Gel Nail Polish Reactions – What To Do Now Your Product Is In The Spotlight
Nail Gel Polish is under scrutiny by the medial How do you cope when your product is the subject of a scare story?
Scaremongers
They are out to scare you. Don’t worry – I am on the case.
The Toxic Makeup Scam
Do your makeup products contain toxic ingredients that even the manufacturers don’t know about?
What Do All These Labels Mean?
We now live in a world where information is freely available in quantities much greater than we can possibly need. But information is not knowledge. Knowing facts isn’t much use without the knowledge of how to use them. A story I came across made this clear to me. A gentleman had bought a deodorant specifically …
Is There Asbestos In Claire’s Accessories?
People often assume that I spend most of my time in the lab formulating products. If only! There are people who can manage to do that but only in very big companies which have big teams. The reality for most formulators, and certainly for me, is that you spend the biggest part of your time …
Are Personal Care Products Making Men Bald?
This was a question posed to me by a journalist on the Daily Telegraph. The answer is of course no, but I’ll get onto that later. First this is quite an interesting example of how stories like this originate. Here is the full text of the e-mail I was sent.
New FDA Guidance On Lead In Lipstick
This feels like the end of a chapter. December 21, 2016 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today issued draft guidance recommending a limit of no more than 10 parts per million (ppm) of lead as an impurity in cosmetic lip products (such as lipsticks, lip glosses, and lip liners) and externally applied cosmetics …
The Epidemic of Methylisothiazolinone
There’s a new paper out with some numbers from dermatology clinics about reactions to methylisothiazolinone (MI). Dermatologists regularly patch test people to discover what they are allergic to. This involves applying a set of common materials that tend to provoke allergic reactions to the skin, and seeing which ones the individual reacts to.
Does MI Cause Developmental Problems?
There are an interesting couple of points in the comments thread on my blog post asking for MI not to become a scare story, from Suzanne. She has drawn my attention to a paper from 2012 that details developmental problems in tadpoles exposed to MI. She concludes from this that MI is potentially unsafe for …
Who Does The Research On Cosmetic Safety?
I get a steady stream of enquiries from journalists. Their questions are usually fairly similar. They ask about the safety of cosmetics, and lose interest quite rapidly when I tell them that they are in fact safe. “Stuff you’ve never worried about before is still nothing to worry about” is not really the makings of …
Another Big Talc Payout
Another blow for Johnson and Johnson: an American jury has awarded a big talc payout to one of its customers. I haven’t looked at the details yet, but on the face of it this is another case of sentiment trumping science. Nobody likes big corporations and we are all only too willing to believe the …
