If you’ve ever looked up sodium laureth sulfate (SLES) and sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) in a clean beauty app, like me, you might be surprised to find that SLES is dirtier than SLS. These apps are terrible and based on pseudoscience: SLS and SLES are both safe in your products. But if you’re a skincare nerd, you’ll know that SLS …
If you’re a skincare nerd, you may know that different skincare oils have different fatty acid profiles – that is, they differ in terms of which fatty acids they contain e.g. linoleic, linolenic, oleic and lauric acid. The fatty acids have interesting properties. For example, lauric acid is strongly antibacterial, and works better than benzoyl peroxide against Cutibacterium acnes bacteria. …
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 …
If you use beauty products, it’s impossible to not have heard of clean beauty. It’s a revolution. You want your products to be clean – you don’t want to use dirty products! You want your products to be good for your health and good for the environment. There are beautiful celebrities telling you about how they detoxed and cleaned out …
You’ve probably seen the recent influx of articles about the new FDA sunscreen study, usually titled something like “sunscreens can make it to your bloodstream!” The study itself is fine and good and necessary as a first step in the FDA’s new zeal for sunscreen regulation. But the more I read the coverage around it, the more annoyed I get, …
Since I bleached my hair and dyed it purple (and am now slowly shifting to pink), my hair care needs have changed massively. Typical straight, black East Asian hair naturally has low porosity, with the outside cuticle lying very flat. This means that water and other ingredients don’t go in or out of the hair strand easily, so using the …
I recently posted an excerpt from The Lab Muffin Guide to Basic Skincare on my Instagram and Facebook (which is one of many useful tables in my eBook by the way, and it’s packed full of information on the super important fundamentals of science-based skincare – although I’m obviously biased since I wrote it and put all my best tips …
Sodium hydroxide is in a ton of beauty products. But as one of my favourite unreliable sources says (the “favourite” is sarcastic by the way, just to clarify): Sodium Hydroxide is, however, a known irritant… The National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health … recommends that consumers prevent skin and eye contact The CDC reports that “Skin contact with sodium …