Sun Bum - Cosmetic Ingredients - and more questions answered - Episode 278

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 278 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and this is going to be a solo show today. Bathory is off traveling, and we weren't able to sync up our schedules, so I thought I would give you an episode where I answer some questions that have been sent in, but we just haven't got a chance to get around to them. And there's a lot of great questions here, a veritable smorgasbord of questions and topics. So let's get started on that. Valerie will be back for our next episode, and we got a lot of great questions there, lots from our patrons. But these questions come to us from our survey sheet that's in our show notes. So if you had a question and sent it in, these are the types of questions we don't normally get to on a high priority level. But I thought, hey, let me, if I'm going to do a solo show, let me just see what the people want to hear about. And I'm going to answer those questions. And we got a lot of great questions, hair care, skincare, you name it. And a lot of questions that we answered previously. So I will talk about where you can get answers, what episodes those answers were on.

First, do I have any chit chat? I was on a trip to Florida. I attended the Florida Sunscreen Symposium, which was great, great event.

But you know, something happened to me there. I actually, I fell down onto concrete and I hit my elbow. And now I have this spongy elbow. And I'm assuming it's gonna go away. It doesn't hurt or anything. It's just really spongy.

So, probably should go to the doctor on that. I don't know, it doesn't hurt. But it is very spongy still. And that's a week later. So I'm probably doing that. Any doctors out there know what a spongy elbow is?

Also, I would like to thank Edwina, listener Edwina. She sent in some advice about taking care of Porchkitty. And actually a lot of the advice that she gave are things that I'm already doing. And she did say that usually the first litter of a cat is very small, one to three. In fact, Porchkitty first had three kittens. One is still around. The other two seem to have gone. She does look a little thicker this time. So I hope she doesn't have that many more kittens. But once she has these kittens, I'm going to catch her and then we're going to spade her. And hopefully she'll at least stop having kittens. All right, that's the Porchkitty update. That's the Chit Chat. But let's get on to these questions.

First question comes to us from Zamzam. They ask, is PPG9 a humectant or a film former? And if so, does it rinse off?

Great question. PPG9 is actually a polymer of propylene glycol. But it works very much the same way. It is a humectant. So it's not actually a film former. It just doesn't have a big enough molecular weight to create the films that you normally find with polymers. It's used commonly in cosmetic formulas, mostly as a solvent or a humectant.

It gives some, you know, affects the feel, so it can give you even an emollient effect. But it attracts water. It's water soluble. So in any rinse off product, it just rinses away. In a leave-on product, it could function more as a humectant ingredient and it can help with the flexibility of say hair or something like that. So that's what it is. It is not a film former. It is a humectant.

Next question comes to us from Renata. She says, I've never understood the concept of combing hair only when it's dry since I have very thick curly hair. And that's not a good option for me. So how can I avoid damage when combing or styling my hair? Thank you.

Well, Renata, here is the basic notion of why people give that advice. Wet hair actually breaks more easily than dry hair. One way to demonstrate this is with a device that can pull the hair fibers or the hair tresses and then measure the amount of force that is required to break the hair. And it turns out in a test like this, it takes more force, a lot more force, to break a dry fiber than it does to break a wet one. And the relationship is approximately linear. So wetter hair tends to break more easily than drier hair. In fact, looking at the paper that I was looking at, it was about, say, it takes 50 units to break wet hair and it takes 250 units to break dry hair. So it's dry hair is like five times stronger than wet hair.