Episode 269 - Ask Me Anything - Answers to 20 questions

Perry Romanowski (0:01)

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 an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 269 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today is just me. It's a solo episode today. We had a lot going on in June with vacations and people launching their own new businesses, selling raw materials. And so, I want to make sure to come to you, to come to the Beauty Brains family and to answer some of the questions that we've had building up over the last few months. There is a variety of ways to get questions to us through our social media accounts, of course. Instagram is TheBeautyBrains2018. You can contact us directly through Twitter at TheBeautyBrains and on our Facebook page also. You can also send us an email to TheBeautyBrains at gmail.com. Ideally, you record your voice on there and you send us a voice message, but we take emails too. But the questions I'm answering today came to us through our form. The form is sent in the show notes, and it's just another place where you can get your questions answered. And these are the ones I like lowest priority for me. So I'm going to go through and answer as many of these as I can. But before I get to the questions, we usually do some chit chat. I don't have much to chit chat. I went on a little trip to Detroit, which was nice. Oh, well, of course, you might be wanting to know about any porch kitty updates. Porch kitty, which is the stray cat that kind of visits my house and outside I feed it. I saw something incredibly new today. Porch kitty has a porch kitty kitty. So it was with a little kitten, little black kitten with the little white mitten paws. Very cute, very shy though, because when I went outside to feed the cats, the little kitten just disappeared. And so now his new name is Blur. All right, that's enough chit chat of just a guy idly sitting in his closet or his wife's walk-in closet talking about stray cats. Why don't we get on with the beauty questions?

First question comes to us from Alice. Alice says, Is there any evidence that one ingredient essences common to Asian beauty, specifically galactomyces firmate filtrate, mugwort and the hyaluronic cordata are effective on skin concerns like acne, so mugwort and cordata, and skin brightening?

No, at least not scientifically controlled evidence, at least evidence that's convincing enough to get them approved as drug actives. Both anti-acne and skin brightening products would be drugs, those would be, drug actives would be required for those types of products, and none of these are approved as drug actives, and I didn't see any evidence in the peer-reviewed literature that would suggest they're going to be actives anytime soon. She also had, is propolis a viable ingredient for the treatment of acne? Many K-Beauty products feature this ingredient and indicate that it may be healing for acne.

Well, Alice, no. I wouldn't have faith that propolis would help much against acne. Propolis is generally known as the B-glue, which refers to some resinous substance accumulated by the bees from different types of plants. Now, one study that is referred to, looking at, so I was looking at research, and the researchers, the review paper, I said, oh, it's been proven effective for acne. Well, then I looked at that study as far as acne goes, and this is what they study. It was an ethanol extraction of propolis, and it showed that it did help against acne. However, the researchers compared that ethanol extraction versus just giving people an ethanol solution, and they found in this particular study that it had some effect. But this isn't the kind of thing that you would really want to test. This just says, okay, if I put alcohol on someone's face or I put alcohol and propolis on someone's face, is there going to be any anti-acne effect?

And they found there was some effect that way. But if you're looking as a consumer for treatments against acne, that's not what you care about. To prove that something, what you would care about, you would want them to test it against something known to have an effect, like benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid. I'm highly skeptical that you're going to see any extra benefit from this ingredient over proven actives like those. So, you know, maybe, but probably not.

Shyla says, is there a great leave-in treatment for my thick, coarse hair? I really do not like putting heat like flat iron on my hair. I'm 63 if that makes any difference, which I'm not sure if it does. I do color my hair also. Well, as far as things go, to this question, age does not really make much difference when it comes to hair. Now, there may be some slight amino acid composition differences, and some of the sebum that you produce is going to be reduced in older hair. But as long as you're using a conditioner every day or standard hair care products, there's not really going to be significant differences between younger and older hair.