How to Be a Sustainable Beauty Brand: Emma Lewisham Review

emma lewisham pump jar

This is a sponsored post. Sustainability and environmental impact is a huge topic in everything these days, and it’s a tricky topic. It’s obviously something that the vast majority of us care about, but a lot of companies are approaching it in a way that’s easy to market even though it doesn’t make a lot of scientific sense. There’s a …

Read more

Do Hats and Umbrellas Protect Well From the Sun?

sun-protection-swiss-cheese

Instead of talking about sunscreen like I usually do, we’re going to dive into some of the things you can use to protect your skin apart from sunscreen (I can feel my sunscreen propaganda shillbucks slipping away right now). As much as we all love sunscreens, they are a bit of a pain in the butt. You have to apply them right, …

Read more

Are You Washing Your Face Wrong? Busting Cleanser Myths

cleansing emulsification

I recently asked on my Instagram stories about cleansing myths, and I got back tons of replies! So here’s some cleanser mythbusting – unfortunately I couldn’t fit them all in this one post, but there’ll be a follow-up soon. A word of warning before we begin: the answer to a lot of these is going to be “it depends”. I …

Read more

How much UV does a REAL mineral sunscreen absorb and scatter?

sunscreen center mount

Warning: Very nerdy content ahead! If you’ve been following sunscreen discourse (apparently this is a thing now) you’ll know that mineral sunscreens mostly work by absorbing UV and only scattering a small amount, in the region of 4-5% across the range of UV. This was quantified in a pretty commonly cited 2016 paper by Curtis Cole, Thomas Shyr and Hao Ou-Yang, “Metal …

Read more

Zinc Sunscreens Don’t Work Better: Every Myth Busted

Chemical vs Physical Sunscreens: The Science (with video)

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 …

Read more