What does Mandelic Acid do in Deodorants – The Beauty Brains solo

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 scientists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today, well, I'm going to do a solo show today. Valerie is off traveling around Europe, Sarah Bellum is swamped at the work project, and Randy, well, I couldn't coax him out of retirement.

Not to worry, you've sent in a lot of questions, and I'm going to answer some of them today. On the show today, we're going to be answering questions about thinning hair and the research going on in that area, whether cupping is an effective facial treatment, which sunscreen ingredients block UVA, and why mandelic acid is used in some deodorants.

Now, since this is a solo show today, I thought I'd take a little time to talk about The Beauty Brains and why we continue to do this.

We started The Beauty Brains mostly because it sounded like a fun project, and there seemed to be an interest. Actually, when I was at parties, and people would learn that I was a cosmetic chemist, they'd have all kinds of questions, questions about the beauty products, what worked, what was fake, what should they use. And it was really fun answering these questions. It was pretty rare that a consumer would get a chance to speak directly to the scientists who make the beauty products. And if you can explain science in sort of a fundamental, easy, understandable way, people find it very interesting. Now, back when Randy and I started The Beauty Brains, there really weren't a lot of ways for consumers to talk directly to scientists. Almost all the information you got was from beauty product marketers. This was in the form of direct advertising, or through salon stylists who were trained by beauty marketers, or through magazines whose editors were also informed by beauty product marketers. Everyone that was giving people information about beauty products seemed somehow to benefit from getting consumers to believe certain things about their product. And these things are often exaggerations and sometimes downright lies.

And so we started The Beauty Brains, and it was fun. I really like the beauty product industry. I like the products, the challenges, the questions. And as a scientist, it's a really great industry to get into, or at least it's a really great job to do. The thing about being a scientist, a lot of research scientists, they work in labs, and they work on little tiny pieces of bigger projects. And a lot of the stuff that you do every day doesn't really have an impact directly on consumers or on people's lives. It might help your company out or something like that. But being a residual chemist at an agricultural firm where you look at the analysis of samples, it's much less impactful than being a cosmetic chemist where you actually create products that people use every day. I tell you, it's so satisfying to go down and walk down an aisle of a store and see a beauty product and know that I created that formula. It's very cool. Now, the internet has changed a lot since we started doing The Beauty Brains. In the early days of doing this, we started back in about 2006, there weren't a lot of resources for consumers to get reliable beauty product information. Now, don't get me wrong, there were beauty bloggers back then, and most big brands had websites. But back then, there wasn't social media, there wasn't Pinterest or Instagram or, jeez, even Facebook, I don't think, was generally available. And now, of course, there are lots of resources for information. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of nonsense that's published. It seems that anybody can publish anything about anything on the internet. And that's a great thing, but it's also a troubling thing, because now you, as a consumer, you don't know what's real and what's fake. There's a lot out there that is misleading and leading you to maybe buy bad products or making bad purchasing decisions. The cosmetic marketers are out there in force to convince you that their next latest launch is the greatest product introduction of all time and it's gonna change your life, or that it's safer for the environment or safer for you, and that it's all new. And they've even employed social media celebrities to help get their message out there. The internet continues to be a great place to get real information, but it's also become a pretty effective marketing tool too. It's really hard for consumers to know what's true, what's real, and that's why we continue to do The Beauty Brains and to bring you information. We keep doing The Beauty Brains because we don't want you to waste your time, waste your money on products that don't actually work. We also don't want you to be doing things that are dangerous or bad for your skin. Some of the things I see on YouTube or on discussions board is just downright scary, and there's stuff I want to say that's like, don't do that, that's terrible.