Hi it's me Michelle from Lab Muffin
again with more beauty and science! Today
I'm going to be talking about one of the
most common questions I get asked: Are
natural beauty products safer? Or the
variations: Are the ingredients in my
products toxic? Should I avoid chemicals
in my products? It's not surprising that
this question is so common. Walk into any
store and you'll see products declaring
themselves to be "natural". All over the
internet you'll run into loads of
bloggers and celebrities talking about
how they're "going all natural" and
"detoxing" from the synthetic chemicals in
their lives. Since I have a PhD in
chemistry and I worked on natural
products during my research, I'm pretty
qualified to talk about both nature and
chemicals. Let's start with chemicals.
If you believe what Natural News and the
Environmental Working Group say you'd
think chemicals are man-made toxic
substances that are going to kill you,
probably by giving you cancer. You might
even be convinced to start looking for
chemical-free products. But the truth is,
everything is a chemical: the water you
drink, the food you eat, the oxygen you
breathe. Even an all-natural pineapple
contains thousands of chemicals - this is
just a selection of them. In fact the
only thing that's truly chemical-free is
outer space, because there's nothing
there, not even air. As humans we have a
bias to think that things that are
natural are good, and things that are
man-made or synthetic are bad.
Unfortunately a lot of natural brands
try to take advantage of this unfounded
bias to make their product sound better.
Let's have a look at some of the most
common misconceptions around natural and
man-made products.
The idea that safety is based on where
something comes from, whether it's natural
or man-made, is very widespread. But
here's the truth. While not all chemicals
are the same in terms of safety, the idea
that a chemical is safer just because it
comes from nature is a lie. This graph
compares the most toxic natural and
man-made substances - the higher the
column, the more toxic it is. It turns out
that natural substances are way way more
toxic than man-made ones. They're so
toxic they had to cut the graph off to
fit them in. If it wasn't cut off and
you're watching this video on a
five-inch phone screen, the one on the
far left would be three times the height
of Mount Everest! Let's go back to a
chemical we're all familiar with: water,
also known as dihydrogen monoxide.
Scientists have gotten really good at
making things to the point where we can
synthesize a lot of the natural
chemicals we come across. Water is pretty
easy. We can make a water molecule in a
lab; we can get a water molecule from the
cleanest glacier in the world. But if you
gave the two molecules to the smartest
scientist with the best instruments and
all the time in the world, she wouldn't
be able to tell you which was which! So
where something comes from doesn't tell
you much. A related argument you'll often
hear go something like this:
Petroleum jelly is a byproduct of
petroleum! You're rubbing petrol on your
face! Again this might seem to make sense
at first, but it makes less sense when
you think about it. Do you know what else
comes from petroleum? Plastic.
And carbon dioxide and water when you
burn it. And if that isn't enough to
convince you, do you know where petroleum
comes from? Nature - ancient plants and
animals which were around way way
earlier than humans, and so by this
natural is better logic, petroleum is
super super safe and we should all do
petroleum cleanses.
The reason petroleum jelly is fine is
that it's purified to take out the
potentially unsafe chemicals before it
gets put into cosmetic products. The same
thing happens to natural castor oil
before it gets sold. Castor beans are
poisonous and contain ricin, one of the
most toxic chemicals on earth. But
because it's been purified, the oil is
fine and you can even drink it - though
not too much.
"If you can't pronounce it don't eat it
or put it on your face" is another idea
that sounds sensible when you first hear
it. But the only reason pineapple extract
is easier to pronounce is because they
didn't put the full ingredients of the
pineapple in the ingredients list. Here
are some of the proper names for the
chemicals in pineapple:
methionine, octadecadienoic
acid, ethyl 3-methylthiopropanoate,
2,5-dimethyl-4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanone,
ethyl 2-methylbutane, sesquiterpenes.
They're just as hard to pronounce!
Sometimes you'll see scary statistics
like: Women apply an average of 168
chemicals to their skin every day. But
here's another interesting fact: did you
know that natural things usually contain
more chemicals than synthetic, "chemical-
laden" things? Here's that list of
pineapple ingredients again. When was the
last time you saw a beauty product with
an ingredients list that long? And here's
the ingredients list for Vaseline.
Surprisingly short! The thing you might
not have expected about natural and
synthetic things is that almost
everything in nature is a mixture of
chemicals. Synthetic chemicals tend to be
pure because the mixtures have been
separated or the ingredient might have
been made from scratch. It might make you
feel better to see "pineapple" on a label
rather than "ethyl 3-methyl thiopropanoate". But the truth is, ethyl 3-methyl
thiopropanoate is only one of the
many different chemicals in a pineapple.
And yes, it's a very safe ingredient! So
what matters isn't the number of
chemicals you're exposed to. What does
matter is how harmful those chemicals
are, how much you're exposed to, and how
you're exposed to it. For example I'd
rather be exposed to these 10
ingredients than this one single
ingredient, even though arsenic is a 100% pure and
natural ingredient.
Unfortunately there's no easy shortcut
or blanket rule that we can use to
decide which products are the safest and
most effective. Wven though going "all
natural" might be tempting on a gut level,
the reality is far more complicated. We
have to look at each ingredient and
decide based on its own merits.
Both natural and synthetic chemicals can
be safe; both natural and synthetic
chemicals can be dangerous.
Oatmeal is natural and fantastic for
irritated skin; poison ivy is natural and
the exact opposite. Vitamin C in beauty
products is usually synthetic and great
for skin, but sodium lauryl sulfate is a
well-known irritant. Sometimes even the
same ingredient is safer from a
particular source. For example, iron oxide
pigments are found in nature but they
have to be synthetically produced to be
used in beauty products because the
natural versions contain higher levels
of toxic heavy metals. In summary, don't
get sucked in by marketing. Natural
ingredients aren't safer. Synthetic
ingredients aren't more toxic. And pretty
much everything is made of chemicals,
including everything you find in nature.
I hoped you liked this video! You can
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