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 …
As a sunscreen connoisseur who tries out a lot of sunscreens, it always feel premature to make a list of my favourites. I try a lot of sunscreens but I feel like I can never get through as many as I’d like, because unfortunately I have just the one face. I did a list of my favourites at the end …
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 …
The myth that “60% of what’s applied to your skin is absorbed into your bloodstream” is one of my pet peeves. It’s so far from the truth, and it’s cited with such an air of authority that it really ticks me off. It also tends to be cited by the sorts of people who push “non-toxic” products, which is very …
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 …
I’m a dinosaur in beauty blogger years. I started my blog in December 2011, and in the last 10-ish years, I’ve learned a lot as I’ve read way too deeply into pretty much everything. I recently had the urge to go through some of my older posts, and unsurprisingly, I’ve said quite a few myths in the past (like the …
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 …