Ben Goldacre
Thursday September 9, 2004
The Guardian

· I prostrate myself before you and admit defeat. I’ve been writing this column for nearly two years, and I still haven’t managed to stiff a single multinational cosmetics firm: they’re just too good at constructing legally defensible pseudoscience. I’m picturing huge laboratories and rows of scientists writing incomprehensible but legally sound babble onto their clipboards.

· Cosmetics companies take laboratory data – stuff at a molecular level, the behaviour of cells in a glass dish – and then pretend it’s the same as the ultimate issue of whether something makes you look nice. This amino acid, they say, is crucial for collagen formation. Perfectly true, along with 19 others. No evidence to say that anyone is deficient in it, and, crucially, no explicit claim from the company that rubbing that actual amino acid on your face is what is going to make you look better. That link is made only in the customer’s mind: because the claim that the cream makes you look good is an entirely separate one, made for the cream as a whole, and it’s true, because all creams will hydrate your skin and make you look good. Vaseline, as it happens, also does it rather well, but leaves a greasy sheen. And most cosmetics research, since you ask, comes down to conserving the moisturising properties of Vaseline, but avoiding the greasiness. Diprobase, at less than £10 for a half-litre tub, represents a pretty good stab at solving this problem.

· What about the other magic ingredients? One thing kind of works: cooked and broken-up protein (hydrolysed X-microprotein nutricomplexes, or whatever they’re calling them this month). These are long soggy chains of amino acids, which contract when they dry, and so temporarily contract your wrinkles. That’s temporarily. And all the expensive creams have got that in them anyway. A couple of other things kind of work. Vitamin C, and alpha-hydroxy acids affect skin significantly, although only at such high concentrations that they also cause irritation, stinging, burning and redness: so now they have to be watered down, to pretty useless dilutions. But companies can still name them on the label, and wallow in the glory of their efficacy at higher potencies, because by law you don’t have to give the doses of your ingredients, only their ranked order.

· Now, I’m begging you, find me one that makes a properly fraudulent pseudoscientific claim I can write about without getting sued, and I’ll give you a free tub of Diprobase.

Laura Barton quotes me, very kindly.

As if by magic

So, there’s an instant potion for lean, toned thighs? Hmm, says Laura Barton

Monday June 7, 2004
The Guardian

As the season of swimsuits beckons, our thoughts naturally turn to Slimfast, Atkins and half-arsed intentions of taking the stairs – last-ditch efforts, of course, to acquire the thighs of Halle Berry before we take ourselves off to the beach. But for those of us who cannot haul ourselves off the chaise longue and detach ourselves from the custard creams, come an exciting array of firming lotions and potions. These require only five minutes of our time spent inelegantly posed in the bathroom, dolloping herbal gloop on our thighs in the hope that it will “firm”, “tone” and “reduce” those lumpen bits of our anatomy.

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The notion that ladling cream on to one’s curvier bits might help us to lose several inches does, in saner moments, appear ludicrous. What is this cream going to do with the squadgy inches of podge? Eat it? Evaporate it? Feed it to the ducks? Nevertheless, in this isle alone, the “slimming creams” market is worth £30 million a year, and the shelves are heaving with impossibly-named products – Clarins Body Lift Contour Control, Shiseido Advanced Essential Energy Body Firming Cream, Christian Dior Bikini Anti-Cellulite.

“Skincare companies are really, really, really good at making pseudo-scientific claims,” explains Ben Goldacre, author of the Guardian’s Bad Science column. “They’ll say ‘Vitamin E and collagen are essential for the cross-molecular structure of whatever,’ in technical grand terms, without making any claim that the specific ingredient will have any effect on your skin. They blind you with cell-biology-level rhetoric and then they say ‘and our cream will moisturise your skin!’ Which even Vaseline will do. And they say things like, ‘you’ll absorb the nutrients through your skin,’ when you absorb nutrients through your gut. Your skin is very thick and dead and designed to be impervious, not letting things in or out. Otherwise you’d leak.”

But so lucrative is the market that, as summer arrives, one can barely move without seeing a lady’s naked bottom plastered across billboards and buses and squashed between segments of Coronation Street. And what a peachy derriere it is – unsagging, uncellulited and without stretch marks. Dove was the first this season, with its ad showing “real women” in sensible undergarments. They were curvy and fulsome, but my, they were firm. Now the skincare giants appear to have moved beyond touting their products’ firming properties and on to shouting about the actual slimming effects. The latest Roc ad, for example, shows a lady tugging at the gaping waistband of her jeans – beneath claims of dropping a dress size.

But at up to £20 a pop, do they work? Last month, a study by the French Consumer Association announced that two creams, L’Oréal PerfectSlim and Elancyl Chrono Actif, could actually reduce a lady’s (or, one presumes, a gentleman’s) thighs by two centimetres in two weeks. Two centimetres is not to be sniffed at, but the nagging question remains: is cream a long-term solution?

“It’s tempting to think you can buy thin thighs out of a bottle,” concedes Susie Whalley, co-author of Running Made Easy and features editor at Zest magazine. “But you shouldn’t rely on lotions and potions. You might lose a couple of centimetres off your thighs if you’re lucky, but you’re never going to shed half a stone. Exercise gives you lots of other health benefits that you won’t get in a squeezy tube. It improves heart health, boosts self-confidence, makes you feel more energised and gives you improved circulation, which helps with cellulite, and your skin facially will improve – that healthy flush tends to last.”

Yes, yes, Susie, but what about the thighs? “I would say you would really notice a difference after running for three weeks,” she says. “If you’ve altered your eating habits a little you might have lost 3-4lbs and you’ll feel slimmer all over. You might feel your thighs are toning and tightening up.”

The problem is that exercise involves some degree of public humiliation, sweat and physical exertion. And “altering your eating habits” requires, well, not having seconds and laying off the sauce. We want these slimming and firming creams because they’re easy and we’re lazy. But the hard truth is there is no magical fix. You want slimmer thighs? Eat fewer cream horns, honey. Do some exercise. It ain’t rocket science.