Episode 331 - Are products with human derived ingredients vegan?

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 an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 331 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and it's a solo episode today. Valerie's gonna be back next time.

On today's show, it's just gonna be me chatting, okay? And answering questions, actually. I mean, I go through a bunch of questions that we hadn't talked about in a while, and we're submitted. If you wanna submit a question, usually you can just record your voice on your iPhone and then send an email to thebeautybrainsatgmail.com, and we put your voice on there. But today, these are all just gonna be questions that were sent in via our...

There's a form in the notes where you can send in a question. And so we got a bunch of questions from people. Let's just hop right into the question. Well, we don't have to hop right into the questions right away. What's going on here?

You know, I spent an inordinate amount of time taking care of these outdoor cats, the Porch Kitty Krew. I had the latest thing is there's this one black puffy cat that I just caught him and got him fixed. And I thought that would make him a little less intimidating to the other cats, but he still hassles the other cats. So anyway, that's lots of drama with cats around. And then, you know, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing too much Yooker too. Yooker is a fun card game, but I do that. And you know, running and stuff. That's pretty much, although you know what I did read today, yesterday, I just finished it yesterday.

It was the book by Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

I thought that was a wonderful book. So if you haven't read it, check it out. Some people had compared it to Catcher in the Rye, which I liked very much when I was a youth. I could see the comparison, but I think it's to me, it's much better, much more enjoyable. The sarcastic wit, it's kind of funny. It's kind of a nice narrative. And it's very well written. And I listened to the audio book by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and she does an excellent job. So if you're looking for a book to read, the 1950s called, it was Sylvia Plass Beljar. Was it in the 50s or maybe it was the 70s? I don't know the year when, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really do enjoy reading a lot of books. I try to read about 70 books a year.

And I not only do I read it, but I listen to a lot of the books, but I do read also, but I count both of them. And I just like books.

I hadn't always liked books, but I developed a love for it and I encourage everyone to do the same.

There is in beauty news, there's a couple of stories, Valerie and I will talk about them, but I saw that Johnson & Johnson is proposed to settle for like $9 billion, all of the claims against it and talc. So it seems to me, they're just trying to make the lawsuit go away and $9 billion, geez, that's a lot. Now, they also don't admit to that their talc is related to cancer. And the evidence I think is on their side, the scientific evidence, but they keep getting juries that award people who have had cancer and blame it on the talc, lots of money. So you could see from a corporation standpoint, they just kind of want to pay to make it go away. We'll see if that happens. It reminds me of back in the late 90s, Dow Corning, who made the silicone for silicone breast implants, they got sued by a bunch of people. They lost to juries, but later on, the science came out that in fact the silicone was not causing the problems that it was purported to cause. And so the company eventually went bigger. But I kind of see this as the same, but it's hard to root for big corporations, but I try to root for what the science is saying.

There was another lawsuit that got thrown out, the L'Oreal, there was a lawsuit against L'Oreal, where a class action lawsuit because they thought L'Oreal was implying that their products were made in France because they're called L'Oreal Paris. And that seemed like a pretty dumb lawsuit anyway, but that's how things are regulated here in the United States.

We don't have regulatory bodies that are really aggressive, but we do have lawyers who look around to come up with lawsuits. And when corporations are faced with lawsuits, they either settle or they fight it in court, but that is one way that prevents their bad behavior in the future. So again, it was kind of a dumb lawsuit. Do people really believe that if a place is named in a brand name like L'Oreal Paris, that, oh, it's all made in Paris?