Will silicone ruin a coconut oil hair treatment? Episode 133

Lizzy Klein (0:00)

You're listening to The Beauty Brains, where real scientists answer your beauty questions. And now, here's Randi and Perry.

Randy Schuller (0:19)

Hey, everybody, welcome to this show. Welcome to the 133rd episode of The Beauty Brains Show. I am cosmetic chemist Randy Schuller, and I am joined, as always, by my partner, Perry Romanowski.

Perry Romanowski (0:30)

Hey, Randy, it's good to be back.

Randy Schuller (0:33)

It's good to be back. And today we're back with a couple of beauty science news stories, and then we're going to answer some questions. We're going to talk about a magic hair treatment. We're going to explain how enzyme hair developers work, or don't work.

And then we're going to talk about silicone and coconut oil, and whether or not they play nicely together.

So we'll get to all that in a little bit, but first I wanted to do a quick flashback to last week, I think it was. Remember we answered a sunscreen question that came to us from Eva. Now, that was actually posted in the notes on our show on sunscreen shaming. Remember that? That was back in episode 85 The people were being shamed out of using sunscreen. You remember that?

Perry Romanowski (1:24)

Yeah, yeah.

Randy Schuller (1:25)

If you guys haven't heard that, go back and listen to episode 85 But it got me thinking that this idea of shaming is all over the place now. Have you seen it? There's fat shaming where people are shamed because of their body weight.

Perry Romanowski (1:40)

Of course, of course.

Randy Schuller (1:41)

Body shaming for other body image issues. Slut shaming, I've seen show up in a couple of places.

Perry Romanowski (1:49)

I've heard of slut shaming, sure.

Randy Schuller (1:50)

I even saw a recent story about drink shaming, where a barista at Starbucks got in trouble for writing, diabetes, here I come, on somebody's super high caloric Starbucks drink. They were drink shaming themselves. So if you're critical of someone for just about any reason, you're seen as shaming them, I guess. That's what this is.

Perry Romanowski (2:12)

And it's so much easier to do these days with social media.

Randy Schuller (2:16)

For sure, yeah.

But it occurs to me that that's exactly what we do when we bash all these pseudoscientific pieces of information we see on other beauty blogs or in magazines or on product claims or whatever, right? I mean, we're really shaming them.

Perry Romanowski (2:34)

Well, we do criticize them, certainly.

Randy Schuller (2:37)

So I came up for a name for what we do.

Perry Romanowski (2:40)

Oh, really?

Randy Schuller (2:41)

Okay. You ready for this? I call it bullsh** shaming.

So if you're out there doing beauty bullsh**, we will shame you. I'm warning you right now.

Perry Romanowski (2:53)

I should say, though, that we're doing this for good, not to make people feel bad.

Randy Schuller (2:57)

No, we took an oath only to use our powers for good.

Perry Romanowski (3:02)

Exactly. We're like Spider-Man.

Randy Schuller (3:04)

There you go.

Perry Romanowski (3:05)

Great responsibility comes great powers.

Randy Schuller (3:07)

Three minutes into the podcast before you bring up superheroes.

Perry Romanowski (3:10)

Where to go?

Randy Schuller (3:12)

Well, why don't we move right along into our first segment, which is, as always, Beauty Science News.

Perry Romanowski (3:19)

All right. Why don't I get the first story?

Well, you know, Randy, it's getting tougher and tougher to be a marketer of beauty products, especially in this age of social media.

It used to be that, you know, if a consumer used your product and they were unhappy about it, they might send a letter to your company or complain to the store, right? In fact, we spent many a day being amused by the incoming consumer complaint letters. But nowadays, you know, you know what people do nowadays? They don't send letters. No. They take pictures of themselves and they post rants about it on social media.

Randy Schuller (3:56)

Of course.

Perry Romanowski (3:57)

And this is exactly what led to like lawsuits from, you know, we recently talked about the EOS lip balm lawsuit and the when haircare lawsuits. And now the people who make dry shampoo are under fire, according to this story. It turns out a Facebook post has gone viral in which a UK consumer claims that her batiste dry shampoo caused blisters and sores on her scalp, which eventually led to widespread hair loss. And she claims to have visited her doctor who told her that she had triangular alopecia and would need a scalp biopsy. Oh, wow.

Yeah, and she... So he told her to stop using hair products, and so she stopped using the dry shampoo, and then her blisters and sores were gone after six weeks of not using the product. So this suggested to her that it was the dry shampoo that caused it. In fact, she wrote, and she posted a picture of her hair that had fallen out, and she wrote, Dry shampoo caused me to have this bald patch on my head and have a terrible scalp for ages. Now, the post was shared by over 30,000 times, and it received a lot of press, even, you know, that's how I found it, right?