Can a $1,200 Eye Treatment Really Reduce Wrinkles? - Episode 430

0:00Paula Begoun: Hi, I'm Valerie and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

0:12Paula Begoun: Welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetics industry. This is episode 430. I'm your host, Valerie George, and with me today is Perry Romanowski. Hi, Perry.

0:26Bryan Barron: Hello, Valerie. Great to see you back.

0:28Paula Begoun: Good to see you on today's show. We're going to cover a lot of questions, including how does Olaplex bond shaper curl rebuilding work? Are plant stem cells reducing wrinkles? What chemical and hair color damages the hair? What's a good sunscreen to use that won't sting the eyes? And is La Balm solid moisturizer worth the price? But first, that inane chit chat.

0:49Bryan Barron: Yeah, you were gone last week. Was it a road trip, a flying trip? Where were you?

0:53Paula Begoun: We took a road trip, baby C turned one, and we went to visit family and we ended up driving 19 hours each way. We love road trips, though. We stop and see a lot of sites and make it a good time. Visit cool restaurants, coffee shops, points of interest.

1:11Bryan Barron: Yeah. There's actually this app called Run a Road Tripper.

1:16Paula Begoun: Okay.

1:17Bryan Barron: And if you put in where your road trip is going to be, it'll tell you all these things along the way to see, like wacky things. We did that once. We were driving back from Florida to Chicago, and we stopped in, I think it's North Carolina, to see the world's largest fire hydrant.

1:35Paula Begoun: Yeah, my parents love that kind of stuff. You know, we'll stop if we see it, but we're more like historical points of interest. Like, oh, what happened in this area in the 1700s? And we visit the historical markers and that kind of stuff. We do audio books related to driving through the area so we can get a sense of the history. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun. And baby C was pretty good. It's a long time to be in the car as a baby.

2:05Bryan Barron: Sure. Now, what did you do with the dogs? Did you kennel them up or something?

2:08Paula Begoun: Oh, yeah. They go to this little farm and hang out and have a great time. We were going to take them. Just given the duration, we were visiting family. and my parents have this crazy huge yard and a pool and butch loves swimming but it would have been too much that's a that's a big drive for a baby and two 90 pound dogs two big dogs that's

2:31Bryan Barron: right well we're glad you're back i've just still been taking care of kittens yeah uh actually we're leaving on a trip at the end of the month another trip see you act like i'm the one who's always gone you're always gone well it's uh you know this was my first vacation in a year this is

2:51Paula Begoun: you know i've been on work trips you know but i feel like that's a little different but

2:54Bryan Barron: is this pleasure or for work uh we're actually going to greece my niece graduated high school and we're taking her on her a trip there for so that'll be that'll be a greece in albania so can i be your niece that well i think there's some genetics involved there that aren't gonna work

3:14Paula Begoun: no Greece is great I once spent a whole summer there working at my church as a camp there a traveling camp and it was awesome you're gonna have a great time I've never been and I'm looking

3:26Bryan Barron: forward to it I'm especially looking forward to it because I hear they have a lot of cats

3:29Paula Begoun: they do and dogs and they just kind of roam around and they're allowed in the restaurants

3:33Bryan Barron: and whatnot yeah well I love all animals great all right you know what else I love beauty news

3:45Bryan Barron: Valerie, this one came across my desk. Well, my computer screen anyway. It's a new tool to grade cosmetic ingredients. Apparently, there's this new cosmetic ingredient platform called Expert ING. And it was created by formulation scientist Dr. Brjesh Patel. And you know what it does? It gives letter grades to more than 49 ,000 cosmetic ingredients. so I guess they have to take an exam to get a grade. I don't know. Well, the pitch is that, you know, unlike some other ingredient databases, the grades are based on information from regulatory agencies around the world. Wow. It also explains what the ingredients do in plain English.

4:29Bryan Barron: It lets the users create profiles for concerns, whether they're pregnant or they have eczema, and it can alert you when a product formula or regulatory status changes.

4:42Paula Begoun: So this is a database for consumers, not for formulators like me and you.

4:48Bryan Barron: Right. I would see this as something along the lines of like the EWG Skin Deep database or something like that.

4:56Paula Begoun: Yeah, I have some concerns.

5:00Bryan Barron: Yeah, I imagine. So what is the problem you think with this is?

5:06Paula Begoun: Well, I think it's very difficult to just assign a letter grade to something without knowing the context in which it's used. So, for example, retinol. Retinol is great at a certain concentration, not great at another concentration, and you just simply can't look at a product or type in an ingredient and know what grade it's going to get in the product. The answer would be A through F, and I don't find that very helpful.

5:36Bryan Barron: Yeah, it's kind of the same problem the Skin Deep database has, right? Except their rating scale is, what, 1 to 10. You know, red, green, yellow, or whatever. So this guy, instead of doing 1 to 10, he's going A through F. Like, how could even an ingredient get an A? Like, is water an A? I mean, too much water can kill you, too. So how does that get an A? Yeah, it's a little concerning, again, just given that the fact that an ingredient is present doesn't answer a lot about its toxicology.

6:11Paula Begoun: And the reality is like all products have to be safe. Hopefully brands are using third party toxicologists or safety assessors to like ascertain through real exposure calculations, this exact scenario. So just typing in something and getting information out of it, I think, could be damaging much in the way that EWG's skin-deep database is damaging. Although I will say that EWG has cleaned up their act a little bit in terms of, yeah, the information. They're more realistic scores. They've taken a lot of heat over the years. And things that they said used to be bad, they now are required to say are fine, like sodium lauryl sulfate, because it is fine.

6:52Paula Begoun: Right. Okay, wow.

6:54Bryan Barron: Is that some sort of legal thing that they ran into? I guess being in California, a lot of lawyers there.

6:59Paula Begoun: Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure. But I mean, I'd like to see this do well, but I'm sure there's other challenges with the software as well. Like at the end of the day, it's not really a toxicology platform. It's just a consumer facing platform.

7:15Bryan Barron: It kind of pretends to be. And the other thing is says it talks about using government information, But then it also uses like Sephora's clean standard. And, you know, they didn't use like science to come up with that. That was just like what their buyers liked or didn't like. So it wouldn't be like appropriate toxicologist stuff. So, I mean, the bottom line for me is that, you know, this might be a convenient database for somebody to look up ingredients. But I don't see how this is particularly helpful. and it is a bit misleading for consumers. So, you know, to me, if a product is out on the market and if your doctor hasn't said, you know, an ingredient is bad for you, you know, use it.

7:59Bryan Barron: And if the product doesn't feel good, then stop using it. I don't know. We're getting too much information about chemists. You know, you consumers do not need to be chemists. You don't. It's more information that will just make you feel bad.

8:14Paula Begoun: Yeah, I think it causes a lot of stress. And at the end of the day, you know, there's no reason to stress out, I don't think. No.

8:22Bryan Barron: Okay. Let the toxicologists and chemists stress. You just use the products.

8:27Paula Begoun: Well, there was another interesting article about the future of beauty, and it's according to five top scientists, and this was in WWD.

8:35Bryan Barron: You know, didn't they just listen to our last, our episode in December where we make our predictions?

8:41Paula Begoun: Yeah, they're not interested in our predictions.

8:44Bryan Barron: I guess not. Well, I was interested to see, so who are the top five beauty scientists? And to be honest with you, I heard of a couple of these, but I hadn't heard of all of these. So have you heard of these chemists?

8:59Paula Begoun: I've heard of a few of them, and they're not all chemists in the industry. They maybe have different technology platforms or different raw material companies, but I wouldn't say they're necessarily like chemists or in the context of like the cosmetics industry. They maybe work across different, different industries.

9:20Bryan Barron: Yeah. I mean, I guess I would just think if you're going to get like the top scientists, you know, I would have heard of them. I mean, I guess I, of course I know Ron Robinson. He's a, he's a cosmetic chemist guy, but Jasmine Agonovic? Yasmina Agonovic, yep.

9:38Paula Begoun: I know her very well from Arkea. They're a raw material technology incubator. Josh Britton from Debut, I know him as well, through the Independent Beauty Association. They're a biotech startup, so again, more on the raw material side. And then I've heard of Joyce Dilemos from Dew and Alec Batiste from Sweet Chemistry. But do you know what would have really been interesting if they didn't just talk to independent brands and talk to maybe a diverse range of companies of different sizes? Companies like L 'Oreal, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, they invest a significant amount of money in beauty's future.

10:21Paula Begoun: And they actually even invest in small companies that are developing technology. So it would have been interesting to hear from people from there. But I would presume the reason they don't have anyone from that list is they wouldn't disclose what they think is coming. Right.

10:35Bryan Barron: Sure, yeah. So with that in mind, let's see what they have to say and we'll see what we think about it. They say from chemistry to biology, said the industry is moving towards engineered biotech ingredients and peptides built for specific biological outcomes. Yeah, I mean, I saw that at Supplier's Day. But, you know, as far as I think, unless you change the regulations for what cosmetics are allowed to do, I don't think biotechnology can have such a huge impact on the way that these products function.

11:10Paula Begoun: I think it's already happening. So this isn't a future prediction. This is already actively happening, as you mentioned.

11:16Bryan Barron: I think you're exactly right.

11:18Paula Begoun: I don't think this will change the benefit that consumers get, but I think it changes the story that marketing people can tell. And it changes what chemists have to choose from by choosing these. I'm a peptide fan, right? By choosing different peptides, you can do some really cool things. But at the end of the day, I don't think a consumer will notice a difference.

11:41Bryan Barron: Having said that, I do think if we're going to find any innovation in cosmetic products and ingredients, it's probably going to come from biotechnology because I think surfactants are kind of done and emolens are all done. So it's got to be these biochemicals and polymers. All right. Another one, they say balance maxing and holistic wellness. I don't know balance maxing.

12:06Paula Begoun: Anything with maxing is it's like a new younger thing. We wouldn't get it.

12:11Bryan Barron: So this is all about topical injectables, ingestion balanced alongside sleep, exercise, and stress management. You know, I guess this is all reasonable life advice, but it seems like pretty weak evidence that it's a coherent product category. I mean, when you lump like a serum in with your sleep hygiene, is that going to make your serum work better? I don't know. It just sounds more holistic marketing or something to me than actual new science.

12:43Paula Begoun: Well, this concept of ingestibles, injectables, all these things kind of living in a beauty routine is not a new concept. In fact, 10 years ago, ingestibles were really huge and then they went away and now they're a growing category again. All this kind of stuff is cyclical. I don't think this is going to be long staying. People have a relatively low commitment to ingestibles and injectables. Most injectables live out of a price point that most people can afford. I don't think necessarily injectables are rising unless, you know, population. It's just a factor of like population rising and population groups aging.

13:25Paula Begoun: So I think this is not something that will be long staying. Yeah.

13:29Bryan Barron: But I agree with you, too. It's going to be cyclical and it's going to come back. another prediction is that wearables are going to be tracking your skin and you'll have these devices that are on your hydration your ph your cortisol levels uh and then the sensors will help uh you decide what products you should be using at what time i don't know i don't think we we know enough about the skin or what makes it feel better or work better with these this kind of detail i

14:00Paula Begoun: don't know this this seems a little far-fetched to me also there's such a wide ph range for skin that's acceptable acceptable and biologically acceptable also where is the skin on your body it can differ are you male or female what's your age what time of year is it so i think this will be a little more complicated to produce and also managing cortisol and inflammatory markers to think that a topical cosmetic product could or should influence those types of things is a really dangerous territory to play into. There's so many things that change cortisol in your body and a slight increase isn't necessarily a bad thing.

14:39Paula Begoun: And I would hate to see what kind of damage this could do. Also, I feel like this is certainly medical device territory. And also the thing about devices is they have low adoption rates. So how many people are going to get this and continue to use it over the years? I don't think so. I mean, right.

14:57Bryan Barron: I feel like something like you put a ring on or a watch or something sure but those how are those things are not gonna be able to monitor your skin like on your feet or something so i don't know yeah and i'm i'm with you there like people buy these medical devices these home medical devices and are promised these things how it's gonna improve your face but come on those red light masks don't work so that's why all right there is AI lowers the barrier to entry. It's going to, AI will speed up product launches. That's probably true. I don't think they're going to be making better products, but probably faster.

15:39Paula Begoun: Yeah. I don't think faster is always better either. And I don't think AI knows anything that a seasoned formulator couldn't figure out. No,

15:50Bryan Barron: I guess to me, what the AI would help do is like, if you need a brand story, AI is great for something like that, you know, helping you shape your brand story. But all the formulas are going to all be kind of what's already out there. There's not going to be any innovation in the formula. But if you had an idea for a beauty product, you could go to ChatGPT and say, here's my idea, give me a launch plan. And I think it'd do a pretty good job of giving you that. You know, you're just going to use contract manufacturers and existing formulas. But I think she's right. AI will make it so there's more cosmetic, well, as the kids would say, cosmetic beauty slop products.

16:30Bryan Barron: Yeah, slop is right. I don't know, but there's always been that.

16:32Paula Begoun: Well, the thing is, there's certain things in the development process you can't speed up. And while you can use AI to screen, and this is not any like ChatGPT or Gemini, but real AI platforms designed to screen peptides or emulsifiers and to check your stability. At the end of the day, you have to still do stability and compatibility and all this testing. And AI is not going to speed that up. It might get your formula to a more predictive place. But guess what? I don't use AI from that retrospect. And, you know, I feel like I'm in a pretty good spot. And sometimes you can, you know, use things that are tried and true and you put one change into it and there's a shift that you didn't anticipate for some reason.

17:14Paula Begoun: So I don't even think on the true raw development side, it necessarily speeds things up.

17:22Bryan Barron: I would agree with you there too. Yeah, you still got to run a 12-week stability test. I don't believe AI can predict that and it won't be able to do that for a while. All right, the last one. Joyce predicts there's the end of clean beauty since consumers are getting savvier and they want real data instead of science washing. um yeah you know i i push back on that i mean i consumers are are still uh i don't know convinced fooled i might say by what you see is science washing or green washing that stuff still sells

17:57Paula Begoun: so i don't see that going away i honestly like to akin this to different people on our side of the industry saying parabens are going to come back in and fighting the good paraben fight and You did it for a while as well. I feel like you were in defense of parabens. And at the end of the day, consumers don't want to go back to parabens. It's too ingrained. That ship has sailed. And I feel like this is the same thing. It's wishful thinking. The majority of consumers think their beauty products do some harm or have the potential to cause harm. And at the end of the day, they don't want certain things in their products.

18:32Paula Begoun: And that's the premise of clean beauty. And that's not going anywhere.

18:36Bryan Barron: As long as people are buying these products, marketers are still going to come up with stories to say that their product is safer than their competitors. Because fear marketing works. It just works. It's just how people are. And the products aren't safer. You aren't making your skin better. But if you're afraid of somebody else's product, you're going to go buy that. And if some marketer can take advantage of that, they are going to do that. So I don't see clean beauty going away, despite what science says about it.

19:07Paula Begoun: Exactly. We do have some listener comments from a listener, Reva.

19:18Paula Begoun: Hi, Beauty Brains. Love your program and have been listening for many years. I would like to correct a small point made during your discussion about the FDA approving bemitrisinol. I'm a consumer, not a regulator or a scientist. but as far as I understand, Canada does not follow the same SPF regulations as the U.S. We have a hybrid model where SPFs can be classified as a drug or natural health product. In addition to many of the same filters, we also have uvenil and maroxyl, among others, that are not yet available in the U.S. Similar but different. All the best, Reba.

19:47Bryan Barron: I'm not in Canada, so I don't know, but I thought they kind of followed all the same approvals that the FDA did.

19:53Paula Begoun: Yes, we did make that comment in passing and didn't go into the finer details that Canada does have their own version of the FDA, Health Canada. If you have a zinc oxide or titanium dioxide sunscreen, it's actually considered a natural health product versus a traditional SPF. And so it gets a natural health product number versus a drug identification number. And yeah, there are a few other filters, but for the most part, companies are formulating for the U.S. and Canada in mind. And so they just follow the U.S. formulation guidelines, which is what we you were intending to say, but there are different regulatory pathways, correct?

20:29Bryan Barron: Exactly. Well, we always do appreciate comments, so thank you for that, Reva.

20:33Paula Begoun: Thank you.

20:39Paula Begoun: All right, well, let's answer some questions. Our first question comes to us from Heather.

20:43Bryan Barron: Heather says, thank you so much for your service. I'm a bleached curly hair curl specialist. I've been using the Olaplex Bond Shaper Curl Rebuilding Treatment on my clients as needed. I think it provides decent results. Hard to say because I don't see my clients for a while after, though I do ask them to tell me what they observe after. Anyway, I'm curious how it works and also why they suggest not washing for two days after. All right, looks like the treatment has three different

21:13Paula Begoun: parts to it a repair and enhance and define i have tried not the professional treatment that's here repair enhance and define but i've tried the take-home products that are recommended by olaplex and in my opinion they're fine they're nothing uh super special but yeah in terms of the professional treatment i think olaplex is kind of following their own model they have this essentially what is a solution that soaks the hair. This peptide, which is the bond shaping technology, can either penetrate the hair or sit on the surface of the hair. You enhance it with essentially a surfactant system and then put a take-home product on it that is very conditioning, has some styling polymers in it, and helps create style within the hair.

22:11Bryan Barron: Basically, this is just like any other curl treatment product you have, you know, to make your hair look smoother and springier. But they have that added ingredient that is Olaplex that they say is their bond building ingredient that theoretically repairs the disulfide bonds inside the hair. And so, I mean, there's at least, I mean, they say there's a plausible mechanism behind their technologies. Whether consumers can notice any difference, I don't know.

22:46Paula Begoun: Well, it is a short peptide. So an oligopeptide is pretty small, maybe just a couple dozen or less amino acids in it. And they might have some data that shows this little tiny peptide goes into the hair fiber. I personally haven't seen the data, so I can't state that. But any peptide penetrating the hair will interact with the hair bonds in some way. Maybe not disulfide bonds, but it will react with ionic bonds or hydrogen bonds because peptides have both positive charges and negative charges, so they can kind of interact with things in the hair. Is it doing anything special that another oligopeptide or dipeptide couldn't do?

23:27Paula Begoun: I'm not sure about that. I don't think so based on what I know about peptides and the hair fiber. and I do believe it probably is doing something in hair but I think it's you know a great story probably really nice products and you probably could use some other things that have the same type of effect the reason they probably tell you not to wash the hair for a couple days after is they want to make sure that you're not rinsing off any of the molecules that haven't had a chance to find find their spot in the hair is my guess theoretically the longer it's on there

24:03Bryan Barron: without being rinsed off, you could have more chemical reactions. Although I suspect it's happening pretty quickly and there's not a lot going on after, you know, the first day or so.

24:14Paula Begoun: Yeah. And it's interesting. The second step has a little bit of hydrogen peroxide in there. And so this probably also tells me there's some kind of neutralization step going on within the hair. So very interesting. Yeah.

24:30Bryan Barron: I mean, it's good to see some technology out there. Now, whether it's much better than just some other curl treatments, uh, it would be hard to tell, but if you're, you know, if your, uh, clients are happy about it, you know, they're happy.

24:47Paula Begoun: Yeah. So how it works, you know, I'm not really sure in summary, a peptide probably goes in, there's a neutralization step, uh, similar to a perm that's probably doing something within the hair and then there's this really great styling product afterwards that's that's

25:05Bryan Barron: probably it yeah yeah all right thanks for that question our next question comes from amy

25:14Paula Begoun: hello beauty brains i was recently going through the airport in another country and had extra time on my hands i was sucked into trying and buying atox lift and locked wrinkle solution by stem Tux skin systems and immediately my under eyes looked great. I'm always so careful about falling for overly hyped and priced products, but not this day. They claimed it had plant stem cells and that's what made it work. I know it probably is a form of a temporary polymer, but had to ask the two smartest beauty brains I know. I feel a bit foolish for even asking, but this product is actually over$1 ,000 online and I thought I got a deal at$200 plus.

25:51Paula Begoun: Any thoughts? Have you heard of this or did I just fall for this line by the way Perry you're the patron saint of kitties your stories always warm my heart I'm a kitty foster failure of a beautiful link Siamese and I'm

26:02Bryan Barron: grateful for fostering for the past three years ah well yeah kitties are so friendly and nice and like they can be very affectionate and they can be very aloof too so but I like them I like the

26:14Paula Begoun: aloofness well this uh stem talks products very interesting first of all I think the most important thing is that you liked it.

26:23Bryan Barron: Yeah. Well, I will also say, yes,$1 ,200 US for 0.42 ounces. What? Wow.

26:33Paula Begoun: Good thing it's for the eyes and you don't need a lot.

26:35Bryan Barron: Yeah. That is true, but it's not going to last very long, I guess.

26:41Paula Begoun: Okay. Yeah. So I'm on that page. It doesn't have the ingredients or anything.

26:45Bryan Barron: It says ingredients, argan plant stem cells, uh acacia plant stem cells coconut oil avocado oil yeah it doesn't actually give you the ingredient list which is uh you know that's kind of a thing that companies have started to do that actually putting the ingredient list online but it's weird that they haven't done that and i'm looking at their packaging and they don't have any image of their ingredient list so that's kind of interesting as far as ingredients go they have the atox they have the b-tox the c-tox okay uh so they had say they have palmito tetrapeptide 7 in there they have palmito tetrapeptide 1 yeah i mean i wish we had the full ingredient list yeah it's it's hard to know i mean they just show the ingredients that they want people to see but you know the glycerin hyaluronic acid i mean look as far as I'm concerned when you see a company like this, which is probably a smaller company, they're spending a lot of money, they don't have scientists or researchers that are doing more than what P &G or L 'Oreal or one of the big guys are doing.

28:02Bryan Barron: And so it's highly unlikely that they're going to have any technology that you couldn't get from one of the big guys. And so what they do, what they can do that the big guys can't do is come out with a$1 ,200 product and sell it. Because, you know, big companies need to sell a certain amount of volume before it becomes worth it for them to sell a product. That's why smaller companies can charge huge amounts, because they don't have to sell a lot to keep their business going. Whereas big companies need to sell a lot. So they can't sell these hugely expensive products. So all that is to say, I'm skeptical that this would be worth$1 ,200 to improve your eyes.

28:42Bryan Barron: I mean, I don't see any, any technology here that you couldn't get somewhere else.

28:46Paula Begoun: Now, certainly if this were$200 retail, I would be like, it's worth a try, especially since you tried it and you felt like, wow, you know, you're in an airport, you're under eyes or in the worst condition that they could be, in my opinion, if you're flying. And the fact that you liked it is the most important thing. Now, should you replenish this at$1 ,200? The answer is absolutely not.

29:09Bryan Barron: For$1 ,200, you could get Botox, fillers, lots of other things that probably do more permanent, real restoration.

29:21Paula Begoun: But I'm curious. I really want to try it. I see someone selling it used on Poshmark. I can't bring myself to do that. but if anyone had some and they just wanted to squirt a little in a cup i would give you 25

29:37Bryan Barron: wait a second they're selling a used product somebody already used it and then just well

29:44Paula Begoun: you're not supposed to sell used products but you know this person got it probably tried it didn't like it oh i'm just gonna sell it and say it's new i only took one pump out right i want to see the return rate on this company's stuff that's what i would like to see because they do have a return policy and i would imagine it's kind of high yeah and as far as feeling that immediate result it's

30:08Bryan Barron: probably from the film forming ingredients that we don't we know there probably are in there but we don't know exactly what those are but that's kind of what they do you know the you create the the film on your skin and then when it dries down it sort of tightens it up and that's kind of how these anti-puffy things work.

30:26Paula Begoun: So you're saying I shouldn't try it? I look pretty tired right now. I just got back from a 19-hour drive with baby C.

30:35Bryan Barron: I'm saying if you send me$25, I'll squirt something in a jar and you can try that. It'll probably be glycerin with some PVP.

30:44Paula Begoun: Oh my goodness.

30:46Bryan Barron: All right, next question comes to us from Valerio. It's a two-parter and yeah. Hi, Beauty Brains. I'm Valerio, and I'm a professional hairdresser. I'm from Naples in the south of Italy, the best part of Italy. I have two questions for you guys. One, in the hair color composition, the 2 plus peroxide, which one creates more damage in the hair shaft, the alkalizer or the hydrogen peroxide, and what kind of damage is that? And then the second question is, I wish to be part of a course in hair chemistry by Valerie. you did that in at suppliers day in in may i believe i sure did uh but i live in italy so is there any online course for those of us who don't live in the states thank you for your information and any information you share you guys are precious oh well thanks for that well on that course actually valora and i were just talking and we're uh gonna try to introduce that course in september for people so keep an ear out for that we'll let people know

31:48Paula Begoun: well Valerio great question in hair color if we're talking about permanent hair color where you have a tube of cream hair color and peroxide the tube either contains something that makes a high pH it's either ammonia or monoethanolamine and you have a separate bottle of hydrogen peroxide developer and when those two are mixed it helps develop the hair color into a color It helps it penetrate the hair and it helps remove your hair's existing melanin in order to get the new color to show up and your old color to get a little bit removed. Yeah, sure. Now, you may think that the alkalizer is the worst part.

32:31Paula Begoun: It smells, it's a high pH, it's creating a really terrible environment. But the true damaging material is the hydrogen peroxide because it's not an intelligent material. It goes into the hair very efficiently. it's very tiny and it is looking for electrons and ideally it would hit the electrons in your melanin which gives your hair its natural color but before then it's running into your hair protein keratin and it's attacking anything it can there which is highly damaging to the hair it's even worse at a high ph and so if you just put hydrogen peroxide alone probably not too bad i mean it wouldn't be great for the hair but it has this synergistic activity when it's in a high pH and so for that reason I think hydrogen peroxide is the worst when you're coloring hair you're also adding a little bit more hydrogen peroxide then you need to facilitate that reaction because you want your guest in the chair to have the experience done pretty fast they don't want to be coloring their hair for two days right you want them in and out in an hour so you're putting a little bit more so definitely for these reasons, I think hydrogen peroxide is more damaging for your hair and it essentially breaks apart your hair keratin, which results in reduced strength.

33:53Bryan Barron: And that's not going to get repaired easily.

33:57Paula Begoun: It is a permanent effect pretty much. So yeah, use less peroxide than you need to. And also I will say the alkalizer choice makes a difference. I just want to throw this in. so i mentioned the two choices are pretty much ammonia or monoethanolamine and ammonia and monoethanolamine you use them once the damage is about the same and this is it's a little complicated to explain but this is presuming they're the same activity in the formula use it once they're the same use it second time a third time a fourth time monoethanolamine is actually more damaging to the hair because it doesn't leave the hair very easily.

34:39Paula Begoun: Ammonia is a gas. That's why it's annoying and hair color is stinky. But when you use ammonia-free hair color, you're like, oh, this is so great. It doesn't smell, but it actually is harder to get out of the hair and you get more damage over time to your hair protein.

34:51Bryan Barron: Yeah, just stays in the hair and keeps on damaging.

34:55Paula Begoun: Keeps on partying. So Valerio, I hope that helps. And maybe we'll see you in the fall online. Next question comes to us from Lisa. My Fitzpatrick score is four, so zinc oxides are white on my skin. Therefore, I look for hybrids and tints. But I'd like to find something that blends more easily. Every chemical filter absolutely kills my eyes. I've tried most, every LRP, ELF, Supergoop, CeraVe, Cetaphil, and none has not killed it after an hour. You mentioned a waxy feel to stop migration. Can you recommend a product or tell me an ingredient to look for? Thanks.

35:32Bryan Barron: these are always uh hard questions for me to answer because uh you know what you like and what works for you is always such a personal choice right and and when somebody says that oh you know every chemical filter just kills my eyes i mean everyone it's hard to know what to do

35:50Paula Begoun: well the problem is most spfs are like kind of oily feeling and they migrate on skin and they migrate right into the eyes. And let me tell you, there is one, it was put into a gift bag at a society of cosmetic chemists event. And everyone was trash talking this SPF. And I actually thought it was pretty great. I wish I could remember the name of it. I can't, it'll come to me. Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the name, but let me tell you about another. And people didn't like it because it had this like waxy kind of feel on the skin, but there's another one that I was gifted actually by the people who developed it.

36:30Paula Begoun: It was Alicia Keys Protect Your Light Daily Moisturizer Broad Spectrum SPF 30. I mean, I have like kind of white skin, but I did not feel there was a really big cast. It's a hybrid. And I felt like it did pretty well. Now, if you're a four, is it going to do well? I don't know. But that thing stayed put on your face. And I like to periodically kind of touch my face throughout the day because I always felt it there. I didn't like rub, but I would just, oh, don't touch your face. It's there. And I thought it was pretty nice. And I've actually bought it since using it. And I am a fan of the waxiness.

37:13Bryan Barron: Well, you know, maybe a sunscreen stick used like around the eyes might help prevent that kind of a thing. So, you know, I guess you could use sunscreen, like the typical chemicals, other places, and then around the eyes or in your face to use a stick. Maybe that would help prevent that stinging.

37:36Paula Begoun: I just, I don't like the sticks. I don't feel like they're waxy. I feel like they're kind of glycol-y. Does that make sense? It just feels like you put a humectant on the face. And I'm not a fan of that.

37:50Bryan Barron: You know, it's all like a personal choice and feel. So unfortunately, there's not one simple answer to this. But those are our thoughts.

37:58Paula Begoun: Yeah. Well, anyway, give the Alicia Keys a try. Like I said, and there's actually some videos of maybe fits types three and four reviewing it online. I just took a look and you can check it out from them. I also like, by the way, that it's an affordable price point. And if we remember the name that was left in the dinner dance gift bag that was very waxy and everyone hated it except for me. And I was like, give me all the SPF. I'm going to try to remember and tell you because those two did not go into the eyes. And I have other recommendations, but they would leave a white cast on your skin. So I can't give those.

38:35Bryan Barron: And my recommendation is to wear a hat.

38:38Paula Begoun: Oh.

38:39Bryan Barron: Big broom.

38:40Paula Begoun: No. She wants to have really good looking skin for a long time. All right. One more question from Lori.

38:47Bryan Barron: Yeah. Lori says the Le Balm is a solid moisturizer created by Dr. Natasha Bonjout from France. It costs$130 for one ounce. Are the ingredients worth the splurge? The Le Balm solid moisturizer. Have you seen this product?

39:05Paula Begoun: No, but like I just said, I'm not a huge fan of solid moisturizers. I don't like sticks. I don't like, you know, I don't mind putting it on like parts of the body, you know, but on the face, I'm just not a huge fan of it. And I actually have seen this product. It's all over my Instagram. I just, and the Instagram is really great. I'm like, let me try it. And then I'm like, no, you don't like the solid bombs. Because again, they kind of have this like really topical feel to them.

39:34Bryan Barron: Well, it's a Credo beauty product. You can find it through them. and they say it functions as a eight-in-one multitasker, replacing your serum, moisturizer, eye cream, night cream, lip balm, treatment, primer, and overnight mask. Wow, that's a lot to do in one product.

39:53Paula Begoun: Yeah. Now, let me retract my statement about the balms.

39:58Bryan Barron: You like a balm? Is this what you're saying? No, I don't.

40:01Paula Begoun: I don't really. Okay. That's not retracting. I don't like to use it as a skincare product, okay? And this is why I don't like that they say, oh it replaces eight products because at the end of the day it just really the only thing it does is it prevents water loss on your skin it's not really like a moisturizer and an eye cream they do different things and besides like eye creams have actives in them specific for the eye area which is why believe it or not i'm an eye cream proponent but the one thing i do like about a solid in air quotes moisturizer or balm in a pot is that you can create a ritual so what i like to do and I actually used to use the May Lindstrom balm for this because I like the smell it's just a ritual and I didn't necessarily put it on my face but I would like put it on my chest or maybe my stomach or whatever and I created like a nighttime routine and ritual and then maybe I would like wash it with it or something like that so I wouldn't use it as a skincare replacement but I did like the ritual piece of it so that's the only time I would use a solid moisturizer and I would never use one in a stick just not for me well I'm looking at that they advertise it as

41:12Bryan Barron: having 68 actives in their concentration but then I'm looking at their ingredient list I don't see

41:17Paula Begoun: 68 ingredients there are not like a lot maybe they're 68 letters but they have squalane

41:27Bryan Barron: you know sunflower seed wax ceramide and pee palmitotrite tetrapeptide yeah all this kind of stuff that you you find everywhere else they have rooting in there are you t i n do you know

41:43Paula Begoun: what that is i do not know it's me neither it sounds like something derived from uh you know a fungi or something i don't know yeah never heard of it it's anti-accident sourced from plants

41:56Bryan Barron: so they have like a lot of stuff you know interesting to me though they have geranol and linalool so this has got some fragrance in it in addition to farnasol

42:06Paula Begoun: citronol yeah the other thing i don't like is that they say the product contains this is i remember from clicking on the facebook ad or instagram ad being like should i get this and you know does it replace my maelstrom ritual they say it has 21 amino acids in it and the reason i don't like this statement is first of all they do not have amino acids intentionally added to the product it might come from hydrolyzed collagen or some other plant material they have in there but that's not really the same as adding 21 amino acids like amino acids on their own do different things than when they're in a polymer form.

42:47Bryan Barron: Right. But also, I thought there were only 20 amino acids. What's the other one?

42:51Paula Begoun: Well, I think there's 20 essential amino acids. I think there's other ones.

42:56Bryan Barron: Yeah. But in making proteins in the body, I think we only use 20. I mean, you can make other ones, certainly. But 21 is an interesting choice there. But perhaps there was another one discovered since I was in biochemistry back in college.

43:12Paula Begoun: Yeah, I think 20 are the essential. Like we got to have them. Okay. You know, and then there's like nine our bodies don't produce, that kind of thing. But I think there are more. They just don't exist in humans.

43:23Bryan Barron: All right. Well, I want to know if anyone has tried this product

43:27Paula Begoun: because like I said, it's beautiful.

43:28Bryan Barron: You're product curious here, huh?

43:30Paula Begoun: I'm just product curious. But after buying the Dr. Few products, you know, I took a risk. and um sure you know that was an expensive risk i took and this is also an expensive risk and i

43:43Bryan Barron: can't take it it would be expensive it seems to me that this at least would last longer than that eye cream because you know this first that's only 130 dollars and bombs do last a long time that is correct so you're right there you know what you don't last a long time underarm deodorant i've had like the same stick for like four months yeah it does and it just but i think there's some trick that they're doing. I think they colored the packaging the same color as the product. And so I might be out of product and I'm just still using it. No, I think it lasts a long time.

44:16Paula Begoun: I think it does. Because like really, how much are you putting on? You know?

44:20Bryan Barron: Yeah, you're not putting on much. So it makes you wonder, how do these companies stay in business? I don't know. Well, speaking of stay in business,

44:27Paula Begoun: I have to sign off and get to work. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you get a chance, head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave us a review. that will help other people find the show and ensure we have a full docket of beauty questions to answer.

44:40Bryan Barron: Speaking of questions, if you have a question and want to hear your voice on the show, you can just record it on your smartphone and email it to thebeautybrains at gmail.com or you can call 1-872-216-1856 and leave a voicemail. Hey, the Beauty Brains are also on Patreon. If you appreciate the fact that we don't have commercials and sponsors and we can talk about products however we want, That's only because we're supported by our listeners on Patreon. So head on over to patreon.com slash thebeautybrains and subscribe at any level. For our patrons, we also will occasionally have special events.

45:16Bryan Barron: You get transcripts and you get to have your questions answered in a higher priority than everyone else.

45:23Paula Begoun: Also follow us on our various social media accounts. On Instagram, we're at thebeautybrains2018. On X, we're at thebeautybrains. On Blue Sky, we're at thebeautybrains. We have a Facebook page, a TikTok, and a YouTube.

45:35Bryan Barron: Did you see that I actually put something on TikTok for Beauty Brains?

45:37Paula Begoun: I'm not on TikTok.

45:39Bryan Barron: Oh, well, I actually did. So if you're on TikTok, check it out.

45:43Paula Begoun: Thanks again for listening, everyone. And remember, be brainy about your beauty.

45:49Bryan Barron: Thanks, everyone.

45:56Bryan Barron: Kittens.