Episode 400 - Indoor sunscreen, micellar water, and a baby?

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 cosmetic industry. This is episode 400 I'm your host, Valerie George, and with me today is Perry Romanowski. Hi Perry.

Perry Romanowski (0:27)

Hey Valerie, good to see you again.

Valerie George (0:30)

I can't believe we made it to 400

Perry Romanowski (0:32)

I know, 400 episodes. Well, you and I are like 300

Valerie George (0:36)

235 Yeah, yeah. But I mean, still incredible, the show has made it because without me, without you, we wouldn't be here.

Perry Romanowski (0:45)

I know. And the best episodes really were after episode 166

Valerie George (0:50)

Sorry, Randy. Well, on today's show, it's going to be an amazing show. We had lots of questions that we're going to cover, including how does different water affect the performance of hair products? Do you really need to reapply sunscreen every two hours? Can rinse out conditioner and a deep conditioner or mask be used interchangeably? Does the Avene Makeup Removing Micellar Water really work? And finally, are 20 free or 12 free nail polishes safer but first inane chit chat?

Perry Romanowski (1:19)

Valerie, I'm back from my big trip overseas.

Valerie George (1:22)

How was it?

Perry Romanowski (1:23)

Oh, it was wonderful. I went to Italy and first of all, I crushed it at my talk.

Valerie George (1:31)

That's good.

Perry Romanowski (1:33)

I only say that because at the end, I got a good applause, but maybe that was because I juggled at the end.

Valerie George (1:39)

It's possible. Not many people can juggle or juggle.

Perry Romanowski (1:42)

Yeah. You don't usually expect to see that at the end of a scientific talk. But so I always like to end with something like that, just to ensure that I do get a few cheers. But the talk was fun. It was actually a pretty good conference. And what they do is they take talks that were posters at IFSEC Congress, and then they get turned into papers. So there are presentations. So it was pretty good overall.

Valerie George (2:10)

What was your talk about?

Perry Romanowski (2:12)

My talk was just about the future of formulating and how that's going to impact cosmetic chemists. About whether, you know, is there still going to be a cosmetic chemist job in 10 years, considering that an AI right now, you can, not quite right now, but I could imagine in just a few years, you could write, I want a product that does this and it has these things, and then it would just spit out a formula.

Valerie George (2:42)

I'm sure you could get a formula that way. I think the technology is going to advance, but the challenge is, there are so many nuances that come from knowledge that AI can't find on the internet. It's just not there because you're in a product evaluation salon, analyzing the product, you learn all these things that maybe don't get published, and I think AI relies on user input to get that information. I don't know who's just going to cough up all those trade secrets into some kind of software.

Perry Romanowski (3:17)

I totally agree with you for the most part. There is still, there's still going to always be required some chemists to get some of the nuance. It's just that before you used to hire 10 chemists, whereas now maybe you can hire one or two.

Valerie George (3:35)

I think a lot of facilities will rely on it to make products, but I think the difference between a shampoo and a good shampoo will be in the human.

Perry Romanowski (3:43)

Yeah, yeah. Well, so well, hopefully, I am.

Valerie George (3:47)

And I just find, you know, the more people rely on AI, the less they actually learn. I teach a class at the University of California, Riverside and their extension program, and I can totally tell when people go to ChatGPT to get an answer because it's like, literally, I put the answer on a slide, and I gave you the slides, it's an open book test, and you went to ChatGPT and pulled up a bunch of nonsense that doesn't even make sense.

Perry Romanowski (4:15)

Yeah.

Valerie George (4:15)

What did you learn? You couldn't even learn to go look at the slide that has the answer that you could copy and paste.

Perry Romanowski (4:21)

Absolutely. You are so right that these AIs are trained with bad information. They're trained with a lot of good information, but they're also trained with bad information, and so what you get left is not always accurate, which is always the same. That's the same as true of professional chemists that you work with in the lab. There's a lot of chemists out there that believe stuff that's not right, and then they just pass it on along, and we see that in things quoted in social media stuff all the time. I'm like, that's not right. But so if humans are giving you wrong information, but these AIs come off like they're completely trustworthy. Like a calculator, you would never doubt if you put in something in a calculator that it's not the right answer, right? You'd never doubt it.