hi it's michelle from lab muffin beauty science here chemistry phd skin care nerd and big fan of chemicals both natural and synthetic and today we we need to talk about clean beauty all right let's do this 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 their beauty routine
and how much better they feel but what if all of this was based on a lie let's talk about the science or the lack of science behind clean beauty if you like nerding out about the science behind beauty products click the like the subscribe and click the nerdification bell so you don't miss any videos clean beauty is one of those concepts that everyone seems to understand but no one can really agree on an exact definition like good music generally the idea is you download a list of dirty or nasty ingredients from somewhere and these are
supposedly not good for your health or not good for the environment you check your products ingredients against this list if it has any of these ingredients it's dirty if it doesn't then it's clean it's a pretty straightforward concept enticingly simple and like a lot of other enticingly simple concepts it doesn't actually work if it did i wouldn't be making this video firstly just to clarify i care about my health i exercise regularly i eat a balanced diet i want to use safe and effective products and i'm not willing to trade my health for nicer skin
i also love the environment i grew up in a semi-rural part of australia i love bush walks i try to recycle i try to reduce my carbon footprint i take public transport i vote for politicians who want to do something about climate change i donate every year to environmental causes what i'm against is feel good actions that don't actually make us more healthy or potentially make us less healthy feel good actions that don't actually help the environment or even make it worse corporations taking advantage of consumers' good intentions by marketing their products based on feel-good
actions and myths so you end up buying products that don't actually do what they promise and it comes with a big dose of fear-mongering and guilt-tripping on the side people who should really know better whether they're scientists or companies that can afford to hire scientific advisors spreading myths about what does and doesn't hurt your health and the environment if you've spread any of these myths in the past don't feel too bad we're all human i've done it before we just have to be open to new information and try to assess it critically and try to
do better in the future before anyone calls me a shill this video isn't sponsored there are a lot of companies in my inbox who want to pay me to talk about how clean their products are but i can't because that's completely against how science and reality work and so with all of that out of the way let's talk about why clean beauty is BS in this video i'm going to be focusing on the health side of clean beauty because that's what most brands focus on and i don't want this video to be like an hour
long there are massive issues with the environmental side of clean beauty as well and i might talk about that in the future first off ingredients aren't clean or dirty clean beauty divides ingredients into clean and dirty or nice and nasty or yay and icky or non-suspicious and suspicious or non-toxic and toxic or whatever version the brand's marketing team wants them to use but you can't just say that an ingredient is good or bad without considering how it's used drinking a glass of water is very different from inhaling a glass of water and the amount of
ingredient that you use makes a huge difference as well inhaling some steam is very different from inhaling a whole river in toxicology the science of how good and bad substances are for you there's the concept of a hazard and a risk in everyday life these two concepts are really similar but in toxicology they're different and it's really important a hazard is a potential source of harm a risk is how likely that harm will actually happen in a given situation i asked fred lebreux to explain these concepts i'm a chemist i'm a phd in medicinal chemistry
and i'm also a toxicologist i have more than 10 years of experience and i've evaluated many cosmetic products he's the ceo of biorius a company that specializes in safety assessments and regulatory compliance for cosmetic products the risk is a product between exposure and hazard which means that if there is no exposure even if the hazard is very high the risk is very low and when you come to cosmetic products it just means that a substance by itself is not good or bad it is more how you are exposed to this substance that is so critical
to explain i will use a very simple example the example of a lion so the lion is intrinsically dangerous it has the potential to be very hazardous but it doesn't mean automatically that it is risky if you go to the zoo and you are behind the bars there is absolutely no risk the lion is dangerous of course it remains dangerous but there is no risk because there is no exposure to this lion if you are in africa in a safari and you are in front of a lion and there are no bars between this lion
and yourself the risk is very high because the hazard is the same but the exposure is not the same anymore the exposure is much higher so the fundamental problem with clean beauty is that it makes you rule out ingredients and products based on the hazards the potential dangers without considering your exposure to work out the overall risk of the situation you're up against it's like never drinking water because you're scared of drowning that's why every brand has a different nasty list because this approach makes no sense if you only look at hazards then every single
ingredient can be considered hazardous sometimes clean beauty lists have a token disclaimer saying you have to also consider where and how you use a product and how much you're using so it's not like they haven't heard of the idea of risk but then they go on to completely ignore this by telling you it's black or white clean and dirty if it's on the list it's out regardless of how much exposure you get so how do real toxicologists work out how much of an ingredient is safe to use in cosmetics once we have qualified this danger
we have to assess the exposure what's the quantity of a given ingredient what's the quantity that will end up on the face of a consumer and it's not that easy to calculate and it's a lot of equations it's a lot of calculations but we we have to do it and many parameters are taken into consideration so how many times a consumer is going to use the product on average what quantity is going to be used is it pea sized amount is it is it more is it less is it a rinse off product is it
a leave on product so all of that is going to have a great impact and once we have a clear exposure scenario and a very good idea of how much of an ingredient is going to end up on the face of a consumer we can really compare the hazard and the exposure as you know the risk is an equation it's the product of hazard and exposure this is how the usage limits are set how much of an ingredient that formulators are meant to use in a product these limits are based on how much of a
product you use how many times you'll use it in a day whether it's rinse off or leave on and it's added up across all the different products that you might reasonably use let's look at one example parabens these are really useful preservatives that are found on lots and lots of dirty lists according to these lists parabens are linked to hormonal or endocrine disruption they can increase the risk of breast cancer and they can be irritating to skin all of this is technically true and it sounds really scary no one wants cancer or endocrine problems but
if you look closely at the actual evidence and if you have some idea of how to interpret it you'll start to see problems so a side note most of these lists were not put together by scientists and certainly not toxicologists more often than not they don't cite any studies to back up what they're saying first off there are lots of different parabens and these all have different hazards and risks but most clean beauty lists just lump them all together some of them talk about them separately and then lump them together anyway now onto their studies
when they actually list them a lot of these studies are done in vitro on cells or on animals cells and animals behave very differently from living human skin cells can die with tap water and dogs can die from chocolate animal studies also usually involve really unrealistic situations that have limited relevance to how we use parabens in everyday life so a lot of these involved having rats that ate lots and lots of parabens the human studies also haven't found a really clear link to health effects even though parabens have been used for about a hundred years
parabens are mildly estrogenic but compared to a lot of the other estrogens we encounter in everyday life like by eating tofu they are really mild you can also see a pattern in how these companies treat natural and synthetic chemicals natural chemicals aren't held up to the same level of scrutiny as synthetic chemicals even though there are lots of natural ingredients that are not good for you this is the appeal to nature bias which i've talked about in another video on top of this toxicologists have analyzed all of these studies before and published their conclusions and
this is how the safe limits of ingredients and cosmetics are set they regularly re-review new studies it's not like these clean beauty organizations are digging up damning new evidence that no one's ever thought to look at before now i'm not saying that we won't someday find out that parabens or whatever other toxic ingredients are actually bad for our health my point is that on one side we have scientists with years and years of specialized knowledge and experience in this specific area saying that these levels are safe and on the other side we have people who
don't know the very basics of toxicology with a very obvious financial interest saying that we need to avoid them entirely but why take any risk at all why not take out any ingredients that could potentially be hazardous well firstly the risk is usually so small that there's very little difference and the goal is not to take any risk so basically we are going to take the danger we are going to divide it by the by the exposure and we obtain what we call a margin of safety and this margin of safety is at least 100
so the idea is we have to be absolutely sure that the exposure to the consumer is much much lower than the quantity that may lead to an expression of a danger for the consumer that's a very quick summary of what we do on a daily basis we evaluate the danger toxicological endpoint by toxicological endpoint ingredient per ingredient then we evaluate the exposure of a given cosmetic product and we are going via a complicated equations to mix the hazard and and the exposure to quantify the risk and this risk cannot be significant so this is why
we talk about a margin of safety to be sure that the risk that is taken by the consumer is very insignificant so it's not like the amount of parabens or other ingredients that we use in cosmetics are just below the level where we see an effect or even half that it's 100 times less than that less than 100 times less than that it's already a pretty darn precautionary approach and it's important to remember that nothing in life is risk-free a lot of the time that ingredient has an important function in the product getting rid of
it or using alternative ingredients isn't necessarily a less risky choice so option one would be using no preservatives preservatives are there for a very good reason every time you open a product it comes into contact with air which has microbes like bacteria yeast and mold which can get into the product and start growing these can reach dangerous levels even if the product still smells and looks okay if you then put the contaminated product on your skin it can cause infections and if it gets near your eyes you can go blind a lot of these microbes
also produce allergens and irritants that can cause skin reactions so these are very real health problems that have actually happened compared to the largely theoretical risks with preservatives preservatives have been a bit of a victim of their own success just like with vaccines we don't usually think of these risks when we use cosmetic products because preservatives work so well they work so well that these problems are quite rare we take them for granted so unless your product was manufactured under completely sterile conditions with completely sterile raw ingredients and you're only using it in a completely
sterile way like an air free container that doesn't suck any air back in you'll probably get microbial overgrowth unless you have a good preservative system this is especially likely if you're using natural ingredients that can feed microbes which is often the case with clean beauty products so what about option two swapping out parabens for other preservatives this might seem like an easy solution but there are problems here as well the main one is that we don't actually know very much about the health effects of newer preservatives parabens have been used for about a hundred years
by billions of people worldwide that's why there have been lots of studies on them and all of this data might seem really scary but it's actually partly because we've been testing them that means that we also have a pretty good idea of their health effects which have been minimal on the other hand neural preservatives haven't been used for as long and they haven't been through as much testing and so their health effects are largely unknown especially their longer term health effects they could be much worse alternative preservatives also tend to be more problematic short term
mostly because they're not as effective as parabens one of the main reasons that parabens are so popular is that they work really well at very low concentrations with the less effective preservatives especially the ones that natural brands tend to use you can either end up with a product that is really easy to contaminate and that leads to all of those issues we talked about before or you end up with a product that has a lot more preservative preservatives are often quite irritating and allergenic and so having more of it around means that people who wouldn't
have had skin reactions with the lower amounts of parabens might react to these newer preservatives if you look at the data on preservatives then you'll see how good parabens are except of course to people who are specifically allergic to parabens these are the incidences of allergy from patch test studies in the us and europe the actual incidence of allergy in the general population will be lower there's also been more recalls of contaminated products recently and a lot of this is probably linked to the fact that more and more brands are avoiding parabens because of the
clean beauty movement so avoiding parabens and switching to products that don't contain preservatives or contain less effective preservatives is a feel-good action that doesn't actually make us healthier and can in fact make us less healthy so in summary clean beauty and this idea that you can divide ingredients into good and bad is fundamentally flawed from a scientific perspective it ignores the very basics of toxicology clean beauty is turning a massive profit even though it's not making us healthier and it could potentially be making us less healthy i do think though that it's important to recognize
that the beauty industry hasn't been very transparent and this might be why we're so willing to buy into this incorrect science the beauty industry hasn't really put in much effort to communicate the actual science behind beauty products that's part of the reason i started my blog back in 2011 i wanted to know answers i wasn't satisfied with the answers i was getting and getting to answers that made sense was really really hard i don't know if it's because companies thought that consumers weren't interested in the real science or they didn't think they could break down
these complex concepts into something that consumers could understand pseudoscience is generally easier to understand and easier to sell but it's not the truth and i find it really disappointing when companies that have scientists on their staff who know better decide to cave into pressure and take the easy route and that was another reason i started my blog and why i kept going even though i was losing money for the first six years i wanted to give the science a fighting chance i think beauty marketing has been gradually changing i work with brands from time to
time on sponsored content and over the years i've seen this big shift from where they wanted me to cut down on the technical details and just post pretty pictures to now where they tend to tell me to just go as deep into the science as i want and i think the fact that my numbers on my instagram youtube and blog are growing shows that it's possible to successfully explain the science accurately and that people are interested in knowing the whole messy truth so hopefully that's like a proof of concept to brands that they can and
they should present the real story instead of giving in to pseudoscience are you also sick of clean beauty do you think it's ever going to go away or is it a movement that's just too big to be stopped do you think that company's investing in educating their customers is the way to go i'm a science educator so i think that transparency in education is the answer to everything but obviously i'm massively biased so let me know what you think if you liked the video click the like and the subscribe in the interest of making a
video that wasn't like an hour long i couldn't include everything that fred said but it's really really fascinating i've uploaded it onto my other channel lab muffin supplementary info so if you want a more in-depth understanding of how toxicological assessments work check that out thank you so much to fred for taking the time to share his expertise and also to jen of the eco well for introducing us she is also a great source for science-based beauty info especially on the sustainability and environmental side so check her out as well i've got more references and info
on the caption especially on the parabens part of the video so if you have more questions take a look there follow me on instagram at lab muffin beauty science and check out my blog for more nerdy beauty content and i will see you next time
