Is Ventner's Daughter Serum worth the price? Episode 229

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 229 I'm your host, Harry Romanoski, and it's a solo episode today. Valerie will be back next week, but today you'll just have me. Now, since it is a solo show, I'm going to answer a few audio questions. And we had them for a little while, but they just haven't gotten to them. And then there's also a question from social media that I'm going to answer. And these include, should which hazel be rinsed off after using? Is Ventner's Daughter Serum worth the price? And do I really need 10% niacinamide formulas? And I've got a couple of rants that I've been itching to get off my mind. Since it's a solo show, I get to rant.

Hopefully they're going to give you some insight into the cosmetic industry that will actually help make you a smarter shopper. And so they aren't just me ranting. It actually could be useful information. So why don't we start with the beauty news story that really got me fired up this week. The Beauty News Story The story came from the Cosmetics Design website and the title was Vegan Claim on the Rise in Color Cosmetics. Now, I saw this in Cosmetics Design and it said that vegan claims on color cosmetics was the third most popular claim in this category. And I said to myself, how can that be? I mean, color cosmetics, they're all vegan. I just don't understand it. It doesn't make any sense. And I'm going to tell you why.

I mean, first, I want to preface this whole discussion by saying that I'm not a vegan. Now, although I do believe philosophically that being vegetarian is a morally superior way, you know, killing animals to eat them seems cruel. Certainly factory farming is cruel. I mean, on an evolutionary path, we are really just distant cousins of all animals and mammals, especially.

And raising of animals really contributes a lot to global warming.

So there are very good philosophical reasons to be a vegetarian and vegan. However, just because I can believe in something philosophically doesn't mean that I can live my life that way. I just don't have a lifestyle set up that can get me to live up to my philosophical ideals. And that's just how it is.

You know, this is true of a lot of people, I hope, I imagine. It's hard to live up to your moral ideals.

But having said all of that, let's get back to vegan cosmetics.

Here's what I don't understand. Why is this even a thing? The vast majority of cosmetics are vegan, and they have been for actually a pretty long time. In the 1990s, I worked as a formulator on the VO5 and the Tressamay brands, or I started then. Now, those formulas were all vegan, with the exception of one SKU, the VO5 Extra Body Shampoo, that had a hydrolyzed protein in it, and it might have been hydrolyzed collagen. And whenever you see hydrolyzed collagen, it almost always is from some sort of animal source. It's a byproduct of the meat processing industry. Anyway, after mad cow disease, which struck, it was a big news probably 1996, 1997, the late 90s anyway, we went through and we changed out all of the animal derived proteins, the hydrolyzed proteins from our formulas, and we just got rid of them. People were starting to tire of animal derivatives in products, and we moved as many of our formulas as we could in the 1990s. So the products that I worked on, with a few exceptions I'll talk about, they were all vegan and color cosmetics are certainly vegan unless they're using some of the exception ingredients. So the primary exceptions, I mean, the sources of bigger use of animal ingredients in cosmetics includes lanolin-based ingredients and beeswax.

Lanolin comes from sheep's wool and, you know, it doesn't really harm animals when you use it, when we get it. I mean, essentially it's, you just take the, you know, essentially lanolin is like the oil that is in our own hair. Our own hair produces sebum and that's the kind of thing that lambs, or sheep, I'm sorry, they produce this waxy coating that goes on their fur. And to get it, you know, essentially you just wash the wool. Now beeswax is obtained from taking honeycombs from bees and then turning that into an ingredient. And I suppose, you know, for some people, taking a bee's house or their source of food can be looked at as cruel.