What really works - Episode 429

0:00Bryan Barron: Hi, I'm Perry and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

0:13Bryan Barron: 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 cosmetic industry. This is episode 429. Today we're doing something a little different. Since Valerie is on vacation and I just got back, we've decided to do a best of episode. Built around one of the questions we get asked all of the time, what beauty products actually work? And that's a harder question than it sounds because beauty companies are very good at making things sound scientific. They'll talk about clinical studies, peptides, collagens, growth factors, dermatologists will talk about things, and all sorts of impressive sounding ingredients.

0:55Bryan Barron: But, as we've learned over the years, sounding scientific and actually being scientific are not always the same thing. So for this episode, we pulled together a few of our favorite segments that help answer the bigger question. We'll talk about how to tell whether a study should be trusted, whether collagen supplements are worth taking for your skin, what actually makes a hair conditioner condition, whether epidermal growth factor is worth the hype, and how exfoliation compares to sunscreen when it comes to keeping skin looking younger. Basically, this is a beauty brain survival guide for your bathroom cabinet.

1:32Bryan Barron: Now, since this is a best of episode, you may hear a few jumps from one conversation to another, but I tried to keep the transistence pretty smooth. The theme, though, is still the same throughout. How do you separate real cosmetic science from marketing nonsense? We'll be back with a regular episode next time, but let's get started with one of the most important questions we've ever had to answer. How do you know if a beauty study can actually be trusted?

2:06Bryan Barron: Speaking of fuzzy and warm, why don't we move on to Lisa's audio question.

2:11Paula Begoun: Hi Perry and Valerie. Thank you so much for all you do to inform the masses and make sure that we have accurate information. I am so very grateful for this and I have learned so much from your podcasts and some of your webinars. I just have a quick question. First of all, I am a recovering clean beauty formulator and the reason I got into clean beauty was because of the quote-unquote

2:38Bryan Barron: studies that villainized traditional cosmetic chemistry using synthetic chemicals. Many of your podcasts take time to debunk studies from the EWG or similar sites, which is fabulous. But I'm wondering, what are the hallmarks of a trustworthy study?

2:57Paula Begoun: How do I know that the information that I'm reading in any given study can be trusted? Thank you so much for answering my question and I so look forward to your answer. Bye.

3:11Bryan Barron: Well, thanks for that question, Lisa. This is a pretty good one, huh, Valerie?

3:15Paula Begoun: It is. And we talk about this, not this specific topic per se, but sprinkled in here and there, we always talk about on the show, like, how do you know whether or not you can believe something?

3:26Bryan Barron: Yeah. And it's, there's, the consumers are inundated with all kinds of information. Social media makes it so easy to get any kind of information out there. And if you're following the right people, that's good. If you're following the less right people, that can be bad because there's a lot of misinformation out there also. So how do you know that a study can be trustworthy? I think the first is you look is where is it published? is it a reputable journal? Is it indexed by PubMed? That will give you more faith that it's more believable. If it's just published on somebody's blog, it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but it probably isn't quite right.

4:15Paula Begoun: Well, I think the great thing about peer-reviewed literature is that it's gone through a process, and some things get through. Nature has published a couple things where I'm like, whoa, slow your roll, nature. That's not cool that you did that.

4:28Bryan Barron: Well, also, if you look at the peer review process, you know, I've been a peer reviewer. Nobody's paying me to do this. And, you know, the editors are sending out articles. They're like, oh, who do we know could read this? And it's a long article. And, you know, you have to make some assumptions that the people doing the studies did reasonable things. And so I can understand how something could slip through peer review if you're not looking at every detail and you're really knowledgeable about what they were doing.

5:00Paula Begoun: Exactly. But on the contrary to peer-reviewed literature are these open access journals. And on one hand, I really enjoy open access journals because they're free. Anyone can go to these journals and take a look at them and get the information. Whereas most of the journals like JAMA and even the International Journal of Cosmetic Science or the Journal of Cosmetic Science. These are paid journals. You have to either have access or purchase each article, right? It's a little bit, if you just want to peek into a study and see what happened, it's a little difficult. So these open access journals, you know, may seem great because it's like, oh, this information's free.

5:39Paula Begoun: These scientists are publishing it. The downside with an open access journal is anybody could be publishing these things. And no one is challenging this scientist's thought system or set of experiments before it gets published. And so when you see something like that, you have to say, this is great, but also take it with a grain of salt, knowing that it necessarily didn't go through a strict review process.

6:06Bryan Barron: That's true. Now, we see studies published all the time. And one of my criticisms with some studies is that it's published by people who don't really know the industry. And so the famous study that looked at parabens and whether there is a problem with them, they looked at parabens in breast cancer. They found some. They found some in the controls. So it really wasn't correlated with breast cancer per se. But the thing about that study that I found a bit ridiculous was that it was hypothesizing that parabens in their deodorants were getting into breast tissue and that was causing problems. The problem is that deodorants don't typically use parabens.

6:50Bryan Barron: So it was not even a smart study. But the person doing it, they didn't know about cosmetics really. And so they just thought they knew or something. And that happens a lot with researchers, academic researchers trying to do cosmetic stuff without knowing how cosmetics are put together even.

7:11Paula Begoun: That collaboration is really important. That's a great point. The other thing, and I always say this, if someone is giving you a piece of information, it doesn't matter where you are in life. It could be this literature that you're looking at. It could be someone on Instagram. You have to think, who is this person and what are their qualifications? Someone may look like an expert scientist online, but at the end of the day, they might not have any industry experience and they just may be really great at communicating. So who are they and why are they telling me this information? What's their agenda?

7:44What do they have to gain from sharing this?

7:47Paula Begoun: Is it non-biased? Is it their viewpoint? If you look at the paraben researcher and that article, you have to say, okay, what does this person have to gain by telling me this? Or what's their motive? Who's funding the study? That's another big, important one. And when you look at her work, you know she seems to be really interested and focused on showing that this material is really bad for us right it doesn't certainly doesn't seem unbiased a lot of the other challenges with skincare studies is that usually they're industry funded or they're funded by an ingredient supplier remember the other week perry we had the question about tectrahexyl desolascorbate and acetyl zingarone and stabilizing it and i'm like i can't believe they're slamming an ingredient they sell to sell another ingredient.

8:35Paula Begoun: It's like, you know, but if you didn't know the people in the tagline of who wrote the paper, you wouldn't know that they have this agenda to sell you this ingredient. You would think, oh, wow, they just made this discovery.

8:46Bryan Barron: That's so true. But I want to get back to that notion that the research that is funded. And if you look at in the beauty industry, you look at especially skincare, anti-aging stuff, all of that research is kind of motivated research because nobody is publishing the study that says, oh, you know, I looked at this ingredient and nothing happened.

9:07Paula Begoun: And so I wonder how much of that there is.

9:10Bryan Barron: Right. There's there's there's definitely a ton of it. So there's I think they call it the file drawer effect, where if you start a research study and you can't show positive results, you just throw it in your your desk drawer and it never comes out again. So everything that you see published has a bias towards positivity or towards proving that something is true, even though it might not be true or the evidence might not even be relevant. So many things, and we're going to talk about this later, but so many ingredients are put on the top of the skin. And in the lab, they were able to show that on a cell petri dish, it affected the cells.

9:51Bryan Barron: But if it never gets down to the cells, is it really doing anything? And that's the kind of research you find. And that's published in peer-reviewed research too. So it does make it harder to know what you can trust. But let's get to what can we trust, Valerie?

10:08Paula Begoun: Well, just in general, I mean, I think you can kind of, to say you can kind of trust everything is a bit loose. I mean, I certainly go into every paper with an open mind. Right. And I look at it, and if I can answer the questions, who did the research, who funded it, and why are they telling me this information? And I cannot be repulsed by it. I can trust it a little bit more. And two, I can also use some common sense and scientific reasoning of whether or not something seems real when you look at the study design. That's how I trust it.

10:42Bryan Barron: And I also think if you look at the size of a company that's putting out products with an ingredient, it's probably more trustworthy coming from a bigger company than from a smaller internet startup that just put up a web page and talks about an ingredient. So that's only like a heuristic. That's not necessarily going to always be true, but it's probably more true that a big company has at least done some research behind an ingredient, and you can kind of trust it more. Having said that, they are also motivated to get you to buy something, so you can't trust them completely either.

11:21Paula Begoun: Sounds like we don't trust anybody.

11:24Bryan Barron: Let's probably just start with don't trust anybody except the beauty brains. We have trust issues. We do. I think it's just the nature of being a scientist, right? Because it's so funny, like even in other industry and topics and stuff, I look at like gas, right? They have the expensive gas and the cheap gas. And I like, does that octane thing really, that just sounds like a marketing number. Or is it really going to affect my car? So I always get the cheapest gas. Meh, sorry.

11:56Paula Begoun: Oh, goodness. Well, we'll work on our trust issues this year.

11:59Bryan Barron: We will. Speaking of drama, let's get to Elvira's question.

12:03Paula Begoun: Oh, gosh. This is a hot topic. And if you are into the supplements industry, you're probably not listening to this show. But let's pretend you are. You're going to love this. Elvira says, is drinking collagen a myth? Is it effective for skin? Shall I throw out my collagen powders?

12:22Bryan Barron: Well, we've been writing about this since way early on in the Beauty Brains, and I preface all my discussions about supplements with the idea that in the United States, supplement industry is barely regulated. They're terribly regulated. So if you are buying collagen and you're drinking it and you're hoping that some of these tiny studies that show some effect, you're going to get some effect, well, you don't even know that you're getting collagen for sure. There's just no, there's no minimal quality control. And I'm sure all the supplement people will say, oh, he's just wrong about that. I'm like, well, it's not really regulated that way.

13:05Bryan Barron: So maybe there are some organizations that people can go to and get certified by, but they don't actually have to do that. And so the stuff, I know there is like a a recent news report maybe last year where they went into like a Walgreens and a CVS and they took some supplements and they tested them to see if what was on the label was actually in the bottle. And this happened, I think, in New York. And they found that, no, a lot of them did not contain the stuff that they said was in there. So I preface all my talk about supplements, just because you're buying something and it says the word collagen and it doesn't mean you're getting collagen powder.

13:43Bryan Barron: But let's talk about the science of this anyway.

13:47Paula Begoun: Let's assume you are getting the collagen powder. Let's talk about the science.

13:51Bryan Barron: Yeah. I've looked into this and I know there are studies published. Often the studies are sponsored by supplement makers, of course.

14:01Paula Begoun: That's the hard part. Yep.

14:02Bryan Barron: But there are a number of them and there's a lot of industry pressure to get scientists to believe, I think, that collagen supplements are going to be helpful. Now, the idea is that when you drink something, it gets in your stomach, it breaks down to the basic amino acids, and then your body is going to use that amino acids and proteins wherever in the body. So even if you drink collagen doesn't mean it's going to go put more collagen at your skin. There was an article published in the journal Dermatology Practical and Conceptual in 2022 called Collagen Supplements for Aging and Wrinkles, a Paradigm Shift in the Fields of Dermatology and Cosmetics.

14:45Bryan Barron: And they said, The evidence from the reviewed study suggests that both collagen supplements improve skin moisture, elasticity, and hydration when orally administered. Additionally, collagen reduces the wrinkling and roughness of the skin, and existing studies have not found any side effects to its oral supplements. So according to these researchers, there is some benefit to it. They then included, though, both oral and topical collagen can contribute to reducing or delaying skin aging, future epidemiological studies with large sample size and thorough follow-up measures would be required to comprehensively understand the potential effects of these two types of collagen on the aging process.

15:30Now, it's important to note that

15:33Bryan Barron: this is not an actual study. This was a review of 12 studies from 2010 to 2020.

15:39Paula Begoun: And that's the best they could glean from all that?

15:42Bryan Barron: Right. Exactly. So that's the best thing you can do. I mean, so you say, okay, well, all right, thanks, Perry. Is collagen, drinking collagen, is that a myth?

15:51Paula Begoun: Or is it a scam? I would have elaborated on that question.

15:55Bryan Barron: A myth or a scam, right. Well, I mean, for some supplement makers, I would say yes, it's a scam. They're probably just taking gelatin or something. They get cheap and mix it up and call it collagen. But you don't know who that is. Let's just assume they're not doing that. But drinking collagen, it's a protein and it's nutritious in that way. And I've heard it claimed that collagen is special because it contains hydroxyproline and other products don't.

16:22Paula Begoun: Which is a ringed amino acid. Excellent for heat protection in hair, but continue.

16:27Bryan Barron: Right. I mean, while there aren't a lot that contain hydroxyproline, it's not common, but it's not also exclusive to collagen. For example, you can find it in gelatin or elastin.

16:40Paula Begoun: Both animal byproducts, by the way. But some studies have shown that some of the hydroxyproline can survive the digestion process and get into your blood.

16:51Bryan Barron: Now, does that mean that then it's going to just go to your skin and make more collagen? Well, you know, some of it is, yeah, but your body doesn't actually need you to eat hydroxyproline to be able to make that portion of the protein. So, you know, it's not like this is an essential amino acid. Your body can produce this little segment. It's a little complicated, I guess, but the bottom line is that I doubt you'll see much skin improvement by drinking collagen. Now, some people claim that is effective for your skin, and you know, you can see some researchers believe that too. But I remain skeptical since most of the positive research is published.

17:33Bryan Barron: It's motivated since it's, you know, produced by the supplement makers. If they had a negative study, they certainly aren't going to publish that, right?

17:41Paula Begoun: No, they wouldn't. So Elvira just wants to know, should she throw her collagen away? And I would say, let's say it's a myth. Let's say it's a scam. in terms of beautifying your skin, not necessarily proven to work, at least a perisatisfaction. I think I would not throw the collagen away because it contains amino acids and your body needs those. So I would akin it to having meat or something like that. You're going to get the same benefit from it. So don't throw it away. Just maybe not buy it with much hope that it's going to do much for your skin. Right.

18:17Bryan Barron: You can sprinkle it on your ice cream or something and, you know finish it off no with the coffee that's what you do with the coffee right wasn't that like a trend for a while was it i i must have been a tic tac thing i actually i think it was yikes

18:30Paula Begoun: all right our next question dear valerie and perry i love your podcast well except for that episode with the creepy ai voices what i always listen to the end so i can hear the cat meows and perry saying kittens okay here are my big questions what makes a hair conditioner condition What ingredients should we look for? Are some ingredients more pricey and worth it? I have very fine hair that knots up at night. I'd get a satin pillow, but I think my cat Izzy would let her nails get caught in it. Besides a conditioner, I have to use detanglers even if I'm not shampooing. What's a good detangling agent?

19:05Paula Begoun: Thank you so much for your informative and amusing show. Chris in Battle Creek, Michigan. P.S. When Perry grows his hair to his butt, will be he posting a picture for us?

19:15Bryan Barron: When that happens, I will. But if that happens, which I hope it doesn't, that means my wife doesn't have influence over my hair anymore. So that would probably a bad thing. Well, thanks for that question, Chris. Hair conditioners. Now, this is something that I spend a lot of time on this. In 2005, I had the most shampooed head in America because mostly I was working on making a new conditioner. And so I had to wash my hair, try a conditioner prototype, wash my hair again. Yeah, you got to wash it out.

19:48Paula Begoun: Yeah. For me, I never, I would only get it done once because I have such long hair. You're lucky that your hair was so short you could do that. But they would do it once, blow dry it, and then, you know, all right, go back to the lab.

20:00Bryan Barron: Yeah. It would take a long time for you to evaluate as many prototypes as I did in the lab with your hair.

20:07Paula Begoun: Well, the good news is you can split my hair up into like five or six sections. Sure. Yeah, that can work too.

20:14Bryan Barron: All right. On to the conditioner. Hair conditioners. Basically, what you do with a hair conditioner is you want to leave a film on the fibers, and that's going to help the comb slide past the fibers. It's going to stop detangling, and it's going to make it feel smoother. and if you have the right kind of coating, it'll reflect light more and so that makes it shinier. So all kinds of good stuff with this coating. Now the coatings, you don't want it to be too thick because it'll build up on your hair and it'll look matted down. So there's a fine line. You just want a thin film coating and the way we do that are with ingredients like cationic surfactants.

20:59Bryan Barron: we can mention some of those cationic polymers and silicones those are the main three ingredients

21:06Paula Begoun: yeah i actually i pick a talk to do every year and i kind of do the circuit with it and last year my talk was on formulation strategies for conditioning hair because there is a distinct strategy to making sure that you can condition hair and it's not just throwing these cationic agents in. As Perry mentioned, there's other ingredients that you wouldn't want to put in. And really the goal is to lubricate the hair fiber with an appropriate lubricant for the hair type, to add a conditioning agent that's cationic to help go through the hair, and then making sure you're also using the right shampoo with it because the shampoo can play a role in how the conditioner performs.

21:49Paula Begoun: And when we're talking about lubricating agents, these are typically oils, silicones. They have different heavinesses. They have different lightnesses. Some of them just help when the hair is wet and you're running your hands through your hair under the water. Some of them aid when the hair is dry. So it really depends which one is in there. For the cationic conditioning agents, there are a few that we can guide you to. They have different properties though. When I would hire chemists into my lab in my previous role, everyone thought they could make a shampoo or a conditioner. And so they would just throw polyquaternium seven in a shampoo and cetrimonium chloride into a conditioner and call it a day.

22:32Paula Begoun: Well, the problem is this actually makes a great economic shampoo, more like what you would see in a hotel chain, to be honest, but it doesn't make a great shampoo. And this is because cetrimonium chloride is great at what we call wet comb. So when your hair is wet, cetrimonium chloride is the perfect detangling agent for when you're in the shower or when you step out of the shower and you want to get a comb through your hair. But it doesn't offer any lubrication or cushion on the hair whatsoever. It almost disappears into the hair. On the contrary, you can have something like oleal conium chloride or behin trimonium chloride.

23:11Paula Begoun: These you can definitely feel on the hair. And they're okay at wet comb, but they're really good at the dry comb and dry feel and wet feel. These are conditioning agents you actually feel on the hair. So as a formulator, you should be using a couple different conditioning agents to make sure the hair can comb really well and detangle when wet, which is what makes a good detangling agent. So if you're trying to detangle your hair when wet, I would look for a cetrimonium chloride. But if you want your hair to feel good, if you want to feel this coating, I would look for a behinetrimonium chloride, a behinetrimonium methosulfate.

23:49Paula Begoun: On the contrary, if you have very fine hair, they might be too heavy for you. So you have to look for maybe even a styroamidopropyl dimethylamine. That's a very lightweight conditioning agent. It's very good at wet comb, dry comb, wet feel, and dry feel is what we call it. So those are the conditioning agents I probably would look for. And then going back to the shampoo aspect, make sure you're using a shampoo that is great for your hair type. If you have really fine hair that knots up, I probably would avoid shampoos that have desalglucoside or laural glucoside in them.

24:22Bryan Barron: Right.

24:22Paula Begoun: I find that they tend to be very matting for fine hair.

24:26Bryan Barron: And there's some soap-based ones, like those solid bar soap shampoos or potassium cocoa-8. Those kinds of things are not good for fine thin hair.

24:39Paula Begoun: No, not at all.

24:40Bryan Barron: And as far as the detangling, also, you know, it's hard to beat a spray in silicones, you know. And if you're worried about buildup, something like a cyclomethicone, as long as you can still get it, that's one of those ingredients that is kind of on the way out. So the thing about it is it evaporates off of the hair. So you get the benefit of the silicone initially, and then it evaporates off. So there's no buildup. but there's environmental concerns there. So you might not be able to find those very much longer.

25:15Paula Begoun: No. And then for at nighttime, I would actually look at a way to wrap your hair up so that it's on top of your head. It's not in the way of sleeping, but that it's not going to move around at night. If you can immobilize your hair, maybe even with, you know, like a little satin bonnet or pinning it up on top of your head, that's going to be really helpful to help reduce that tangling. Because once fine hair is knotted up, it's very difficult to undo those little knots. As you know, they just tend to break off. So I would also work on some style techniques with that.

25:47Bryan Barron: Overall, conditioners are quite important. I think if you want your hair to look and feel the best, it can. If you have shorter hair, it's not as concerning, but I still like to condition every day anyway, even because it does make your hair feel better. Yeah.

26:04Paula Begoun: And sometimes I actually condition first, um, when I'm shampooing because I do have long hair and while it is, you know, the texture of male leg hair and doesn't not super easily sometimes because it's so long, it just gets really, you know, gross in the shower. So I'll actually, uh, put conditioner on the middle to the ends of my hair first and then shampoo the base and then just take their remnant conditioner and put it on the top of my hair. And sometimes that helps too.

26:29Bryan Barron: How about we move on to our next question from Kales. Is epidermal growth factor worth the hype? Epidermal growth factor. Now these, so this is a skincare ingredient. The idea is that there's these EGFs or peptides and protein change that are ostensibly meant to accelerate cellular wound healing and other biochemical effects. And whenever you see something has an impact on skin cells, the skin marketers get this idea that, oh, that would make a good active ingredient. And sometimes it does, you know. But as far as this EGF goes, if they do work in skin cells, They are meant to either boost collagen or elastin production and in that way maintain youthful skin.

27:26Paula Begoun: Well, there's no doubt that these have benefit in skin. There's plenty of literature out there to support that EGF and even keratin growth factors, if you're talking about hair, do have mechanisms within skin. The question is, is it really doing anything in your skin care when topically applied? Can it get down into the dermis? Can it survive in a skincare formulation? I would say the answer to that is probably not really. And let's say it really did work. You would be making a drug claim. And in fact, the FDA slapped a Beverly Hills skincare brand from a celebrity dermatologist because he promoted and used EGF in his products.

28:12Paula Begoun: and the FDA said, well, you're making drug claims. You know, you absolutely can't do that. And what's interesting about that story is I actually was a tester for that product line. This was before I was in the cosmetics industry and I was a paid evaluator. So I would go to this office and get pictures of my skin taken and then get the creams to take. And then that's why I distinctly remember this FDA warning letter.

28:36Bryan Barron: Yeah, well, a lot of the dermatologists do kind of skate the line because at some level they're doctors, right? They are doctors. And then when they are prescribing something, they can make it seem like there's like this medical care grade skin care, which is different. But it's not really. When it comes down to it, it's still cosmetics. And EGFs, they are interacting with your cells. And if something is going to interact with your cells and cause biochemical changes to your body, that becomes a drug. It's no longer a cosmetic, which is only supposed to affect the appearance of your skin and not in any kind of permanent way.

29:21Yeah.

29:21Paula Begoun: So are they worth the hype? I don't think so. Also, you know, they're very expensive. So it's hard to use, you know, I don't even know what a meaningful level is, but they're very expensive. So I would also imagine there's not much in the product or because most of the work is done in medical literature, they're not looking at use levels and efficacy. So it's kind of hard to say, is your product really supporting efficacy?

29:48Bryan Barron: I wonder if you use them with micro needle patches.

29:53Paula Begoun: You know, probably, actually.

29:56Bryan Barron: Yeah, probably. There should be a study done. I wonder why that hasn't happened.

30:02Paula Begoun: Yeah, well, maybe or maybe we've prompted some great ideas.

30:06Bryan Barron: Well, often the reason a study hasn't been done is it has been done and it just ended up in somebody's file cabinet because it didn't work.

30:14Paula Begoun: Or because you have to have someone pay for the work, right? People just aren't working for free. So someone has to support it.

30:23Bryan Barron: Absolutely.

30:24Paula Begoun: Question comes to us from Jennifer. Hi, I know using SPF is a necessity, which it is if you're talking to Valerie, the beauty brain.

30:33Bryan Barron: Hey, I agree. I agree. It's a necessity.

30:36Paula Begoun: If you would like to delay the aging process, would you say the same is true for exfoliation, such as an AHA exfoliant? Thank you, Jennifer.

30:47Bryan Barron: Well, I will see. I agree. When it comes to SPF and preventing cancer or making your skin look the best it can look, you should use sunscreen.

30:58Paula Begoun: But I feel, yeah, I knew this was coming.

31:02Bryan Barron: No, no. I mean, I do not use sunscreen every day. I wear hats and I do more cover up. But, you know, of course, my skin could probably look more youthful than it does. I just don't care that much. And as far as skin cancer go, that is a concern. So if I'm going to be out for an extended amount of time, I certainly will do that.

31:25Paula Begoun: Tell us more about your angle.

31:29Bryan Barron: About my angles?

31:30Paula Begoun: What do you think about exfoliation? So you've already said, okay, SPF is very important because it shields skin from ultraviolet light, which causes premature aging. It interacts with the collagen. It causes hyperpigmentation. hyperpigmentation is one age spots is one uh you know hallmark of aging on skin

31:51Bryan Barron: actually i noticed my first one like on my little cheek here it's like a little spot i'm like you know perry you should have been using sunscreen you should be using tranexamic acid to reduce that because it does penetrate the skin i i hear that's a very controversial ingredient Is it even tranexamic acid?

32:11Paula Begoun: Oh, goodness. We won't go there. So, yes, SPF is very important, and it is key to maintaining a youthful, soft, supple appearance in skin. I have an opinion on exfoliation. I would like to hear your opinion on exfoliation. Well, okay.

32:28Bryan Barron: Exfoliation, you know, on the other hand, it's certainly beneficial, and you're it's but it's more about enhancing the skin's appearance like right away right I think over the long term if you never exfoliated would anybody even notice um I think it's like it's a useful tool but it's not on the same level as SPF so if you were a person uh maybe you had your own beauty podcast and you never exfoliate um i don't think there's a downside to that is there's somebody i know who could that be no i've exfoliated on occasion i just it doesn't do anything for me but again i wash my face with shampoo so does your wife exfoliate i would like to think she does i think she does yeah for sure yeah i know she does i think i i don't even have to go in your bathroom to know she does that's right well i will say it's i suspect that

33:30Paula Begoun: exfoliation is very gendered mr cosmetic chemist likes to exfoliate but he uses these worthless exfoliants that have like he likes the physical scrubbies oh yeah like i don't knowst ives yeah i at least got him off of that but he just insists in buying these like big old bottles off Amazon. And I'm like, this is not exfoliating your skin. But he thinks it is. So I guess that's all that matters.

33:57Bryan Barron: I mean, isn't just washing your face exfoliating to some extent?

34:02Paula Begoun: This is true. Let me give you my take. You know, we get lots of questions on here. You know, should I spend all this money on a serum? Should I spend all this money on this and that and doing these things? And the reality is just having a simple routine, regardless of what products you by is going to make the hugest difference in how well your skin ages. The things that you have to do are actually cleansing your face, exfoliating, and wearing SPF. And if you do those three things day in and day out, maybe not exfoliating every day, but exfoliating a couple times a week, you're going to see a huge improvement in the look of your skin.

34:45Paula Begoun: The SPF is going to protect you in the long run and yes it protects you from cancer not exfoliating is not going to give you cancer but it's going to make a huge difference meaning exfoliating in how your skin looks i had a friend and she kept saying no matter what moisturizer i use my skin is always so dry and when i put my makeup on i always have these huge dry patches all over my face and i said when's last time you've exfoliated your skin? And she was like, never. And do me a favor. I'm going to, we were actually in Vegas for this. So I said, I'm going to give you this exfoliant and I want you to use it, moisturize over top of it.

35:26Paula Begoun: And boom, a world of difference because you might not think even in aging, yes, it does something immediately, but it actually does something in the long run as well. Because if you are not exfoliating, you have all this dead skin all over your face and you're effectively hydrating with your moisturizer really really really really really dead skin cells and yes your stratum corneum these are dead cells as well but you can at least hydrate them if you have an extra thick layer of dead skin buildup you're doing nothing for that skin underneath even though it's also technically dead and flat so right i just feel

36:04Bryan Barron: But you certainly can make it feel and look better.

36:08Paula Begoun: Yes. And that's what exfoliating is going to do. It's going to get you to the real deal, the stuff that you have left, and it's going to make you feel good. And if you have hydrated skin and a restored barrier, hopefully over the long run that helps. Now, is it like as essential as SPF? when you think about it from a brass tax like long-term health spf is the best thing but i still think every person needs to be exfoliating if they care about a youthful look yeah i kind of

36:38Bryan Barron: think of it like this though if you say you don't exfoliate for like six months and then you exfoliate you pretty much are gonna get all the benefits of exfoliation as you would have got if you did it once a week for those six months. It's like it's built up and you can all wipe off in one shot, right?

37:02Paula Begoun: I see what you're saying.

37:04Bryan Barron: If you're going to go out, maybe you've got a wedding coming up. Okay, let me exfoliate before the wedding or like a special occasion, but like day to day.

37:12Paula Begoun: I think with poor, I see what you're saying, but I feel like exfoliation also helps with pore reduction. It helps prevent breakouts because what happens with breakouts is you have dead skin. Dead skin gets in the pores.

37:26Bryan Barron: Based on some of the brands that you buy, it could be pore creation because they're really expensive.

37:35Paula Begoun: Oh, gosh. The dead skin blocks all this oil. The bacteria on your skin are like, oil. I love eating oil. Then the oil can't expunge. Then you get all this inflammation. I feel like it does help for a lot of reasons. Perry, I would like to challenge you this.

37:52Bryan Barron: Okay. What's the challenge?

37:54Paula Begoun: Can you please, please, please exfoliate your entire face tonight?

38:00Bryan Barron: Do I have to shave?

38:02Paula Begoun: No. Let me restart. Exfoliate only half of your face tonight.

38:07Bryan Barron: Half? Okay.

38:08Paula Begoun: Okay. I will try that. In one month, we are going to exfoliate the half again. Okay.

38:15Bryan Barron: Okay. So tell me what you think after six months of this. All right. This sounds like an interesting experiment.

38:22Paula Begoun: I'm going to put it on the calendar. Half face exfoliation tonight. And make sure if you exfoliate though, you put on SPF because here's the other downside to exfoliation, guys. It actually could make you older. I totally forgot about this. Especially if you are using alpha hydroxy acids. Perry, why could it make someone look older and it actually increased their risk of sun damage and sun cancer?

38:45Bryan Barron: Well, I think if you remove that top layer, which is what exfoliation does, that just means more UV damage could get down to lower in the skin. And so that could be dangerous. And, you know, that's going to increase the look of aging. Now, as far as immediate aging, I mean, it gives you sort of a glowing effect, but that's generally looked at as more youthful.

39:11Paula Begoun: so i guess exfoliating could make you look older if we think about it that way yeah so you have to be wearing spf wherever you exfoliate if you are using acids and actually that's a required warning by the fda everyone should have that if there's acids in your product they're required to put a sunburn alert um on the packaging now say you exfoliate before you go to bed and then you go to sleep for eight hours and you wake up is that i mean you some dead skin cells has built up over those eight hours i think you gotta be uh cautious and put the spf on of course

39:55Bryan Barron: i mean you've gotta you know use spf every day for sure unless you want you know a catcher's mitt looking face like my own you can only age leather so much so that's the great news that is the great thing speaking of the great thing you hear that music

40:12Paula Begoun: meow meow meow those are my lab kittens if you get a chance head over to apple podcasts and leave us a review that's going to help other people find the show and i'm sure we have a full docket of beauty questions to answer speaking of questions if you have one just

40:25Bryan Barron: record it on your smartphone and email it to the beauty brains at gmail.com and we can put your voice on the show. The Beauty Brains are also on Patreon. Head over to patreon.com slash the beauty brains and support the show. That helps keep the show ad free and also lets us give our honest opinions and you get your transcript of the show and you get special events and you also get your questions a higher priority.

40:54Paula Begoun: Also, don't forget to follow us on our various social media accounts. On Instagram, we're at the beauty brains 2018. On X, we're at the Beauty Brains. We have a Facebook page and a TikTok.

41:06Bryan Barron: TikTok, TikTok.

41:07Paula Begoun: Thanks again for listening, everyone. And remember, be brainy about your beauty.

41:13Bryan Barron: Thanks, everyone.

41:20Paula Begoun: Kittens.