Blue light protection for skin – do you need it? episode 188

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

Hello and welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty questions and give you a unique insider's look at the beauty product industry. This is episode 188 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today is a woman who prefers earthquakes and wildfires to freezing temperatures and blizzards, Valerie George. Hello, Valerie. Hi, Perry. On today's episode, we've got a good show for you today. In this episode, we're gonna cover a bunch of your beauty questions, or at least a few of them, how to get good color matched foundation from the internet. Wow, you can find anything on the internet nowadays.

Whether you need to protect yourself from blue light and whether your skin adapts to your moisturizer. Plus, we've got an installment of the Recall Roundup, everybody's new favorite bit. But before we get to that, let's say hello to Valerie. How's it going, Valerie?

Valerie George (1:10)

It's good, Perry. We're ready for another episode.

Perry Romanowski (1:14)

We are. It just seems like we just put one out. And how about that turnaround time on getting that edited?

Valerie George (1:21)

It's pretty impressive. I think on that episode, we let the listeners know just how much time we put into the show. And it's not just researching all of the answers to make sure we're providing current and factual information.

But the post-editing of the show takes a lot of work and I think you would do it. Not that I doubted you, but I just thought, man, that's a lot of editing and sure enough, you did it.

Perry Romanowski (1:49)

Well, you can't really call me a procrastinator, although sometimes it does seem that way.

Valerie George (1:56)

Well, I think you've referred to yourself as a procrastinator in the past, right?

Perry Romanowski (2:00)

I like to think of myself more as a prioritizer.

Valerie George (2:03)

I like that. That's the positive way to look at it.

Perry Romanowski (2:06)

Well, why don't we get started with our beauty news? All right, Valerie, why don't you take the first one?

Valerie George (2:17)

Well, this week, I was reading Cosmetics Business, which is an industry publication from Europe, and they posted a press release about a group of researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center. And this research group discovered that there's a link between mental health and genetics with tanning bed addiction.

Perry Romanowski (2:39)

Oh, wow.

Valerie George (2:40)

What this research group did is collect saliva samples from nearly 300 women aged 18 to 30 in a genetic study to assess five different genes related to pathways that reward addictive behavior. It's well established that individuals can have variations to the gene responsible for dopamine, which is the chemical relinked to the brain's reward and pleasure system.

In addition to studying the participants' genetic makeup, the scientists evaluated mental health, body image, and tanning habits to determine if there is a link between variations in this gene, if the participants have those variations and tanning bad addiction. So it was a look at both genetics and emotional behaviors.

Perry Romanowski (3:19)

So are they trying to correlate something in the genes with an emotionally addictive behavior then?

Valerie George (3:24)

Exactly. So I guess there's five genes that are known to be related to the dopamine receptors in the brain, and if you have a variation in the genes, I guess you would be considered to have addictive behavior or that they're trying to prove, exactly.

Perry Romanowski (3:38)

Exactly. I think in a previous show, way back, we talked about people who did get addicted to tanning.

Valerie George (3:46)

It can happen. And the study found that women with symptoms of depression and modifications to those reward-related genes were at the most risk for being addicted to tanning. In fact, sometimes 13 times more likely.

And what if the women didn't have signs of depression but still carried the variant genes? They were twice as likely to develop tanning addictions.

Perry Romanowski (4:10)

Wow, so getting addicted to tanning is in your genes?

Valerie George (4:13)

It could be. Now, this area is of high interest for me personally because I've always done my best to protect my skin from the sun. I've always tried to wear sunscreen. A lot of people think I'm younger than my age. And I'd like to attribute that to taking care of my skin in the sun. And I used to walk around saying tan skin is damaged skin.

But in the medical industry, this area is of interest because there's already strong evidence that the use of indoor UV tanning causes or increases the risk of skin cancer. So it's really important to understand what gets people to tan, what gets people to do this behavior that we know is bad is kind of like smoking, right? And the psychosis behind intentional indoor UV tanning isn't a new area of research. Scientists have tried to understand what gets people in bed, in the tanning bed for a long time. In fact, I came across many publications by Dr. Joel Hillhouse, a professor and researcher in clinical psychology at East Tennessee State University.