Hair Loss from Hair Care!? W/ Cicely Shillingford PhD

0:10Welcome to the EcoWell podcast. This is a show about the science of cosmetics. My name's Jen and I'll be your host. Is hair care really the cause of hair loss that a lot of people attribute it to be? How does this vary and how do hair care brands navigate this so this isn't a problem? To help us navigate the topic, this week's episode features cosmetic chemist Dr. Cicely Schillingford. We get into the science, what's behind hair loss, and how hair care may or may not be involved with that, the class action lawsuits we've seen over the years, common misconceptions, and lots more. Before the episode, a quick thank you to all my Patreon supporters for continuing to support my Sciacom efforts, including this podcast.

1:00You've been such a motivation that's kept this show on the air for so long. Thanks for helping me continue to share these kinds of conversations. If you'd like to support my work on Patreon and it's accessible, you can find me at patreon.com slash the eco-o. Other great ways to support this podcast is by subscribing to it on whatever platform you listen to it, writing a review for the podcast if you haven't already and sharing. With that, here's the episode.

1:30So I am here with Dr. Cicely Schillingford and we're going to have a conversation about a hot topic that's been out there in the zeitgeist for a long while, I think, Like since I've started in the beauty industry, at least, like in the early 2010s or, yeah, I think there were already class action lawsuits about consumers blaming hair care products for hair loss. And so the idea of this conversation is around, like, are they? Are consumer perceptions about hair loss related to cosmetic products aligned often with reality? Or could there be other things going on maybe? So I'm going to get right to it with my first question.

2:31You can comment on anything that I said in that intro, but our consumer perceptions. Oh, and just for reference, Cicely is a hair scientist and she works for the brand Amica. Did I say that correctly? Amica.

2:50Cicely Shillingford PhD: Almost got it. I think it was closer than the last time. Yeah. The accent syllable is getting closer. I have a hard time saying that name because I have a business relation with somebody named Amika. Amika, if you're listening, you have ruined my ability to say this brand's name. But my question, yeah, is are consumer perceptions and complaints about hair loss related to hair care products generally aligned with what's actually happening from your point of view? Yeah, yeah. From my point of view, it's such a sensitive question. Obviously, hair loss is very emotional and tons of people ask me about this all the time.

3:40Cicely Shillingford PhD: And I previously, too, Amika, I used to work for a company called Roe that had a lot of dermatological hair products. Although I'm not a dermatologist, I am quite familiar with hair loss. I've developed several products for hair loss in the past. So I'll provide that caveat. I don't know everything, but hair loss, I think it's first important to ground ourselves in like what hair loss actually is and what's occurring because it is multifaceted and it is very individualized ultimately to the lived experience of the person that's experiencing that hair loss. The most common cause of hair loss, and I'll speak specifically about women just because that's the consumer that I'm most familiar with in my current line of work.

4:28Cicely Shillingford PhD: But the most common form of hair loss in women is something called androgenic alopecia, which involves a heightened sensitivity at the hair follicle level to testosterone and testosterone derivative compounds. It can also be due to excess testosterone produced at the hair follicle level. So it's a bit of both. And androgenic alopecia results in the progressive thinning of the hair follicle, which means that over time it gets narrower and narrower. And then those thicker hairs turn into something called vellus hairs, which are those like thin peach fuzzies you get on your face until the follicle eventually stops working altogether.

5:10Cicely Shillingford PhD: And this is caused by a testosterone derivative called DHT, that's dihydroxy testosterone. When it's overproduced at the follicle and the hair follicle really has all the molecular machinery needed to produce hair. So circulating testosterone is oftentimes not a good indicator of whether you're likely to have this type of hair loss. That testosterone continues to progressively tighten that hair follicle. And that's essentially what it is. And often it's represented in women as diffuse hair thinning, a widening part. Often the hairline stays intact, but you'll see thinning across the board. And it'll kind of happen progressively and slowly over time.

5:50Cicely Shillingford PhD: Women with PMOS, which was previously rebranded from PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome to polymetabolic ovarian syndrome, I believe now, hopefully that's correct. A lot of women that have this condition experience this type of hair loss because excess androgen production is one of the ideological causes of PMOS, something that I suffer from myself. So I'm quite familiar with that. And it's extremely common. It's sometimes up to 20 % of female populations. So this is a huge cause of hair loss and almost up to 50 % of women will experience this in their lifetime. So if that's almost half of women, it begs the question, like, are your cosmetics, your cosmetics have nothing to do with this type of hair loss.

6:33Cicely Shillingford PhD: It's strictly hormonal. The second most common type of hair loss in women is called telogen effluvium, this is your stress-induced hair loss. And stress is obviously also extremely common. This is going to impact about 20 to 30 % of women at some point in their lives and probably multiple times throughout your life. What happens is that when you have a stressful event, let's say it's a divorce, the COVID pandemic, illness, rapid weight loss, a changing job, a traumatic event in your life, a death in the family, it could be anything. Your body kind of tends to turn off non-essential functions to keep you alive.

7:17Cicely Shillingford PhD: Hair is not an essential function. Your hair is constantly cycling through these various phases of growth and dormancy and growth and shedding. And while While most of the hair is often in its growth phase, there's always about 5 % to 10 % of that hair that's in its shedding phase. And when you have a stressful event, more of the hair ends up in that shedding phase. So you shed your hair. Now, this is completely reversible. Once the stressful event is eliminated, the hair will regrow. There are many other types of hair loss. The third most is often like nutrient deficiencies, iron deficiency, you know, sometimes vitamin D deficiency, very extremely rarely biotin deficiency.

8:03Cicely Shillingford PhD: Biotin deficiency has almost nothing to do with hair growth. It's extremely, extremely rare. And then you've got things like autoimmune issues that can cause certain types of alopecia, traction alopecia. So tension, a lot of black women that get a lot of protective styles, braids, they're going to suffer from this a lot. Scarring alopecia. alopecia. There's some other less common causes, but androgenic alopecia and telogen effluvium are the most common. So I ground us in this understanding because these have nothing, well, the first really has nothing to do with cosmetic products. I would say the second has a relationship, but it's not what you might think.

8:42Cicely Shillingford PhD: So if you're using a cosmetic and you see that someone on the internet's like, this causes hair loss, that's probably going to already be a stressful event for you because you're saying, oh, okay, somebody used that X product and they're complaining about hair loss. Oh my God, that's in my shower. Like I getting hair loss. And then you're probably going to get stressed about that. And then with the stress, every time you see more hair shedding, it's like, oh my God, it's more than yesterday. And that's more than the day before. And then it's sort of this cascade of like stress that happens. And that is actually going to contribute to hair loss.

9:16Cicely Shillingford PhD: You're going to start experiencing like weeks and months later after that stressful event. And so it sort of catalyzes the cycle of like stress and hair loss and stress and hair loss. And, and once you're kind of aware of this, I think you'll start to notice that like when stressful things happen in your life and then you see the hair loss, they get more stress and then it kind of, it kind of repeats itself. You know, that it's just from my perspective, that tends to be what happens, especially with how accessible social media is these days, how much issues in which cosmetic brands might be accused of hair loss become extremely visible.

9:55Cicely Shillingford PhD: And so it sort of kind of avalanches on itself. And from my perspective, that's why sometimes consumer opinions about what's actually causing the hair loss might not actually be related to what's really causing their hair loss. It was a very long answer. No, that was a really good overview. And I will just say for my listeners that if you want more on hair loss management, I had a podcast last podcast season with Dr. Leona Yip, who's a dermatologist researcher, very aligned with the commentary from Dr. Jenny Thomas, who came on my podcast a little while ago to talk about how cosmetic products theoretically could be a little bit more.

10:43help prevent hair loss in certain conditions where oxidative damage may contribute to a poor scalp environment that translates to the hair anchoring not being quite right. That could lead to shedding. Scalp health seems to be really important. There's a lot of really interesting research from many different companies. Although the claims should be, I mean, like when you read the labels thought through on like, what is compliant with cosmetic language?

11:18Cicely Shillingford PhD: It's like so multifactorial, multiple things can be happening at once. Like I live in New York City, there's a pollution rich environment. I'm surely exposed to tons of pro-oxidants all the time. And I also have androgenic alopecia. I've always had progressive thinning of my hair for a long time. time there's multiple things and sun I'm my scalp is so sensitive to the sun and like on a high uv index day I'm spreading sunscreen on my scalp because that can be really damaging and then you you could have an allergy to products and then you I mean I'm sure we'll talk about this more but allergic contact dermatitis is going to disrupt your scalp environment and put your scalp into a state of stress and it could just be multiple things at once too which is why it's It's just almost never from my point of view, a single product because it's just too simple.

12:07Cicely Shillingford PhD: You know, it's like hair is too complicated to just be one particular thing. And cosmetics are regulated to be safe under most. And obviously there's lots of brands that are doing silly things, but it's very rarely just kind of like one specific thing. You know what I mean? churning to some of the I think like the famous class action lawsuit that kind of kicked off some of the hair loss discussions from cosmetic products maybe I have a warped memory but this was like pre-covid and then after the delineation but I'm not sure if you remember the it was a what did they call it? It was like a clen, a clendishner by Wem.

12:57It was essentially a conditioner with a little bit of a, I don't even, I don't, I would, I'm sorry. I didn't look at what was actually in the formula. I don't know how much of like cleansing surfactants were in there. There was a bunch of class action lawsuits for that brand. I heard a lot of cosmetic scientists

13:18Cicely Shillingford PhD: opining on, and I'm so sorry I didn't look into this at all, about how, I don't even know if there's cleansing surfactants in their formula, how the reason for this hair loss may have been the fact that it wasn't cleansing the scalp. And if you remember, if you go listen to my conversation with Leona, a really important component of protecting your scalp is making sure that it's properly clean. And so what the cosmetic scientists were saying at the time was that if you're just conditioning, you're just conditioning, you're not cleansing. And then all the pollutants or whatever is just adding and adding thoughts on that potential explanation.

14:06Or was it even the products? I guess we'll never know for these types of things. Like, were people. Was there ever a study done to actually see that this is a phenomenon that was happening associated with these products? Because that's not how class action lawsuits work. But what are your thoughts on the potential for using just conditioning kind of products like that to contribute to hair loss through the mechanism that was explained?

14:35Cicely Shillingford PhD: Yeah, it's a great question. I wasn't super familiar with this one class action either, but it was interesting looking into it and looking at that point of view of the fact that it's not really cleansing the scalp. I tend to prefer shampooing the scalp, shampooing the hair. I tend to agree that it is the best way to maintain a healthy scalp environment for most people. Keeping your scalp clean and free of debris and hair follicles and pollution. and ensuring that you're cleansing it at least a couple times a week is very important for the health of the hair growth. Your hair follicles are essentially these like, I always liken them to like a scallion growing out of the ground.

15:23Cicely Shillingford PhD: You've got this like bulb at the bottom that's under the surface of the earth. And you can imagine if it's just coming back to the hair follicle analogy here, you know, if it's just clogged with oil and junk and pollution and whatever, it's just not producing a good environment for growth. You know, it's like if your soil is dry and gross and not healthy, and it's got tons of contamination in there, it's like not going to be a great harvest for you. It's the same thing, right? So I just actually got back from Seoul where I did a scalp spa for the first time. Seoul is like one of the cosmetic beauty capitals of the world.

16:05Cicely Shillingford PhD: The scalp health is really, really important to that consumer. And I was so shocked to look at the before and afters of my scalp because I do wash my hair at least twice a week, sometimes three times a week, which I feel like is decent, especially because I have curls and I have really fine hair. And they were like, oh, your scalp was like pretty oily. And I was like, wow, I've never considered my scalp to be oily. But even when you don't think that there's a lot of like gunk in there, I'm like looking at the hair follicle. I'm like, oh my God, there's like all this stuff that's sort of like around every follicle.

16:38Cicely Shillingford PhD: Keeping the scalp clean is really important. I can certainly imagine how not cleansing the scalp frequently might contribute to hair loss in some people. Again, I think it's very difficult to just relay it to one specific product. It really depends on the health of your scalp, your sensitivity to certain ingredients, your sensitivity to fragrance, perhaps. My husband has psoriasis. That's also an autoimmune issue and he cannot use any fragrance or he'll get scarring and lesions. And so that can definitely impact his scalp, although he has a very full head of hair. It's hard to say looking at these class actions, like were these consumers' hair loss complaints directly attributed to these products or were they not?

17:28Cicely Shillingford PhD: But I will say, I do think that kind of stress social media cycle is a contributing factor. And it is tough to see brands, especially the smaller brands, have to settle for almost$30 million. And knowing that it's probably a lot of stress induction, which is reversible. And sometimes these class actions can really get out of hand. Something I don't think a lot of consumers realize is how big the industry of class action is and how much money consumer lawyers make just to attack brands and force them into a settlement. Most brands are not going to want to spend millions on legal fees and trials, so they will settle.

18:10Cicely Shillingford PhD: And if you make enough noise, again, it gets to social media. Other consumers see if they stop buying the brand, it can be really damaging for the brand, which is why the consumer lawyer industry is so big. And consumer lawyers' motivations are quite nefarious and consumers have to understand that as well. Were all these people experiencing some sort of stressful event? Almost certainly. Is it directly attributed to the product? It's really difficult to say. Again, And hair loss is super individualized. But I do think that stress just really plays a huge role in almost any class action lawsuit related to hair loss.

18:50Yeah, especially in the States for class action lawsuits. Oh, my gosh. Some of the things that I've heard from my friends in business who have brands. The class action or just like the lawsuits in general that have been leveraged against their brands. for things that like they did nothing wrong but like it was so expensive for them to do anything about it that they folded this seems to be based off of the information that I've been getting from the independent beauty association which is a trade association for cosmetic companies small to medium-sized cosmetic companies in the United States well maybe did I say especially in the United States.

19:35So yeah, especially in the United States. Oh my gosh. I just want to say that as I used to consult brands for formula development and product development, I've been trying to step away because I don't super like it, but like brands then are considering the markets that they're going to be sold in and like thinking about insurance. And the moment they say like, oh, we want to sell in the States. The insurance rate is so much higher because of the risks associated with consumer lawsuits that is very unique to that market. Yeah. And that the consumer lawsuits are on the rise, specifically in the beauty industry.

20:17And it's because cosmetic companies are kind of easy targets. And for American listeners, actually for everyone, like you should look, just Google current calls for participants in a class action lawsuit. Like they're on Google. There's often like, sometimes there's like commercials about it of like, have you used this product? Did you know that this could cause that? Do you experience that? We think that you can make money. Like that is how it's framed. That is so compelling for people who are considering participating in these lawsuits because like people want answers to their problems. And then when this very loud campaign is telling you that we have the answers and not only do we

21:15Cicely Shillingford PhD: have the answers, we're going to do something for you to make it better for you. That's compelling. and then it's compelling when more people join in in those laws. So I feel really badly for the brands that are implicated in this. We don't have to make this a conversation about kids who are having a loss. As I was looking into this case, there was like one consumer lawyer website. They make like$1.7 billion a year selling these Wend products. And I was like, there's what? Like the, obviously like just the size of the brand, like that's just not true. I was looking at other estimates and more of like the five to 10 million revenue, annual revenue range.

22:00Cicely Shillingford PhD: So it was just, these brands don't have this kind of cash to defend these things. And that's why safety is so important in having the substantiation on file. and a lot of smaller brands just don't know how much it costs to substantiate product safety. You know, over the years, as more and more ingredients have been implicated in hair loss in these class action lawsuits, again, with very little supporting evidence to demonstrate that there are safety issues. We've been restricted from using safer alternatives. I mean, obviously preservatives are a huge class of ingredients that are implicated in these kinds of lawsuits.

22:44Cicely Shillingford PhD: And when we can't use them as formulators, you end up with other concerns, such as poorly preserved products. And that is a much greater threat to consumer health than the 10 ppm of formaldehyde released from DMDM ID and to enter however much it's going to be. that's a stressful issue because we've moved from an era of I mean let me like rewind a little bit and contextualize what I'm saying a bit more in the 70s to like early 2000s preservatives were a lot more effective so things like parabens DMDM hidantuin which releases small quantities of formaldehyde that are less than what you'll receive if you were to eat a pear or many other types of fruit that contain small quantities of this naturally occurring molecule.

23:40Cicely Shillingford PhD: High levels of this are associated with cancer, but at the levels that are present in your daily exposure, again, by eating like fruit, it's really, really not a toxicity risk. And there are international governing bodies that study religiously the safety of these ingredients and have limits on how they need to be used based on consumer exposure. So if you're putting X amount of something on your scalp or skin X amount of times a week or a day, they're calculating these safety limits based on actual toxicology. And those are the regulations we follow. Most of these bigger multinational brands are abiding by EU regulations, which tend to have the strictest limits.

24:24Cicely Shillingford PhD: They tend to be a bit more conservative than the FDA. So if you're a smaller brand and you're selling in the US only, you're not beholden to some of these international regulations. And you maybe don't even know about the state regulations because our federal regulations are a little wild and crazy, but they've gotten a lot better since a few years ago when a cosmetic piece of regulation was passed by the FDA called MOCRA, which even consumers are familiar with these days, which is basically obligating brands to have safety substantiation on file. That's, I would say, the main thing consumers should know about it.

25:04Cicely Shillingford PhD: Prior to that regulation, our federal regulation wasn't the best in the United States, I would say, but states have much stricter laws, California and Washington being two that are a lot more restrictive about a lot of ingredients. And Washington, in fact, early last year passed regulation around formaldehyde releasing preservatives, restricting them and banning them for use, which goes against the safety regulations that are established by the European Union and ignores a lot of data that shows that these preservatives are highly effective and exceedingly safe at the doses that are recommended by EU regulating bodies and other international regulating bodies.

25:47Cicely Shillingford PhD: And we also have limits in the US too. It's just on fewer things. So it's a little more nuanced. But anyway, so now that a lot of these preservatives are restricted, not just from a regulatory point of view, the reputation that an ingredient has from a consumer point of view can impact its use. And by that, I mean, you basically can't formulate with DMDM hydiantuin or any parabens in the U.S. anymore. I mean, especially if you're a bigger brand that's more susceptible to class action because consumers are scared of these ingredients and have been told stories about their safety that are not necessarily rooted in actual research.

26:30Cicely Shillingford PhD: So, you know, while everything I'm saying is sort of my own opinions, I'll, you know, just speak a little bit about the brand I work for just because we don't formulate with these ingredients. Although, like I'm saying, some of these decisions aren't necessarily rooted in safety, we do like to meet consumers where they are. If they don't feel safe using an ingredient because they've seen something about it on social media. At the end of the day, I always say like consumers don't have time to read a PhD thesis about parabens every time they buy a shampoo. They just kind of like need to make the decision that feels the best for themselves and their family in a very quick moment.

27:06So that's why

27:08Cicely Shillingford PhD: we're pretty restrictive with ingredients just because, you know, we've got to meet people where they are and we don't expect them to understand all this nuance. But nonetheless, less effective preservatives are now being used in cosmetics because of the restrictions around some of these, you know, parabens, amygdantolin, isothiazolony, and some of these other kinds. And it's been really difficult. It's difficult to preserve products. It puts the onus not on the preservative itself to keep the products safe from contamination from bacteria, mold, fungi, and yeast, but on the entire process, the manufacturing, the GMP, which is good manufacturing practices, which is a set of standards that manufacturers must follow in compliance with the US FDA to ensure cleanliness, safety, standard operating procedures are followed and so on and so forth.

28:01Cicely Shillingford PhD: Manufacturers and companies that make products have to be so careful with contamination and with practices within manufacturers, which should always be the case, but it's now just more important than ever, given that preservative systems are, you know, just much more difficult and we're restricted to preservatives that might be more pH dependent, such as things like organic acids, things like sodium benzoate. They work best at low pH. So it's not great for maybe something like a shampoo. And then other preservatives might need strict control of how much water is in the formula that necessitates careful formulation.

28:43Cicely Shillingford PhD: And then when you think about things like shampoos that have a high water content, somewhat of a higher pH than things like conditioners and are in warm, humid environments, oftentimes wet hands continuing to open and close these bottles. It's very, very important to preserve these products from contamination under those circumstances. It's scary to think about, but there's, you know, cosmetics are not made in sterile environments. There's a million ways in which some sort of pathogen can get into a product from the water systems to the equipment, the machinery, how they're cleaned. These materials are changing hands so many times.

29:20Cicely Shillingford PhD: And so preservation is important. And the risk of injury from something like a formaldehyde releaser is just so much lower than from something like a pathogen, especially if you're immunocompromised. And I think that that dissonance is hard to understand. I actually had a conversation with our VP of supply chain a while ago, who's like showing me some, I don't know, maybe it was a class action about like a carcinogen. And he's like, this seems much scarier than like the bacteria. And I was like, well, actually it's the opposite because you need repeated exposure of that carcinogen over the course of your life to really have it accumulate and cause an issue versus if you have, you know, one bacteria that you're sensitive to on your skin, that can trigger an immune reaction that can be much more dangerous for people who are immunocompromised.

30:08Cicely Shillingford PhD: All it takes is this kind of, you know, small loading of this organism and you can have an immune reaction throughout your entire body because that's how the immune system works. And he was like, wow, I like never would have thought about that. That's true. So anyway, yeah, those are some of my thoughts about preservatives. Yeah. Like people can die from a poorly preserved product. Worst case, or go blind. You're not going to die from a paraben. No. For reference, for my audience, I had a round table that's going to be aired this season. I think I'll probably have it before this conversation, so look back, is a roundtable on the formaldehyde conversation in cosmetics.

30:57And we spend a lot of time talking about the exposure scenario of formaldehyde related to formaldehyde donor preservatives. Just to re-emphasize what Cicely was saying. It's overwhelmingly it's supported to be safe for the vast majority of the population. There is a tiny minority that seems to have a sensitivity to the preservative, but that could be said about just about any ingredient. Someone somewhere will be sensitive to just about every ingredient. Formaldehyde donor preservatives are specifically helpful for the specific products that they're formulated into, unlike some of the now alternatives.

31:53When we're talking about the manufacturing side of things and how this can all domino to impact businesses and like the economy. Resistant microbes is a really big issue, including in manufacturing environments. And having a poorly preserved formula may compound that. It's just so complicated. It's such a complicated equation for putting safe products onto the market that the frustration for me is it just hasn't been well communicated to the public. To your point, nobody has time for this stuff. But because people do want answers, there's all this noise. It's created gaps so that misinformation can kind of fill the void.

32:49And I think that this is like a classic example of that. So much so that in, as Sisley was mentioning, in Washington state, they are banning formaldehyde donor preservatives and making all these statements about how formaldehyde donor preservatives, these are my comments, not Sisley's. They're saying that these preservatives are causing cancer because of the formaldehyde released and like disproportionately in certain populations which is like it's just there's so much noise in the marketplace and it's just like not the case at all and it's such a blatant demonstration of science literacy on these topics but like why don't people know why don't people understand me breathing out represents more formaldehyde released in my exhalation than what you're exposed to.

33:49Are you concerned with exhales? No. It's a misunderstanding about hazard versus risk that I think has painted a lot of these discussions. So people are so over-focused on things that they really don't need to be focused on with ingredients because they don't understand the safety context, the formulation context, how it all works. So maybe this leads really well to the next question. So we've been just talking about the complexity of the safety equation. So maybe you can help us understand what goes into verifying the safety of products that enter the market and what gives you confidence that products that are being put out based off of the safety substantiation that is accruing are unlikely to cause hair loss?

34:42Yeah, it is a deep question and it's very complicated.

34:49Cicely Shillingford PhD: So it starts truly with the practices at the manufacturing site where the products are being made, I would say. So formula aside for a moment, safety really starts with choosing manufacturing partners. If you're a new brand, you're looking for a manufacturer that are going to meet the standards that you want to ensure that the safety of the products coming out is strong. There are a lot of cosmetic manufacturers to choose from, smaller, bigger, et cetera. and there's a very big difference in terms of how these businesses operate. So, I mean, I'll walk you through some of the things I look for when we're looking at a good manufacturer, because that is going to be the most important thing from my perspective, from product safety.

35:46Cicely Shillingford PhD: So I spoke a little bit about cosmetic GMP. Let me tell you about some of the things that like we're paying attention to. Like say we're walking on a manufacturing floor and I'm looking at certain things. We do a lot of walkthroughs, audits, things like this. The quality of the water system, I would say, is extremely important. We love to use USP water. That's US pharmacopoeia grade. That is the strictest standard for the purity of your water. There are water systems that are not as good, some that are good, some that are better. Do the people that are working the water system, are they paying?

36:24Cicely Shillingford PhD: How often are they sampling it? How often are they testing it? How many ports are tested on a daily basis? That means maybe the ports that are leaving the water treatment facility or the ports that are actually being used to put the water into the tanks where the products are formulated. How often are those swabbed to ensure that there's no contamination? What kind of water are they using in their cleaning? Are there certain things cleaned with deionized water versus USP water versus city water, which might have more contamination. Like think about, you know, all the little things that are used to make cosmetic products, these big tanks, the mixing equipment, you know, tools and spatulas and buckets and all these things.

37:04Cicely Shillingford PhD: And, you know, what are their sanitary practices like? Is there washing area in a separate room that has a proper divider so that you're not having contamination? Are there sticky mats on the floors when you're going from space to space to limit contamination and dust collection in certain areas? Are areas where products being mixed, properly segregated from where materials are being received? Because materials are being received from loading docks that are outside. So you have doors opening all the time and dust flying in from the exterior and pollution. So are these areas properly segregated so that you're reducing contamination?

37:40Cicely Shillingford PhD: where there are sampling booths in a manufacturer. So every time a raw material, which is like an ingredient for a product, will enter a manufacturer, in some way, shape, or form, it needs to be evaluated. So what does that evaluation look like? Are you testing for contamination as soon as the raw material enters the facility? Do you have the ability to test for that right away? Or do you have to send that raw material to a third-party facility to test for contamination? Are you receiving that material into your inventory only after it's been cleared for this, you know, microbial test? How are materials that have not been tested segregated from materials that have been tested?

38:21Cicely Shillingford PhD: Is there a proper quarantine area? I could go on and on and on. I also think it's important to look at the culture of a facility when you visit. Are the lights bright in the area where the lines are being filled? You know, is it temperature controlled? Are people happy there? Because people that are unhappy at a workplace will make more mistakes or they won't care as much about quality. How often are products being tested when they're being, you know, packaged up on the production line? And I literally could have a whole podcast about this. And I'm not, I wouldn't call myself like a quality expert.

38:56Cicely Shillingford PhD: I do oversee our quality team. I have an amazing senior director of quality, but it's definitely not my like trade, not my line of training. But these are just some things that I think about because I really do think safety starts with how the manufacturing of the products is coming to life. And the truth is that a lot of smaller brands can't use big manufacturers that have higher standards or just might not be able to critically evaluate the safety of a process that they have. So it's difficult. So now we can talk about the product itself and how we evaluate the safety of the product after it's been created.

39:30Cicely Shillingford PhD: And there are some standard tests that are used pretty much across North America and across the world. The first of those is the preservative efficacy test. This is a study in which your product is essentially inoculated with a bunch of bugs. So bacteria, mold yeast, whatever. And then we make sure that the preservative can kill those bugs over the course of 28 days and that there's significant reduction at certain time points. So that tells you, okay, it's actually killing these things. There's also a portion of the study called the suitability test, which is essentially going to show you that if you knock out the preservative system, bacteria like can be recovered and do grow.

40:16Cicely Shillingford PhD: So we kind of do this study in like both ways just to make sure the preservative is effective essentially. So that's critical and products really like should not and cannot be launched without this study. It's extremely important. There's ways to add a lot of rigor to the study as well. There's standard methodology, but you, you know, if you as a brand live in a certain geographic area, for example, where you know that a certain microorganism might be more common in that geographic area than another. Maybe you want to add additional microorganisms to that study to make sure that it can kill those specific microorganisms or say you're selling in a different market where you might want to pay attention to certain other things.

40:55Cicely Shillingford PhD: There's a lot of ways to make that more robust. We also evaluate safety using analytical testing to study for the presence of certain nefarious compounds. So we test for formaldehyde, benzene, heavy metals, lead, mercury, things like that. So those studies are really essential. Again, things that smaller brands sometimes just don't have the money for or the insight to look into. So just watch out for that. We're testing so many things. Honestly, it's like the amount of testing after we approve the formulas a lot, but all of that is to ensure the product safety. We also look at stability of the product itself.

41:36Cicely Shillingford PhD: So we challenge it to higher temperatures over the course of several weeks and months and make sure that the formula doesn't separate or undergo some sort of destabilizing event. Product separation is a problem because you can have preservatives partitioning into one layer and not then preserving another layer of the product. And then you've got your preservative that isn't functioning as you want it to. This is also why it's important to test for preservative efficacy on formulations that are not freshly batched. It's actually better to wait until that formula has aged for several months and then see if it's still resisting contamination.

42:18Cicely Shillingford PhD: So there's just like tons and tons and tons of ways to rigorously evaluate product safety. And then as it pertains to skin sensitization, the standard test is a human repeat insult patch test. That means that the product is applied repeatedly to the skin to see if a reaction is generated on the skin. And this test for, is it likely to cause some sort of allergic contact dermatitis or something like that? Basically, the more participants you add to the study, the more rigorous it is and the more expensive it is. So we tend to add a lot with our brand, but I can't speak for what all the other brands are doing, but we basically want to see no reaction across any participant.

43:02Cicely Shillingford PhD: If we even see one reaction, then we reformulate. So we're looking for zero, zero, zeros across the board. Then the product is considered safe after all of this. I'm sure that I'm missing things because there's so many things to consider. That's the overview of product safety, substantiation. What goes into, like when brands are putting out use instructions for the products, is there an equation to that that may be important for consumer outcomes. And the reason why I ask this is another recent class action lawsuit related to Olaplex. My listeners may have seen this come up. People within my network, and this is another topic that I haven't looked into at all, We're talking about how some of the issues people may have had is by not following the use instructions where there was very specific use instructions.

44:18But yeah, are those use instructions so important to follow that not following them could potentially lead to, well, poor outcomes just in general? but also like so poor of outcomes that there's hair loss.

44:38Cicely Shillingford PhD: I think that use instructions probably don't generally have too much. I mean, it really depends on the product, I guess, because to answer your first question, how do we establish use instructions? So we do so much testing to figure out how the product should be used. So hair tresses, mannequins, pro stylists, Amika employees, consumers, third party studies. And we are very specific and all brands should be about the use instruction. So is it applying the dime sized amount and mid lengths to ends and whatever it is? We are very specific about the hair type, the consumer, you know, the hair density, the texture.

45:24Cicely Shillingford PhD: all these things play into how we create those instructions because hair is just, I spent a lot of time in skincare and it's just so much easier than hair from my perspective, because like I always say, everyone has the same goals with skin, clear, no wrinkles, no acne, bouncy, like that's it. But with hair, it's like, I want my hair to look this way today. I want my hair to look that way today. Everyone's hair is a different material and I'm a materials engineer nearby training and materials chemists. So like I, that's just how I think about hair is how do you want the material to behave and look?

45:58Cicely Shillingford PhD: And we all start with different substrates and we want different results. And it might be different Monday versus Tuesday versus Wednesday, different climates, different times of year, levels of humidity. So versus like, you kind of want your skin to look the same way all year, you know, you want it to look the same. No one's ever like, I want oilier skin today than yesterday. You want it to be moisturized and flawless. So hair is so much different than that. And so when we write use directions, we are really trying to be as prescriptive as possible because we want our consumers to have the best experience.

46:34Cicely Shillingford PhD: And we do tons of testing and evaluation to figure out from our perspective, what's the best hair type and experience. It's impossible to get it a hundred percent right again, because there's so many, so much diversity in terms of hair type and we can't nail it every time. And sometimes we'll want something and then we'll go back and realize, oh, like all these people really liked this. And like, we don't really test it that way. And then we'll go back and do more testing and like, you know, share new messaging. And so it's hard to nail as it pertains to how this relates to hair loss, really kind of separating this from how we think about it from the brand point of view for a second.

47:11I'd say there's, it probably isn't the most relevant.

47:14Cicely Shillingford PhD: The only products where I could see there being an impact here would be like a scalp product and literally really have scalp products. So I could, I could easily see a product like, I don't know, an exfoliant that's like too strong for consumer use. And they're like overusing it and over exfoliating their scalp to the point where like cell turnovers too high and the skin is oversensitized. and like that could be an issue. There's not a ton of products out there like this, I'd say for consumer markets, because if you've ever gotten like a scalp exfoliant in your eye, you'll know it's pretty unbearable.

47:49Cicely Shillingford PhD: So I would say this is a niche issue. Maybe some of the scalp exfoliators, again, we don't have any of these products, but if you're using something really abrasive too much, I could see that being sensitizing for the scalp. If you're not washing the scalp as much as you should and you're getting a lot of buildup. If you're applying styling products like directly onto the scalp versus onto the hair, because again, like you want your scalp to be clean, moisturized, just like your facial skin, essentially your scalp is skin and it's just more porous skin that's on your head. So keeping it really clean, keeping it really moisturized.

48:29Cicely Shillingford PhD: We wash our face every day and we don't wash our scalp every day, which doesn't you know, make a lot of sense when I think about it, because that skin is even more porous and sensitive. For me, I guess, maybe not for everyone. Some people might have really resilient scalp and extremely sensitive skin. So it just depends. But yeah, I could see those scenarios, maybe even overusing dry shampoo. You know, dry shampoo is an amazing product. And I actually think it's really positive for the hair in the sense that brushing the hair and styling the hair is the biggest cause of damage and breakage. So if you're able to extend that style by X amount of days and have less heat and mechanical manipulation of that hair, I think it's net positive for the quality of the hair because you're just not manipulating it as much.

49:20Cicely Shillingford PhD: So if you can extend that style with dry shampoo, not have to do that heat styling blowout, then your hair might be better, especially if you have really long hair and really fine hair like mine is extremely fine. So I really just try not to brush it. But then obviously there's the counter argument of like, then you're washing it less. So, you know, you have to do what makes the most sense for your hair. If you have super, super fine hair, that's really sensitive to heat styling, but you don't have a really sensitive scalp. Maybe you wash your hair a little bit less, use more dry shampoo and you keep that hair healthy.

49:54Cicely Shillingford PhD: Again, it's so individualized for every person, how to use products, how often to use products. I don't envy the uneducated consumer. I wish I could tell you all of the, tell everybody as much as I know so that it's easier to choose what makes sense for you. I can't imagine how confusing, I really can't imagine how confusing it is. Just, yeah, I could definitely see consumer misuse being implicated in the hair loss in a couple of niche scenarios. I can't think of too many examples of that, but yeah. And now just to cover some of the basis that we've missed, there was a good RX article that I thought we could react to some of the things in it.

50:40And since we've reacted already to a lot of the insights in there, I'm just going to read all the things that I have. And then you can comment on any of the things that we've kind of missed. Okay, so the title of this article is Six Shampoos and Treatments That May Cause Hair Loss. Okay, the first point that I jotted out was from the article. Some shampoos can have up to 30 ingredients, including various chemicals that help with stability and presentability. That's a weird way to phrase it, of the shampoo. Each of these ingredients has a specific purpose, but over time, some of them may lead to different problems and health outcomes.

51:27As research reveals more about certain ingredients and their negative health effects, they may be removed from cosmetic products. So that's point one. Point two, learning about other people's experiences with specific products through lawsuits can be informative and help raise awareness about safety concerns. We've already talked about lawsuits, but maybe you want to comment more. The final point to cover is from the article. If you watch social media or read internet forms, you've probably come across some people who've experienced hair loss after using native shampoos.

52:08Cicely Shillingford PhD: So far, there aren't studies proving this association. The insinuation was like, but people are concerned, so just so you know. in the class action lawsuits, they raised several lawsuits filed against brands, and the common denominator was that they were using DMDM hydantoin. Okay, so the lumped in themes of these questions is, well, question one, does more ingredients in a formula equal bad? That seems to be a misconception. More equals bad. Two, specific ingredients, does that translate to hair loss, specifically with DMDM Hidantwin. We've been talking about this, so I don't know if you want to comment more.

52:54The third point is like people's point of view on social media or internet forms or via class action lawsuits, as we've been kind of talking about, is representative of things we need to be concerned with when it comes to hair loss related to products.

53:17Cicely Shillingford PhD: I'll stop talking. Thoughts? I mean, as it pertains to just number of ingredients and issues, I don't understand. I mean, yeah, a lot of products have a lot of ingredients. I think there are some products definitely have too many ingredients like i don't know i can think of like dr barbara stern for example i feel like a lot of her oh yeah all the extra are insulting or whatever but is it gonna come 35 like different plant extracts and at that point you're putting like you know fairy dust of every single one of these in there so they're obviously not all providing any kind of benefit if you have a formula that has like 100 things in there like they're not all these things are not providing a benefit and it is overcomplicated.

54:06I mean, ultimately, like we want our formulas to

54:08Cicely Shillingford PhD: be stable and reproducible when you have 25 different kinds of plant extracts that are all being harvested from different parts of the world at different times and purified or whatever. You're, you know, you're introducing reproducibility risk and they're not doing anything. So, you know, we try and put things in, we should, a hot take, we should put things in products that work. Yeah. But I don't understand that point of view that some of these may lead to different problems and health concerns.

54:44Cicely Shillingford PhD: I'm just not - And I don't think this article is talking about the extracts. The extracts maybe people should think about. Sure. Yeah. But like the - It's just such a general state. It's so generalized. And because it's so generalized, it's just kind of silly because I do think cosmetics are vilified a lot for safety concerns. I think there are a lot of consumer industries where we should be a smidge more concerned. If you go on the FDA website and search their recall database, which anyone can do, just Google FDA recalls, 90 % of the recalls are food. It's food. The food industry is much more of the wild west and you're putting this stuff in your body.

55:28Cicely Shillingford PhD: Your skin is your barrier against the outside world. It's meant to keep things out. It's not meant to absorb everything that you put on it. If that were the case, then rubbing alcohol on your skin would make you drunk. It doesn't. That's not how it works. I mean, I'm being a little facetious when I say that, but like in general, we don't rub that many drugs on our body because it doesn't work very well. We have to ingest them. Things we put on our body aren't immediately impacting us. That's why we have injections because it's hard to get it into your body. You need to inject it past the skin.

56:06Cicely Shillingford PhD: Super challenging. So the things you're putting in your body, I would just generally be much more concerned about than the things you're putting on your body, especially on your hair, because your hair isn't even your skin. Again, another hot take, hair is not skin. So yeah, I mean, like I'm personally like extremely sensitive to like Advil, Motrin, like any NSAIDs, like I'm just going to have probably a stomach ulcer. I'm just like, don't like taking them. I'm super sensitive. Your stomach is just, it's way more sensitive than your skin. Obviously it's meant to break down a lot of stuff, but like, I just wouldn't be that worried about your cosmetic products causing health and safety issues over the course of your life.

56:46Cicely Shillingford PhD: Obviously there are exceptions. And again, like I do think some like, you know, newer brands that just don't have expertise take a lot more risks. And if any brands are listening to this that are new and fresh and like want to talk more about safety substantiation, happy to chat with you pro bono, let me know because I care about your product safety as well. But I understand it's just difficult. I often say that I'm not the most entrepreneurial because I like know too much. I know too much about how to make a product safely to start a brand if I don't have enough funding to do it well. Like I can't bring myself to cut corners if I were to start my own brand.

57:27And so to do it extremely compliantly on a limited budget, you know, the more brands scale

57:34Cicely Shillingford PhD: and grow, the more budget they have to pay attention to these things and the more susceptible they are to consumer lawyers. So as brands grow, they increase their level of safety and substantiation. And obviously as brands scale internationally, they're beholden to the safety regulations of huge cosmetic markets, such as the EU. I'm talking about the same stuff over and over again, but the statement of just like, there's a lot of ingredients so they can be unsafe. There's no way to know how much of an ingredient is in a product by looking at the label as well. And again, hazard versus risk, dose makes the poison, something I know that Jen loves to say.

58:17Cicely Shillingford PhD: So, but it's so true and you can't garner that, which is why a lot of these websites like EWG and like there's Yuka app, there's so many of them aren't the most helpful. I get it. Consumers are not, there's so much to understand. I don't envy them making decisions about their health and it's hard to know what information to trust. So I do understand that these apps serve a purpose and just at a certain point, the peace of mind of just having somebody else tell you this is safe for me, for my pets, for my family is important. That sense of safety is really important, is really real. So, you know, these tools exist to give consumers that comfort.

58:58Cicely Shillingford PhD: They do serve a purpose. They're just not always accurate. That is what it is. So I think consumer products to probably be more aware of and conscious of in your home and cosmetics include things like cleaning supplies. There's a lot of volatile chemicals in those. Inhalation of these kinds of things, again, I think can be a lot more threatening than skin contact, depending on what you're inhaling. But those products, I think, could use a little heavier hand of regulation, much more so than cosmetics. So I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is about consumers obsessed with cosmetic product safety versus other categories.

59:41because like to me cyclospora come on y 'all eat eaten back salads but afraid to use dmdm hydantoin it's not making sense my theory for why people are so disproportionately concerned about cosmetics compared to other industries this may seem i don't know i don't know how people will react to my commentary, but I think it's correct, is that the cosmetics industry is such a female dominated industry compared to some of the other industries that you were talking about. And like women often, like when you go and look through the data are like more often concerned about this stuff and therefore marketing in this space is more likely to be effective.

1:00:35And And a lot of the negative noise that has gained a lot of traction have like starting points from misinformation. Like the classic example, starting points from marketing led to misinformation.

1:00:53Cicely Shillingford PhD: Yeah. Well, it usually goes hand in hand with like something that's out there, but it really gained traction in cosmetics marketing. like the first kind of free from claims with SLS free. I mean, that really kind of started with a viral email chain, but the cosmetics industry really leveraged it to start using SLS free or with paraben free. Like there was a back and forth between like kind of a shitty study in the early 2000s, but then marketing reinforced it. And then it just like kind of snowballed through external entities like NGOs, like the EWG, or you got when consumer concern got to the point that it started to get retailer standards responding, marketing noise compounding, and around and around we go until like but why is the cosmetics industry so unique in in some of these issues like I truly think it has to do with some of the dynamic the gender dynamics that are specific to the cosmetics industry compared to other industries yeah yeah that's my hot take my my heart no that's so interesting and a great take yeah to answer some of your other questions I think I only answered one but um we also had a little bit about uh consumer perceptions did we just like believe people on the internet or in class action lawsuits and then there was a commentary about dmdm i don't know if you want to expand that well I don't think we should believe people in class like okay okay I'll let me add some nuance to my response believing people in class action lawsuits, something bad is probably happening to you.

1:02:47Cicely Shillingford PhD: You're probably stressed because you saw this thing and you have this product and now you're losing your hair. Is it due to the product? It's really, really hard to make that association. And most class action lawsuits do not have any sort of study epidemiological data. There's no real data. And ultimately I am a scientist. Statistics and data do matter. And making an association between a specific product and hair loss is really, really difficult to prove. And I do think the stress of seeing on social media that everyone's experiencing this and you're, you have this in your shower and now you're seeing it and therefore you're stressed.

1:03:28Cicely Shillingford PhD: And like your hair sheds naturally all the time. Every time you brush your hair, it's going to shed. Every time you wash your hair, it's going to shed. So are you critically, truly evaluating the difference in shedding between like yesterday and today? Can you really tell? I feel like my hair sheds like crazy all the time and I've had a lot of stress over the past couple of months. So I would definitely say it does seem like more, but it's like, does it seem like more because I know I'm stressed or is it actually more? Even I can't make that determination and And I would consider myself somewhat of an expert here.

1:04:01Cicely Shillingford PhD: So it's really, really hard to know what to believe. And ultimately, I would try and shut out the noise and really look at your life and the other things that might be happening. And the other, like, have you noticed rapid weight gain or rapid weight loss lately? Like, have you undergone a stressful event in your life? Have you experienced trauma? Did you change medications recently? Like there's just so many potential causes that a singular association to a cosmetic product to me just doesn't ever feel scientifically reasonable. So whether or not to believe people, I do believe you're undergoing a stressful event.

1:04:40Cicely Shillingford PhD: Is it directly caused by this individual product? Are you having allergic contact dermatitis? Maybe that's, you know, that does happen. are you specifically allergic to something in that product? Potentially. Is that a reason to sue the company who made the product? Absolutely not, because we all have allergies. If I accidentally eat peanut butter and I'm highly allergic to peanut butter, I'm not going to sue Skippy's or something in the company. Honestly, I don't know because I don't eat peanut butter. But if I accidentally eat the Levain Bakery cookie that my sister sent me four days ago for my birthday that has peanuts in it and I feel sick, I'm not going to sue Levain Bakery because like there's an allergen in there.

1:05:23Cicely Shillingford PhD: And all the allergen labeling is a whole separate topic. Allergen labeling has gotten much more comprehensive due to some recent EU regulation around allergen labeling of fragrance ingredients. So there's now a new list of 85 allergens that need to be listed, which should give you a lot more visibility. But if you have sensitivity or a tendency toward allergic contact dermatitis, I would not buy products with fragrance in them because not all the allergens are listed and you need to evaluate that about yourself. It doesn't, to me, it's not necessarily a reason to sue a company. If you have an allergy to a specific thing, I would try and investigate that.

1:06:00Cicely Shillingford PhD: I just always feel bad for these smaller brands that have to react to these lawsuits. The bigger guys, like they budget for this stuff. It shouldn't be happening. Again, I think consumer lawyer activity in the United States has gotten a little out of hand. It's just really hard to make that association. It's really, really, it's really specific. I think maybe this is the theme for this whole episode is this shit is complicated. Like it's all really, really complicated. And that competes, I think. And I think that this is a reason why a lot of misinformation takes off, misconceptions take off. It competes against our bias for simple information.

1:06:41Like we want to fill gaps and like, it's all like, we don't have a background. Most people don't have a background in this stuff, but they're looking for answers. And the stuff hasn't been explained to them. So like the simple answers, especially that meet some of their, like there's so many biases at play here, like confirmation bias or negativity bias. It just makes it really like a good fit for our biases. So I guess like, yeah, maybe just consider that. And this is all really complicated. Now we've been talking for, now we're over time. So I have one more question, if that's okay. One more question for you that I ask all my guests to close off the podcast interviews, which is, do you have any final take-homes that you'd like to, I'm sorry if I stole your take-home, but maybe you have a different one.

1:07:34You can echo me, whatever. Final take-homes that you'd like to leave my audience with and, Or are there any points about this topic that we haven't had a chance to cover, but you think is important for my audience to consider?

1:07:54Cicely Shillingford PhD: Question everything, I suppose. I'm sorry it's so complicated. This is why we need more women in STEM. You know, train your future generations to understand these topics and think for themselves. I mean, we're entering into an era where like AI is kind of doing all the thinking for us, but just know that like it's never black and white. I think that one of the things that being a scientist teaches you is how to not think in binaries good or bad or right or wrong. and to look in the gray area because there's almost always gray area. Probably something that, I don't know, being in regulatory for several years now has taught me as well as there's always gray area.

1:08:43Cicely Shillingford PhD: It's never good or bad for you or this or that. I know that we wish that making choices for ourselves and our families could be that simple, but it almost never is. and it's hard to even advise to like consult an expert because how do you even know who the experts are? How do you know what the expert is? How do you find this person? How do you trust credentials? What do you look for? It's really, really, really impossible. My advice, if you want to make the best decisions about the products you use, is to really understand what the brand is that you're shopping stands for. and stick to that brand.

1:09:27Cicely Shillingford PhD: Find brands who have values and ethos that align with yours. I think that makes it a lot easier to shop. I think that's a much better approach than trying to decipher every product and ingredient and Google it all to understand its safety because you don't know how much of an ingredient is in there. You don't know if they're labeling it correctly. It's just really tough and apply a lot of scrutiny. Again, I love indie brands. I love seeing new brands come to life and serve new consumer needs. I think it's really hard. So be cautious if, you know, knowing that like, it's just difficult to have the same levels of safety to substantiation, especially if your distribution is limited to the United States.

1:10:14Cicely Shillingford PhD: but I do encourage brands to just keep learning about how to make your products safer and better for your consumers. And the more, you know, you know, publish what you know and make it a part of your brand identity. And I just want to get to a point where we focus a lot more on like ethical sourcing and sustainability and like all these kinds of interesting things that are really good from a sourcing and like full product life cycle point of view, then these issues of like preservatives because it's just kind of tired at this point. Like we can focus on so much more that's actually good for the world.

1:10:51Cicely Shillingford PhD: Yeah, it's complicated indeed. Thanks again to Cicely for joining us to share your expertise on this podcast. I hope you enjoyed that discussion. Quick reminder, if you're not already subscribed to the podcast, please do. and if you haven't already, please give the podcast a review. If you enjoyed this episode, please share, and if it's accessible, you can also support the podcast on Patreon at patreon.com slash the eco l. Thank you again to all my Patreon supporters who've supported my science communication efforts over the years. That's all for this week. Thanks for tuning in.