Do grey covering shampoos work and other beauty questions? Episode 249

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 product questions and give you a unique look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 249 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today is Valerie George. Hello, Valerie.

Valerie George (0:31)

Happy New Year.

Perry Romanowski (0:32)

To you, too. I see you're still in your pajamas, huh?

Valerie George (0:38)

A late day at work, I had to change back into something comfy.

Perry Romanowski (0:42)

There you go. Well, on today's show, we're going to be answering questions like how do gray color-reducing shampoos work? Is it okay to spray perfume on your hair to get it to stop smelling?

Is your foundation making your face turn orange? And can you use body wash as a replacement for hand soap?

Valerie George (0:59)

Interesting.

Perry Romanowski (1:00)

But first, let's get to some of that inane chit chat we're so famous for. Welcome to the New Year's, first time I've talked to you all year.

Valerie George (1:07)

Well, we're not too far in, so I don't know if that's impressive or not. But yeah, it is our first time talking. And I think what I love most about me and you, one of the things I love most is that we're so goal oriented. And I think both for the Beauty Brains and for ourselves, we have some big goals this year, right?

Perry Romanowski (1:26)

Absolutely. Every year, I put together my new spreadsheet, which lists all of my goals, and I use the spreadsheet for tracking. I've been doing this since 2003

So I have this really long spreadsheet of stuff.

But I remember last year, you had a goal to read 52 books. How'd you do on that?

Valerie George (1:44)

You know, I did not get to it, and I got pretty far. I read 26 non-fiction books, which I feel pretty good about getting halfway there. But as you know, I have a new venture that I'm starting in addition to the full-time work that I do.

And I did read a lot of trashy novels about this detective named Stephanie Plumb. So I'm a little embarrassed to admit those. So I didn't post about those, but I didn't get to 52

But I did a lot of audio books, did the trashy books, and did 26 non-fiction books. But maybe this year I'll get there. I don't know.

Perry Romanowski (2:24)

Yeah.

Last year, I got to 75 books, so I was only going for 52 But this year, I upped my goal to 70

Valerie George (2:32)

Wow.

Perry Romanowski (2:32)

We'll see how that goes.

Valerie George (2:34)

Yeah.

Perry Romanowski (2:35)

And actually, this book reading project I've been doing since 2005, which is I'm trying to read the 150 greatest books of all time. Because when I started the project, I had only read 14 of them, and now I only have 13 left to read.

Valerie George (2:53)

Oh, congratulations.

Perry Romanowski (2:56)

But I still have some long ones left, including Ulysses and the Gulag Archipelago. So I got some work to do.

Valerie George (3:04)

Well, I have read Ulysses, so at least I can check that one off my list.

Perry Romanowski (3:08)

Indeed, indeed. But for The Beauty Brains, we've got some goals too. I'd love to... Hopefully this year we're going to update our website.

We haven't had an update on that in a while, so it's a little stale.

But that'll be coming. I'm hoping we can improve our Patreon page, and of course have more of those Patreon-exclusive events. Yeah. For our subscribers. And of course we always have the goal of weekly episodes. You know, I was looking at...

Valerie George (3:42)

I would love to get one episode a week, yeah.

Perry Romanowski (3:46)

Well, I was looking at... Last year we did 44 episodes, but the year before we did 35, so we're getting better.

Valerie George (3:55)

Yeah, it does take a lot of work, as we've discussed before. Like, we just don't come on always and blindly answer things. We really do take a lot of time to look and research, and sometimes I'll have 23 different tabs open with different journal articles that I'm trying to go through just to make sure I have all the information to answer a question.

And we do a lot of other stuff with our time as well, so we try to keep up and try to answer everyone's questions, but it is tough.

Perry Romanowski (4:27)

It is amazing about how you can go down a rabbit hole for a single question, which seems kind of obvious, but things get a little more complicated.