when people are imposing rules it's really a reflection of them
and not the reality of what skincare products do
it's Michelle of lab muffin beauty science chemistry PhD cosmetic chemist and person
who is quite non-confrontational in real life but if you get me on a rant I will do a rant
I asked for your hot takes and unpopular opinions
about skincare and beauty and today I'm going to go through a few more of these
the demonization of parabens was deliberate soF products would go
bad faster so people would buy them more often
alright so a bit of background in case you don't know parabens are preservatives
they've been really demonized and they were actually one of the first
ingredients to really be demonized by clean beauty before it was called clean beauty
clean beauty only really became a thing around maybe 2016 before that
it was mostly just some combination of natural beauty or be careful of
ingredients there wasn't really a nice marketable name for it
there was this widely publicized study in 2004 that found parabens in breast cancer tissue and
this was all over the media so the study itself they found the parabens and breast cancer tissue
but they didn't also look for parabens in regular breast tissue plus it also found parabens in the
blank samples that didn't contain any tissue at all so it didn't really tell you anything
except maybe parabens are so common that they are in the dishwashing detergent that labs use
but of course the corrections and all the subtlety didn't spread as far as this big
scaremongering story and this is really common with misinformation it's something
that science communicators who debunk a lot of misinformation on social media have to deal with
a lot within skin care we've seen this with things like benzene and reef safe sunscreen
parabens are really effective preservatives but it was too late people were already scared of it
and so these days you see paraben-free even from really non-clean brands because consumers will
ask about it so yeah parabens are really effective so products do tend to go bad faster if they use
less effective preservatives and I have heard this theory from some cosmetic chemists in the
industry so this is like I guess a legitimate conspiracy theory but there is a similar theory
which is much less of conspiracy and this is much more mainstream opinion amongst cosmetic
chemists not the ones who promote clean beauty because yes there are a bunch of clean cosmetic
chemists and cosmetic scientists it's pretty accepted that clean beauty marketing makes
people throw away their products out of fear and they buy new ones and then after they try the
new ones and they don't like them they just end up going back to their old products so overall
there's just more product going into the bin rather than being used there's more money being
funneled into the beauty industry consumption is higher the wheels of capitalism keep turning
we've seen this recently with not so pretty there were all these tiktoks of people throwing
all their stuff in the bin fear is just a really powerful motivator for people to act
on things especially with things like cancer and potential harm to your unborn children this
sort of fear-based marketing really taps into that sort of reptile brain of ours that evolved
very early on and it's just a sort of instinct that we can't deal with very rationally so yeah
to no one's surprise if you've seen a bit of my content I do think this is
really unethical marketing also not using parabens means that a lot of
brands are now using less effective preservatives which means they need
a high concentration to keep their product free from bacteria and mould for long enough
using higher concentrations usually means that you end up with more irritancy because
you've just got more preservatives in there and preservatives do tend to be
somewhat irritating because they are meant to kill microbes also parabens
have really low allergenicity very few people develop allergies to them and the
newer preservatives that are replacing them do tend to cause higher rates of allergy
everyone gets Botox secretly and pretends it's skin care
I'm not sure what they mean by everyone I think with celebrities who have skincare
lines this is definitely true in terms of influencers I think it really depends
so personally I've only had botox in my jaw once for that jaw slimming effect and
it was really interesting but in the end I realized it wasn't really worth it for
me I quite like the shape of my face and a lot of people actually said I looked worse
with the slim jaw I've had some laser treatments I had a series of picosure
treatments last year there were three of them and I did a video on those I've also
had some chemical peels but I don't really have any sort of regular treatment regimen
one of the reasons I don't really go for these sorts of regular treatments is because getting
to appointments for me is a big issue just seems like a big chore and I think part of
that is because I do have ADHD so anything that requires regular maintenance is just probably
not going to be a great solution for me I've accepted this as part of who I am
so for example when I got my hair bleached I made sure I got blended roots to make sure I could
do everything at home I wouldn't have to go the hairdresser more than once every two years this
is one of my big concerns with fillers anything thing where it's hard to go back and I have
to keep on keeping it up is just kind of scary to me because I know my own personality limits
botox is less scary to me because if you stop doing it then you just kind of end up
back where you were you just have muscles again but botox resistance does worry me a bit so I
guess I'm not really rushing to do it I do have microbladed eyebrows as well and I don't know
maybe I'll do a video about all my procedures at some point and what I thought of them
but I think it's also not fair to compare different people and what
treatments they've had done though there are things like genetics which means that
people age very differently so everyone has a different risk and reward ratio I'm sure if I
was in a different position I might have a different approach if I had a lot more sun
exposure when I was younger for example if I didn't have this baby face Asian thing going
on where it's actually been kind of annoying because for a lot of my life people didn't
really take me seriously because I looked too young and inexperienced maybe if I was
in a job where looking a certain way was really important then I might be doing more treatments
I guess with this job being on camera in front of a lot of people it is and isn't
important I kind of don't want to get too much done as well because I do feel like
it's good to have people who look their age and don't have that many treatments done in
the public eye but yeah that attitude might change in five to ten years who
knows people change I will change but I will be telling everyone about everything
I get done though because I think it is really valuable info to have online
just because a product toner serum mist isn't essential doesn't mean you can't use it
I 100% agree with this different people want different things out of
their skincare routine and products I feel quite strongly about this
I feel like we should really treat skin care more like food some people love food they need
flavours they need variety and they're willing to go out of their way and pay a lot more for that
on the other hand some people are happy eating exactly the same thing every day and they just
see food as a form of fuel and then at the very extreme you have people who like drink Soylent
I think both sorts of approaches can be healthy well maybe not the soylent people
I feel like they're probably missing a whole bunch of micronutrients that we
just haven't really researched enough so I think skincare should be the same it's
possible to approach skin care from either direction and be doing good for your skin
and I think believing either of these approaches is the correct one is really
imposing a value judgment and that isn't really supported by any sort of science
there was another opinion that was related which was I think people can
get nerdy about skin care slash makeup as a way to make it feel less vain I think this
is the case for some people and maybe they get judgy and don't like it when
people like the more frivolous things in skin care like nice packaging and
that whole sensorial experience of having a pleasant fragrance and having a nice texture
and I think that just comes from their own hang-ups and also the particular products
named here toner serum mist these are actually reasonably essential in that these products do
usually contain moisturizing ingredients and so really it's just moisturizer in a different
texture like most of the time I could use a toner instead of a moisturizer and get
the same effect since I have pretty oily skin yeah I am a big fan of this there are no real
rules in skin care philosophy and I think a lot of the time when people are imposing
rules it's really a reflection of them and not the reality of what skincare products do
every product should have expiry dates clearly labeled regardless of shelf life
I would like this I am super forgetful and I have to try out a lot of products
I don't remember when I opened stuff and even before my blog I was like
this I would just forget when things were opened and I'd put stuff away and
not see it and then just forget to use it for months or maybe possibly years
but at the same time I know that the shelf life printed on a product is not super strict it does
indicate how long something is most likely to be safe for but at the end of the day it is just an
estimate most brands work out their shelf life by using accelerated stability testing and then they
release the product before leaving that product on the shelf for the amount of time so a lot of
the time the shelf life is like two or three years they don't actually keep that at room temperature
for two or three years whatever it says before releasing the product well releasing lots and
lots of bottles of that product with that shelf life attached so accelerated stability testing
is where you heat up the product and that allows you to sort of estimate what happens for a longer
time at a lower temperature so for example two months at 40 degrees is approximately equivalent
to 16 months at 20 degrees that's all Celsius because I live in a country that has real numbers
the reason brands do this instead of doing like real-time testing is because if you
do real-time testing then you have to develop a product two or three years in
advance which means that you are going to to miss whatever trend is coming out
the problem with this is that it doesn't catch everything it mostly just shows you
what happens in terms of texture changes there are a lot of things that don't get
caught I'm sure you've seen it on social media when people are complaining that
their product has like little bits of brown crud at the bottom after a while
if ingredients are crystallizing out if there's like really weird texture changes
a lot of the time the accelerated testing has been
done and yeah the real time what happens at room temperature was just not the same
and it's not like a product is like Cinderella's Carriage it's not like a switch happens when the
clock ticks over and the product goes immediately from great to bad it's usually more of like a
gradual decay curve for most things so yeah expiry dates are really just a guesstimate
and so I do tend to use things a little after the expiry sometimes if it's like a lower risk product
but I do think having the expiry date would be really useful for me when I
go and cull my products and I realize I don't know some something expired three
years ago and I should really let go of it and stop being such a hoarder
having perfect skin won't make you look 30 at 50
this I think is very true your skin is just one part of what changes as you age it's sort of
like the covering there's also lots of changes below the skin things like your muscles change
your bone the fat the distribution of all that changes as you age and a lot of this
stuff is just too deep for skin care to go and affect in any sort of significant way
that's why there's all these deeper treatments like fillers Botox facelifts and yeah other
procedural things to change your look as you get older and I think most people probably shouldn't
be striving to look that much younger anyway I personally think it can be really unhealthy
and you can get into that weird space where you're chasing the impossible and it takes
up a lot of mental energy and we are in an energy crisis so maybe that's not so good
I think nice skin does make a big difference but yeah it is definitely not everything
very very few products show any measurable results in real life
I guess this depends on which results we're talking about so yeah if you want
to look 20 when you're 60 that is not going to happen with skin care but for something like
reduction of wrinkles like making wrinkles shallower even simple moisturizing does that
by hydrating your skin it plumps it up and yeah you end up with less creasing
this is actually a trick that people do in clinical testing they will test an active
ingredient in a cream versus nothing instead of an active ingredient in a cream versus nothing in the
cream which is called a vehicle so if you're using a vehicle cream then you are truly testing what
the effect of that particular active is but if you test your cream against nothing you get much
nicer results because you are testing a thing that moisturizes versus like dried out crepey
skin because it's just had cleanser with nothing afterwards and so yeah you will definitely get a
reduction in wrinkle depth plus a little little bit for whatever your product is actually doing
so this reduction in wrinkle depth is actually a measurable result that is
going to happen with the vast majority of products that have some sort of moisturizer
in them or maybe even just water if you measure it quickly enough
now if we're talking about permanent changes in the skin then I would agree
there are a lot less products that will be effective I think I do tend to look mostly
at products that have a decent chance of working so my sample is quite biased
because I automatically cull out a lot of stuff that's on the market as a whole but
there are a lot of active ingredients that do have decent data to back them up and a lot of
actives are pretty easy to formulate with so for example it is pretty hard to mess
up like a glycolic acid chemical exfoliant to the point where it actually does nothing
but there are also a lot of ingredients and products on the market that are massively
oversold I've talked about a bunch of these ingredients where it's just been hyped up
well beyond what the evidence shows this is going to be a problem as long as skincare
isn't regulated as a drug because drugs actually have lots of regulations regarding
how well they work whereas Cosmetics don't and so there's a lot of marketing involved
not that we want skin care to be regulated as a drug because
there's a lot of other downsides to that as well but yeah we can't have everything
people would wear sunscreen more if it was given for free
so there was actually a study done on this so some scientists put out some complimentary
sunscreen dispensers at the Minnesota State Fair and then volunteers inconspicuously
observed sunscreen use at four of the stations over a sampling of days and time so they just
kind of stalked everyone who touched those dispensers and they did find that people
did use the sunscreen so it was definitely better than not having the dispensers there
but they did still find that people didn't use enough sunscreen and on days where it
was cloudy even though the UV index was still quite high people used the sunscreen a lot less
so yeah I think having these free sunscreen dispensers definitely helps we have them at
a lot of beaches in Australia we also have paid sunscreen dispensers as well where you pay like
I don't know a dollar and you get a pretty decent dollop and I think this is a really
good public health investment because the sort of intense sunburn exposure that you get at the
beach is one of the biggest contributors to skin cancer but at the same time I don't know if it's
really about free versus not free I think it is more of a convenience thing for a lot of people
sunscreen doesn't cost that much in Australia we have supermarkets that sell really good
sunscreen for about two dollars I think it's more about having the sunscreen there
at the point where you realize you forgot to bring your sunscreen I think a lot of us are
just lazy a lot of the time we don't do things that are good for us because it is more effort
there is also this other effect where sometimes people don't appreciate something that's free
so it might be useful while it's novel but then they're less invested in it so they
might not use it all the time loss aversion is usually a more powerful motivator than gain so
if we buy a sunscreen and it's going to expire in a certain amount of time then
we are probably going to use it so it doesn't go to waste whereas if we got a free sunscreen
we might not actually use it because we haven't lost anything we got given this
free sunscreen it was a bonus to begin with we're not losing anything by not using it
so it would be really interesting to have a study to see what happens if you give people free tubes
of sunscreen for everyday use versus making them pay two dollars for it I think if sunscreens in
general were cheaper although not necessarily free then people would definitely use it more
there are a lot of people who try to save on more expensive products and justify that and this is
one of the reasons why when I do sunscreen reviews I try to make it clear that the best sunscreen
is one that you can use a lot of regularly and so that is about texture but also about budget
so I hope you enjoyed this chatty video let me know what you think I feel like these ones weren't
very controversial maybe they were I don't know maybe I'll get flamed in the comments but yeah if
you have unpopular opinions please leave them below and I might respond to them in a future
video like and subscribe more videos should be popping up around me if you want to nerd out more