Update (14/9/2022): Dr Julian Sass (@scamander14 on Instagram), a biostatistician and full-time employee of Matter of Fact (Director of R&D and Education) has publicly accused me of bullying him in a video on his Instagram and Twitter. My response is here: Response to accusations of bullying from Julian (@scamander14) Relevant to this post and Matter of Fact: Interestingly he didn’t …
This was a talk I gave on 15 September 2021 for Ventech’s panel on Scientific Literacy and the Price of Misinformation. I talked about my insights on debunking myths over the last 10 years of Lab Muffin (yeah I’m old), how there’s financial incentive for many brands to bust beauty myths and communicate science, and the larger public health implications …
In case you haven’t already heard, the 2021 edition of “This Anti-Cancer Product Is Giving You Cancer” is that there’s been benzene found in a bunch of sunscreens. How much should we be freaking out about this? I did an Instagram post on this already, but I thought I’d elaborate a bit more. The video is here on YouTube, scroll …
There are so many myths around mineral or physical sunscreens – the ones with zinc oxide and titanium dioxide – and how they’re supposedly better than chemical sunscreens with scarier names like oxybenzone and octocrylene. And it’s usually zinc oxide that gets all the hype. Some of these advantages are true… but so many are just myths. And a lot …
There’s been a recent study published about the sunscreen ingredient octocrylene turning into benzophenone over time. According to the paper, “benzophenone is a mutagen, carcinogen, and endocrine disruptor”. I wasn’t going to do a proper analysis of this paper because it only really got lots of attention in France and not many other places, but then I saw that I …
Being the “sunscreen nerd” person, I get a lot of questions about unusual sunscreen products and whether or not their claims work out. Last time I talked about the Colorescience powder sunscreen and the Skinnies “pea-sized amount” claim. Related post: Do They Work? Colorescience SPF Powder, Skinnies “Pea-Sized Amount” (with video) This time I’m talking about two more products that people …
The Inkey List are a brand that I generally quite like (well not anymore, now that I’ve seen their response to me raising this issue, and some of their other practices). They’re probably the main competitor to The Ordinary, which I also quite like. Both brands have lots of products, and many of them work well on my skin. They’re …
I’ve had a lot of questions about certain sunscreen products with unusual claims, and what I think of them. I’ll be talking about what I personally think of the claims for 2 products in this post, but there are a lot more products that I’ll talk about later – let me know if there are more products you’re wondering about …