Episode 259 - Are parabens safe for cosmetics?

Valerie George (0:00)

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

Welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetics industry. This is episode 259 I'm your host, Valerie George, and with me today is George. I mean, Randy. I mean, Perry Romanowski. Hi, Perry.

Perry Romanowski (0:31)

Boy, it's amazing how many different names we both can get.

Valerie George (0:35)

Yeah, most recently, I'm Valerie and you're George, which is pretty cool, me and me. Anyway, on today's show, we're going to cover a little bit of Beauty Science News, a recall, and it's a rant episode.

Perry Romanowski (0:49)

Yay, which means we're just going to cover one question. It's okay, we just gave you 20 questions last week.

Valerie George (0:57)

It's not the quantity, it's the quality.

Perry Romanowski (0:59)

Indeed, it is indeed. But before we get into that, Valerie, you got any inane chit chat for us?

Valerie George (1:07)

Well, it's March, and I'm wearing a tank top and shorts. It's 80 degrees in LA, pretty nice.

Perry Romanowski (1:14)

That is nice.

Someday I've got to move to LA. Well, I do have some news actually. I was fostering those cats, and then the one cat had to get his eye removed because he had cancer in his eye.

Valerie George (1:26)

Did I tell you that? How's he doing?

Perry Romanowski (1:29)

He is good. He's going to get the cone off tomorrow or something like that. Or two days. Anyway, they've also got adopted, so I'm going to have them for two more weeks and they got adopted.

Well, I know we did like a little Zoom interview, and the lady, she wanted the cats, and she got to see he had the one eye and everything. She's good with it.

So that's good or bad. It's the life of fostering. It's very difficult.

Valerie George (2:03)

You saw that one of our listeners said you should get a catio, which is a patio for cats. Did you see that?

Perry Romanowski (2:12)

I did see it. Yes. I should set that up for the porch kitty who still comes around, whose that's our local stray who I feed.

Valerie George (2:22)

Yeah. That's so sweet.

Yeah. So as you guys know, Perry is a member of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists in the Midwest Chapter, and I'm the California Chapter, but I'm going to be virtually visiting Perry later this month in a few weeks. Right, Perry?

Perry Romanowski (2:40)

Yeah. Looking forward to that. You're doing a talk for the Midwest Chapter on hair dye, hair blonde. Yeah.

Valerie George (2:48)

The science of hair color, blondeing, and I wanted to call it bonding, but Marcy was like, you should call it repair. So basically, yeah, hair color chemistry, blondeing chemistry, and how to repair the hair. I don't know if any of you will call it the public or our listeners can attend. I know it's an intimate online event, but I'll actually put a link to it.

Perry Romanowski (3:12)

Yeah, anybody can attend. It's just not free because we got to pay the big bucks when we're getting the big speakers like Valerie.

Valerie George (3:20)

I'm speaking for free just because I love it. But one of my favorite topics and the woman organizing it was so worried that I should be like, are you going to be able to fill up 40 to 50 minutes for this talk? I was like, no, honey, I got to turn my presentation down. It's like I have 40 to 50 hours of content.

Perry Romanowski (3:42)

Yeah, indeed.

I had no doubt there. So I'm looking forward to that. That'll be a good event. We'll put a link in the show notes if anyone wants to attend.

Valerie George (3:51)

All right.

And I also thought it was funny that this week, you and I had the same Beauty Science News question. So let's head on over to Beauty Science News.

Perry Romanowski (4:01)

That's right. Cue the music!

All right, Valerie, since we did stumble into the same one, you want to say what it was?

Valerie George (4:14)

Yeah, well, basically, Crest is in hot water. They are getting sued in a lawsuit over deceptive marketing claims for their charcoal toothpaste, which I just thought was so funny because charcoal's like so hot right now, and yet they are being sued.

Perry Romanowski (4:37)

Isn't that whole, say yes to, there was a say yes to Carrots, they were originally say yes to Carrots, but then they were say yes to charcoal. But they didn't get sued.