I was looking over some artwork the other morning. The design looked fine, the branding was sharp, and the claims were nicely hedged. But then, down in the ingredient details, something caught my eye: “Active ingredient: 1003.5 ppm.”
“1003.5?” I thought. That sort of precision is — to put it politely — rather optimistic.
In the real world, quoting a concentration like that implies a manufacturing accuracy of half a part per million. Even pharmaceutical facilities, with all their fancy clean rooms and batch record scrutiny, would struggle to guarantee that sort of control. For cosmetics, it’s frankly fiction. You’d have more luck herding gerbils.
What’s most likely happened here is an overzealous calculator incident. Someone started from a simple number — perhaps they meant “0.1%” or “1000 ppm” — and then converted it to ppm or mg/L, and their spreadsheet obediently spat out a result to one decimal place. Before you know it, “0.1%” has blossomed into “1003.5 ppm,” and it’s printed in bold on the pack.
This is what we call spurious accuracy: where the number gives the illusion of precision that isn’t real. Computers love it, and designers rarely question it. But in science, it makes you look just a bit silly. There’s no shame in rounding off to a sensible number — 1000 ppm would have conveyed exactly the same information with far more credibility.
On artwork, especially, spurious accuracy is something to avoid. Not just because it’s misleading, but because someone — probably another chemist with a sharp eye and a mischievous grin — will spot it, point it out, and you’ll never hear the end of it. Better to be roughly right than precisely ridiculous.