Anyhow, the writers are “cosmetic scientists.” I’m not sure what that means, but I think it’s supposed to sound less intimidating to lay people like myself. Anyhow, they analyze the claims that these companies make and look at the ingredients and tell you what they actually do. Sometimes they’ll call in another expert when they don’t know the answer, and they called in a microbiologist for a recent post about whether or not you can use natural extracts to preserve a product.

Just thought some people might be interested. I wasn’t sure where to post this. Please feel free to remove if you don’t think it’s appropriate.

I love the work that Ben does and I’m a longtime fan but he possibly needs the commercial perspective. We’ve had to make adjustments to one formula to completely eliminate risk to pregnant women (a vanishingly impossible risk – the threat would involve the foetus ingesting over 8 gallons of an ingredient which comprises 0.5% of the product). So we made those changes. And then resubmitted the product for laboratory certification. It passed.

The point is that paying for certification means the laboratory accepts a large amount of liability. No lab in its right mind will just pocket the money with a wink and certify a product.

To be fair, my wife is being extraordinarily meticulous about this issue. It’s possible that some labs will skimp on tests. What we needed was an absolute and definitive state-of-play-certificate. We have it now. It cost a huge amount of money, but my wife can sleep nights knowing that the products can be used safely.

Verified by science.

This leads to another issue; Ben’s correct assertion in his book that things such as anti-wrinkle cream can be made by the litre for pennies.

He’s correct, of course.

But to go the market in a responsible manner requires the type of scientific validation I’ve mentioned and when you throw in sterile manufacturing, packaging, marketing and delivery the costs mount up quickly.

Cheese costs pennies to make but pounds to deliver.

What is your view on Sirtuin and creams that stimulate stem cell regeneration?
Surely this is poppy cock. How can a topical administration of a cream stimulate stem cell regeneration?

Boots No 7 Protect & Perfect face cream contains about 8 variations on the theme of parabens. All of which are bad for yer gonads boys. Might temporarily help your wrinkles though.

Huge amounts of what happens to you and your face is hormonal but very little is known because you can’t patent a hormone so nobody is going to make money so nobody is going to bust a gut, much less an overdraft, with the research.

We don’t talk about this because it mostly only affects the girls and PMS is such a joke but parabens preservatives cause swollen and painful breasts and really bad periods because it is a false oestrogen and messes up your hormones. Cue the big clever sexist jokes we’ve all been hearing for decades.

Yawn.

Medical oestrogen is given by patches or gells. Transdermally in other words. But products you put in your mouth or on your skin such as toothpaste, shampoo or wrinkle cream containing known false oestrogens can’t possibly do any harm!

It’s odd though. How a number of products, toothpastes, shampoos etc I’ve had to avoid for years because of the horrible hormone problems I got from using anything with parabens in now suddenly don’t contain parabens anymore.

Ooh! Maybe it’s the unproven cancer link!

Sensodine toothpaste for example gave me problems for years but I didn’t know why, only that it did. Then when I realised it was the parabens preservatives, very cause and effect parabens: Take it get probs, stop taking it, month or so later probs stop. Start taking it again… etc.
Now, oddly, and in the UK anyway, Sensodine no longer contains parabens. No explanation.

Many effective, and some quite expensive, wrinkle creams still do contain parabens however. Often in large quantities. In the case of Boots No 7 Protect & Perfect face cream, LOTS of parabens. Read the lables. Many, many things ending in “Parabens”.

I’m sure they are all totally safe.

I also suspect they are the “active ingredient” in making your skin look better because they are basically a hormonal preparation because of the effects of the preservatives.

Parabens is officially used as a preservative. The false oestrogen thing is something we don’t mention. It may shrink yer gonads like the fish in the rivers but at least your skin will look good.

Some people say you’ll get better skin by applying oestrogen gel to your face. I think that’s basically what is going on here.
You might well get better skin too. But you may find other stuff happens as well.

I often see disjointed Web pages – and Opera’s zoom control is very useful but sometimes it struggles.

But then again, way back, even before Windows, I think there was a virus program that would pop up whenever you typed Margaret Thatcher, but of course these days it could still be around and most the horrible old cow of the time we wouldn’t even notice.

Not much chance of getting Charlotte Green to read that out on The News Quiz, so I thought I’d better draw it to your attention instead.

I agree with Delster here. The point remains that the source of funding of a study does not *necessarily* impact the methodology used. Assess the methodology used and see if that is faulty (as it is in the case of the Boots cream study and also the dodgy MRSA testing scandal).

All that said, lets be honest here. A study’s source of funding can be used as an indicator of likely shortfalls in the methodology employed.

ok say i have a product… i can go to an independant lab (ie a lab outside my own organisation) and say to them i have a product that does “blah”. Please devise & carry out for me a comparison test with other products that also do “blah”. The once they have done that i get the test results and pay in invoice.

The testing has been done independantly but i have still paid for it (or funded if you prefer).

At the end of the day somebody has to pay for testing to be done and the only one’s who are going to do that are manufacturers of these products…. unless your going to put your hand in your pocket?

feel free however to critique the study’s methodology… e.g. what they compared the product with for instance.

Unlike the Horizon programme which (if I remember correctly) did compare the Boots cream against various other more expensive creams.

As Ben says, hard to blame the cosmetic companies for not rushing to do lose/lose research. Maybe that’s why Equazen’s fish-oil ‘trials’ are flawed: they worry a proper study might prove the pills work and so leave them open to expensive, pharma-style regulation…

Has somebody replaced Ben with a Bad Science apologist?”
Nope, he’s just expressing the obvious logic of profit-based therapeutics. The point being that if you are a shareholder of a company that sells a therapeutic product, objectively measured outcome improvements are very much a surrogate measure.

If you don’t understand this, you would make a very bad business person.

Fair play Ben, your recent articles have all been very brave and have taken on difficult areas without any dip in scientific quality.

For instance, most cosmetic products come with a use-by date, and if you are supposed to keep the stuff in the fridge meanwihile, like a vaccine, I presume they will tell you so.

I mean, if the stuff works then they’d be daft to package it so that it doesn’t.

Some of the cosmetic adverts on TV are hilarious. One seems to be claiming to work in the same way that Polyfilla does – fill in the cracks with foundation gunk and then you can paint on top of it. (I’m no expert, so do not use Polyfilla without checking instructions.)

I’m not a lawyer but can’t a case be argued that the effect of the mealy words does not actually avoid the fact they make pretty specific claims and are selling snake oil?