There’s been a lot of stories about benzene contamination in personal care products over the last 4 years. This year, benzene was discovered in benzoyl peroxide, a staple acne treatment. How concerned should we be? Petition and original paper I’ve written about the background behind Valisure’s benzene analyses before, as well as questions about the accuracy of their data and …
How do you check if information is reliable? One shortcut that works well (most of the time) is to check if the source itself is reliable! This is much faster and easier than trying to learn the science behind an area you’re not already familiar with – it takes a lot of time to properly factcheck information, even for experts. …
Here’s Part 2 of our deep dive into benzene contamination in your products. In Part 1, we talked about whether the experiments were “realistic” (no), and whether the cancer risk was described accurately (also no). This time, we’ll be discussing the wider issues around the private lab behind these findings, Valisure. This is adapted from the video version (which works …
Is rosemary oil a natural, science-backed treatment for hair growth? According to a lot of doctors, scientists and trichologists across the internet, yes – there’s “scientific proof” that it works as well as minoxidil. But unfortunately, that isn’t true. It all seems to be a misunderstanding of a single study: Rosemary oil vs minoxidil 2% for the treatment of androgenetic …
I recently talked about how I don’t think tranexamic acid works in most skincare products I’ve come across, in both a YouTube video and an Instagram post. Perry Romanowski and Valerie George of The Beauty Brains podcast commented on my opinions in Episode 369, “Can Tranexamic Acid Really Reduce Hyperpigmentation?”, published 14 July 2024. Unfortunately I don’t think they looked …
One of the biggest sources of myths in beauty is misunderstanding how scientific research works, and how to interpret scientific evidence. A huge problem I’ve seen is people relying on abstracts – the short summary of the paper – instead of reading the full text. Here’s why this isn’t a good idea. This article is based on part of this …
There’s a troubling pattern with a lot of “science-based” cosmetic products. Many of them make claims solely based on mechanistic reasoning, rather than any actual measured effects on humans. This is a big problem because mechanistic reasoning often doesn’t predict what happens on actual humans – and it’s especially the case with the ways these claims are often used for …
There are a lot of myths in beauty, and over the years, I’ve noticed that a lot of them come from misunderstanding how science and scientific evidence works. Here’s one big misconception: the idea that if a source is “peer reviewed”, it’s automatically higher quality than a source that isn’t. Unfortunately, it isn’t any sort of guarantee, especially for a …