Mushrooms, diamond dust and dark circle serums - Episode 402

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 402 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today is nobody. Just a solo episode here today. Valerie, of course, is off, well, taking care of her baby. She actually had a baby boy, and perhaps we'll get more details about that when she returns early next month. No doubt, she's taking some time for the baby. Apparently, babies take some work. But the work goes on here at Beauty Brains Central. And on today's show, we're going to cover lots of questions, including are the IS Clinical Hydra Cool products special? What do we think of the anti-aging effectiveness of the Pavise sunscreen? What ingredients might be responsible for the great results in a conditioner? And what can be done about under-eye dark circles? And finally, how do you practice sun safety diligently? I hope you do it more diligently than me. I'm not very good at it, but I could talk about it. All right, you know, this is normally where we do chit chat. And of course, you know, I interact with Valerie, but Valerie's not here. In fact, the only one here is my cat Teddy. And hopefully, I had to shut the door because he kept jumping on my lap. It's not the best thing to try to podcast and pay attention while, you know, you have a cat. But, you know, he's doing good. All the outdoor kitties are all doing well. It's nice summer here in Chicago. So they just mostly lounge around underneath bushes and things. But, you know, summer does make me go outside a bit more. You know, I go out to do my running and my leg is still kind of gimp-y, but seems to be getting better. So maybe I don't need that physical therapy after all. We'll see.

I guess, you know, I'm terrible at making doctor appointments. I don't have anything against the doctor. I'd be perfectly happy to go. It's the appointment part. You know, you have to call people or figure it out online. It's all very complicated. I helped him. You know, I need a personal assistant to do this for me. Otherwise it doesn't get done. But you know, the truth is, it does remind me of realities about any condition, whether it's cosmetic or health related. You know, there are three things that can happen with any kind of treatment that you do. First, things could get better. So you do a treatment, it gets better. Another thing that could happen is it could get worse. You do a treatment and it keeps getting worse. And then the third thing that can happen is nothing. It stays exactly the same. You do the treatment and it stays the same. So get better, get worse, stay the same. Those are the three things that can happen with any health condition or any beauty condition, wrinkles or the way you look or dandruff or whatever. But you know what? Whether you do a treatment or not, those same three things can happen. So if you do nothing, it can get better and get worse or it could stay the same. And for now, I guess my doing nothing for my leg is it's getting better. So do I need to do anything?

I don't know. I probably should. Alright, normally we would talk about the news and I thought I'd do something a little different since Solo Show. Why not? I'll just do a quick, let me just talk about a topic that's been on my mind a bit and I haven't really talked about it recently. So let's talk about natural and organic products. I get these in my inbox all the time, products talking about how organic or natural they are. And you know, honestly, as a chemist, it kind of bugs me because I'm a little bit tired of watching smart consumers get sucked in by these fancy marketing stories, the packaging, the green leaves on the label, and this promise that a natural product is better. And by implication, anything that's synthetic is not better. You know, and here's a spoiler alert. Natural is not better. Cosmetics are not natural. You can't go out and grow yourself a skin lotion. You just can't. There's no skin lotion plant. No, it's not natural. You have to gather up the materials, take them into a laboratory, and mix them together in the right proportions to create a lotion that you're going to use. No natural plant is going to do that for you. There isn't that. The closest you can get to a real natural product would be something like coconut oil, where, you know, the coconut makes it, you squeeze it out of the oil, out of the plant, and you got that oil. That's it. Just that one ingredient. I mean, coconut milk, something like that. So things that plants produce, but plants don't produce lipstick and they don't produce moisturizers and they don't produce cleansers. There's just, there's nothing natural about cosmetics. You see, they try to use that natural terms in the same way that food. They try to do natural for food. And for food, there is natural. You can go out and grab a banana off a tree and eat it because it was naturally grown. It's food. It's plants. That's what they grow.