn’t, how do you leave a guy like that on the side of the road?” he said. “You wouldn’t leave your dog on the highway that morning but they left a guy who at least one [deputy] claimed was suicidal.”
The reports from deputies were all written after they knew Barajas was dead, Laux said.
Neither the Saline county sheriff’s office or the coroner’s office responded to a request for comment. The Arkansas state police declined to comment on the case, citing pending litigation. •••
The family hopes to see the lawsuit – which was originally filed in New Mexico but transferred to Arkansas and refiled to include the state police – result in a trial in which the deputies will be deposed and they can get answers, and justice.
“We can’t let this go. We really need these police officers to be held accountable,” Raquel said.
The case has garnered widespread attention and support, including from the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights group in the US. His sisters have tried to tell people who Barajas was when he was alive – a man they describe as vibrant and hard-working who loved dogs, Chicago house music, traveling the highways, great food and cooking for his friends and family.
Raquel’s and Xexilia’s children never got to meet their uncle. Raquel keeps a picture of him in the entryway of her home and tells her son and daughter that their uncle is watching over them. Xexilia tells her daughter about Barajas when they sit under the stars in one of his favorite places: Taos, New Mexico.
“It’s like the sky is right there, like it’s gonna fall on you,” Xexilia said. “I’ll tell her, count the stars or say hi to Uncle D, and she’ll just point at the sky and she’ll say Uncle D.
“I’ll teach her everything he believed in and everything we fought for to get justice and truth.”
She hopes the trial provides longawaited answers. “We don’t know anything more than we did when we first got that call. The more we ask questions, the more it’s become a mystery.”
This is destroying us, destroying our family, not knowing. We want the truth
Xexilia Barajas