Will sunscreen prevent tanning? episode 184

Harry 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 questions. I'm Harry Romanowski.

Due to a scheduling conflict, today is gonna be a shortened solo show. But fear not, my regular co-host Valerie will be back next week for a full show answering your beauty questions.

On today's show, I'm gonna be mixing it up a little bit, you know, trying a couple of new segments. I'm gonna do something I'm gonna call kitchen cosmetic segments, which is gonna look at whether a homemade beauty hack is really safe and effective. Then there will be a segment that I call hot topics, in which I'll give you my spin on some current trend in the beauty industry. And of course, we'll also answer a question. These are experimental segments, and they may continue or may not. Well, we'll see how they go.

But first, I wanted to talk to you about The Beauty Brains. Really more specifically about the kinds of questions we can answer, the advice that we can give, and really any kind of a beauty advice you might find on the internet in general. Thankfully, we get a lot of questions here on The Beauty Brains. In fact, we've gotten over 800 in our spreadsheet right at the moment. And I'm happy to have them. I really am. I knew when we started The Beauty Brains that people had a lot of questions about beauty products. That's really what caused us to start The Beauty Brains in the first place. I would be at a party or an event, and someone would find out I'm a cosmetic chemist, and they would just have tons of questions about their beauty products. Of course, we're going to answer as many of the questions that we get as we can, but I think it's important for you to know the types of questions that we can and cannot answer. And this is gonna be generally true of most resources that you have on the internet. So let's start with the types of questions that we can answer. Unsurprisingly, the easiest questions for us to answer are the ones in which you ask about technology and product functionality. For example, questions like, how does a product or technology work? Does a product or technology even work? Or what can I use to solve some of my skin or hair problems? For the most part, we can answer questions like these because there are mostly definitive answers. We can look at the chemicals in the formulas, review some published research, and give a scientific assessment of the mechanisms that have been proposed about how the product works and whether it actually does. But I should mention that for many beauty product technologies, there isn't a lot of published research. Companies try to keep these things secret often, and much of the research that is published is not of high quality. For example, you might have heard about the wonders of bok choy extract, and how it works as well as retinol. But what you probably didn't see in those reports was that this was done on a six-person panel. Now, this is a ridiculously small panel, and while these types of small studies are used for giving direction to the way your research should go, and they're also used for supporting any kind of claims you make in advertising, they shouldn't be substitutes for actual science. This isn't getting to answer a scientific question. It's just giving you a direction. They could have easily taken six other people and not found an effect, and so we don't know where we're at. So small studies should be treated with high skepticism, and these types of things happen a lot in the beauty industry.

Other types of questions that we can answer are ones in which you ask for our view on a specific subject. So questions like, what do you think of this product or technology? Why do you think this certain thing happened in the beauty industry?

What does some beauty product claim mean?

Is this product or technology natural?

Questions like this we can answer because we have some direct experience with using the product, or we've been around the cosmetic industry long enough to have developed an opinion about specific technologies. There actually isn't a lot that changes in the cosmetic industry in terms of technologies. In fact, nearly all the ingredients that are commonly used today were also commonly used 20 or 30 years ago. Now, there are some questions that are a little more difficult to answer because they involve some kind of value judgment. These types of questions, we can't give you definitive answers to, although we can certainly provide opinions. Two of the most common questions like this are ones like, is a product or technology safe? Is a product or technology a good deal, or is it worth buying? Questions about safety and value are difficult because things that I consider safe may not be the same things that you consider safe. Safety is a judgment call. For instance, I think going on a roller coaster is perfectly safe. Other people might think that it's too dangerous and not safe. Neither of us are necessarily right or wrong. It's just a personal preference and a level of risk that you're willing to take. From the standpoints of cosmetics, for example, I think preservatives like parabens and formaldehyde donors are safe. I think the amount of lead that you get in lipsticks from cosmetics is safe. I come to my conclusions based on published toxicology reports and the opinion of professionals and the opinion of professional toxicologists, people who are experts in this subject. But there are organizations, like the Environmental Working Group, and there are beauty brands, like, say, Juice Beauty, who don't agree with toxicologists, and they don't believe those ingredients are safe. They don't really care what toxicologists say or about scientific concepts, like threshold values and doses. They really have come to the conclusion based on, I don't know, reasons, that these things just aren't safe, and no amount of collected data or studies is going to change their mind. Now, I don't think this is a good way to learn the truth about things, but, you know, that's how I look at the world. In truth, I do feel confident to answer questions about product safety, though, because I believe that my values reflect reasonable risks based on available safety data.