This article has a headline engineered with shock value connotations, but when you read it carefully, it takes pains to rein the suggestions of the title in as much as possible while still stirring the pot. It’s a kind of artistry you need to get papers published these days.
All that aside, it’s an interesting thing to think about but it’s not a basis for any kind of personal health recommendation and the authors state that. I have relevant expertise and this is a very complicated area that people routinely want to be boiled down into black and white simple advice. What this article seems to say is that lotion can affect the oxidation chemistry nearby it, but it’s not yet known if that is an effect with consequences that are on the whole negative or positive.
I would criticize the authors for their use of the word disrupt, because of the negative connotation carried by that word when talking about human biological systems. They use a softer, more neutral word, perturb, to express the same idea later in the article, which I think better expresses the idea without an emotional tinge to it.
"A commercial lotion composed of aqua, glycerin, Brassica campestris seed oil, Butyrospermum parkii butter, ceteareth-12, ceteareth-20, cetearyl alcohol, ethylhexyl stearate, Simmondsia chinensis seed oil, tocopherol, caprylyl glycol, citric acid, sodium hydroxide, acrylates/C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, sodium gluconate, and phenoxyethanol was chosen for this experiment."
Personal health recommendation: You'd be better off rubbing down with olive oil or sunflower oil than with that concoction, most likely. The ancient Greeks got some things right.
Massage with vegetable oil, usually mixed with some fragrances, had been a widespread practice for many millennia, not only in Ancient Greece, but in most lands around the Mediterranean, which was about as frequent as it would be today to take a shower.
In fact, in the ancient world the main use for vegetable oils was for massage and for perfumes, and not as food.
In the ancient literary sources, there are very few, if any, mentions of vegetable oil used as food, but countless mentions of massage with oil.
Already in the first version of the Gilgamesh Epic, almost 4 millennia ago (the Old Babylonian version), there were 4 pleasures listed as the benefits of being a civilized man as opposed to a savage: making love with a professional woman, eating bread, drinking beer and being massaged with oil (these were used to lure Enkidu into going to a city).
While in later times olive oil was the main oil used for massage, in the Gilgamesh Epic it seems that the oil that was used was sesame oil.
2000 years after Gilgamesh, e.g. in Pliny the Elder, similar accounts were given, i.e. that the main benefit from grapes is drinking wine while the main benefit from olives is being massaged with olive oil, both for pleasure and for a healthy skin.
While massage with olive oil or other vegetable oils was ubiquitous and daily for those who could afford it, for me it is a bit of a mystery how they cleaned themselves after that, in the absence of soap, because I have never seen any mention about this.
> Massage with vegetable oil, usually mixed with some fragrances, had been a widespread practice for many millennia, not only in Ancient Greece
Fragrances made of what if not volatile chemicals? Did they disrupt the human oxidation field? Did the oil?
Anyway, drinking and bathing in mercury was also widespread practice for millenia from ancient greece to the 20th century. And now we know why so many people died prematurely from mercury poisoning.
Trepanation, bloodletting, smearing animal feces on the skin, all common practices of the ancient world practiced for thousands of years that we now know are generally bad ideas.
If one appeals to age-old widespread practice, that's fallacy. There needs to be more than "people did this for a long time" before we make claims about whether that thing is actually better than modern alternatives. People have a long history of doing stupid things for very long times until something new comes along.
According to TFA, the main culprit for disrupting "the human oxidation field" from the skin care products are the alcohols contained therein.
The massage oils and the perfumes used by the ancients were not alcohol-based, but they contained only vegetable oil and oily extracts from aromatic plants.
From what is described in TFA, the oils and perfumes used in the ancient world would have had a much weaker disruption effect than modern products, if any, because they would have captured less of the hydroxyl radicals, while also generating some radicals themselves, possibly offseting the effects due to the captured radicals.
The various undesirable ancient practices listed by you have existed, but they cannot be considered as widespread or recommended by medical authorities, when compared with massage with oil.
Massage with oil was something as frequent as washing for anyone who would not be considered as poor. Massage with oil was praised as important for a healthy skin by the ancient physicians, e.g. from the Hippocratic tradition, for whom the majority of their advices about hygiene, healthy nutrition and exercises remains as valid today as they were 2500 years ago.
> According to TFA, the main culprit for disrupting "the human oxidation field" from the skin care products are the alcohols contained therein.
Phenoxyethanol is a phenol ether, not an alcohol. Olive oil contains a collection of phenolic acids, which are considered to be more toxic than phenol ethers, not less. We intentionally replace the acid hydrogen with an alkyl group specifically to lower toxicity. We do this because we actually study things like toxicity now, which the ancient Greeks did not.
> but they contained only ... oily extracts from aromatic plants.
Phenoxyethanol is an oily substance also sometimes found in aromatic plants! Green tea and chicory both contain it! People across the planet have been consuming chicory and green tea for thousands of years! (Oh no!)
> What evidence can you point to that supports this "most likely" assertion that isn't purely naturalistic fallacy?
Reducing this to the naturalistic fallacy is inappropriate.
Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic. When we are working with incomplete knowledge (e.g. lack of studies on phenoxyethanol), naturalism is a useful probabilistic heuristic because we are /generally/ adapted to what was in our ancestral environment. It's also a useful heuristic to defer to things we have a significant amount of understanding of (olive oil) than things we have little understanding of (a concoction invented in the 2010s).
When we say "natural", by the way, we are approximately referring to what humans adapted to by natural selection. Eating large amounts of cyanide isn't "natural" just because it's in nature; that's semantic confusion.
No one objects to saying a zoo animal should be eating its "natural" diet, and that its enclosure should represent its "natural" habitat, because this is a generally true useful heuristic. Maybe the apes are going to be healthier if you put them in a VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx and feed them protein shakes -- where's the research? -- but I'm not going to put that on equal footing until the research is out. Until then, I'll go with naturalism.
There are artificial things that are very good for us, such as vaccines. But we know this because we have sufficient research. When we don't have sufficient research, heuristics like naturalism are going to give you better results on average.
>The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?
He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.
> Reducing this to the naturalistic fallacy is inappropriate.
> Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic.
They are using a purely appeal-to-nature-and-antiquity-without-any-other-justification heuristic. If your objection is that I should have said "appeal to nature and antiquity without any other justification" because you think "naturalistic fallacy" means something else (which it might), then ok let's go with that, but otherwise it's very appropriate.
"Most" likely is a decision about the balance of merit.
Show something beyond "people did it without chemical analysis" that doing one is actually better than doing the other, especially in the way being discussed by the article. Show that rubbing olive oil on your body won't likewise disrupt your oxidation field. Show that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in olive oil aren't individually disruptive to skin chemistry despite suspected or known links to cancers, cardiovascular disease, and poor fetal development.
> He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.
Picking which things were right and which ones were wrong requires analysis of the merits. They did none of that.
ps. Do we have a reason to call them "he"? I didn't see anything in their profile or comment history.
We use coconut oil for kids’ diapers and as skin moisturizer. The melting point (above room temperature in winter) and skin absorption makes it less greasy to me. And it seems ok and maybe preferable to get the refined organic expeller pressed stuff because it has lower aromatic smell and scratchy particles as the virgin cold pressed stuff at a 3-4$ jar discount.
The opening paragraph is precisely why so many people have moved to natural ingredient products and fragrance free. Some fragrance makers have new for formulas with “clean” ingredients, but they are still proprietary and come with a “trust us” promise. It’s interesting to see the specifics of what these products can do other than what’s advertised on the tin.
You jest, but there's a ton of people convinced they can use rock alum which is natural and so is better than industrial deodorants which contain aluminium.
I'm similarly puzzled by "uncured bacon" which afaik still uses naturally occurring nitrites. How they're allowed to call it uncured when it's clearly still cured is beyond me.
My skin care routine is "I showered in some not-so-distant past" and sunscreen. You hit diminishing returns very quickly. Showering more than once a week has no health benefits, it's just so that other citizens of your overcrowded city wouldn't complain about your natural smell.
It's not terribly uncommon. My wife also has it. It's also related to the length of my hair, where longer hair is significantly worse. Presumably it's the oil build up as my hair is extremely oily and fine.
edit: I am fully aware that not washing leads to less oil build up over time, but I have tried and doctors have tried and that boat has sailed.
I see, that's interesting. Initially sounded like a hair weight issue, so by wet washing it you remove enough sebum to not drag on your scalp too hard. But I'm not sure it adds enough weight for it to do that.
I wonder that over time your scalp produces enough of some chemical to give you a headache, and so you need to rinse it away before that happens? Especially since you mention that any wet wash helps, so the chemicals in the shampoo aren't actually relevant for it. Interesting issue though, don't envy you.
Your returns are nowhere close to diminishing, even for people with close to no physical activity or sweating, people can tell if you haven't showered for a week.
All you need is a modest trauma to the nose in right direction. Bones shifting a bit will cut forever hair-like nerves going from your nose sensors back to brain, effectively making you lose the sense of smell. When asked some doctor friends they confirmed harm is permanent.
When you realize that through most of human history people married because of teenage sex drive or economic necessity rather than emotionally mature relationships, then the whole dating thing loses its appeal really fast.
Also, the smell of sweat of someone attractive turns me on really hard.
> Babe I love it how you naturally smell
> That's great but I just bought a new generic cherry shampoo
I honestly think that this is actually valuable insight. It's important to distinguish things we do just to fit into the society from things we truly want to do. I'm not saying we never should do the former, we obviously should, but I think it's worth it to be aware of the choice. Most people just follow mindlessly the current social trends "because everyone does it".
A conversation I’ve had with several people is: do you want to be right or do you want to get shit done? I dabbled in management for a bit, and spending time figuring out how different people communicated, how to hear and speak to them, and what their motivations were meant I could build a team out of anyone. Same here - yes, it’s all an ape dance, but we’re all apes, and if you know the dance moves, it’s a whole lot easier to move through the tribe.
I want to be right, but I need to get shit done. I take part in the social dance to the minimum degree that gives me what I need. Regarding the rest of my time, I spend it looking for people with whom I can be right. That feels way more pleasant than the social dance.
One thing I’d say about this is that other people will have perspectives that you do not that can help you be more right if you can hear it from them. You’ve got one life, one set of experiences, one brain, and the same 24 hours in the day as everyone else. Leverage other people - even if they’re not “right”, they can help you be less wrong.
That's true but it's just difficult to find people whose perspectives are valuable. At some point I decided to be more approachable in order to have more friends. While the skills I gained from that are useful, I also discovered that most people are just not worth my time and energy.
Having said that, I absolutely love the moments when I'm talking to someone and the other person tells me something that is indeed valuable. That's why I do put effort into maintaining friendships with people who aren't NPCs.
It’s a mistake to consider other people as something other than autonomous agents in their own lives - it’s popular to conceive of other people as somehow not making decisions; frequently this indicates they’re making decisions by different criteria and using different information than you. This is what I mean about perspectives you don’t have access to - I won’t say there aren’t people who fundamentally are not making real decisions in their lives, but that’s fairly rare, and if someone’s making choices that don’t make sense to you, there’s often a reason you don’t see. Again, you may make different choices than them, but actually truly understanding why they make the choices that they do - to the degree that you can understand and describe to someone else their worldview, constraints, and goals - improves your understanding of the world and your ability to accurately model, predict, and explain it.
> Showering more than once a week has no health benefits
> I want to be right
Ok, well, this is only right if you don't benefit from others not being viscerally disgusted by being near you. This is almost never actually the case for anyone. Social benefit is also a health benefit.
People don't bathe because everyone does it. People bathe because not bathing leads to personal loss from ostracization due to unpleasant odor. There's a huge difference. Calling it mindlessly following a social trend is weirdly misguided and not well thought through. You might have more to learn from the people you mindlessly call NPCs than you think.
"the human health impacts of many such chemicals remain poorly understood"
The effects of ritual bathing (soap, scrubbing with washcloths, etc.) on the skin may also be "poorly understood". Many people also wear regularly-washed clothing.
When I look at the laundry-list of chemicals in personal-care products (soaps, shampoos) (and in foods ... sometimes, wow!) I often wonder how much effort goes into testing all of this gunk.
Occasionally when I shower I get this vivid vision: a man comes home from hard days work and takes a shower. Grabs his shampoo but only squirts out half of his usual amount because shampoo bottle is empty, he thinks it will be enough but after applying it instantly feels it's not enough, so he grabs his wife's shampoo, squirts the second half and rubs it onto his hair. Few seconds later his hair bursts into fire because different chemicals in two completely different shampoos reacted together. How plausible is this scenario?
I don't think it's very plausible for shampoo but it's relevant for toothpaste for sensitive teeth. There's are two mechanisms for sensitive teeth, one is to flood the nerve with potassium ions using potassium nitrate, i.e. saltpetre. The other method is to block access to the nerve endings with other chemicals. You could potentially mix toothpaste and get your mouth to warm up slightly.
Heh, is this bad ... who knows? Chemistry, environmental chemistry, and biochemistry are absurdly complex and full of interlocking Chesterton's Fences. But the profit motive means we don't really spend much time looking into them before tearing them down.
Not sure why you got downvoted. The researchers state:
“If we buy a sofa from major furniture company, it’s tested for harmful emissions before being put on sale. However, when we sit on the sofa, we naturally transform some of these emissions because of the oxidation field we generate,” said lead author Jonathan Williams, who heads the study of organic reactive species at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. “This can create many additional compounds in our breathing zone whose properties are not well known or studied. Interestingly, body lotion and perfume both seem to dampen down this effect.”
Which, if you're worried about the effects of unstudied compounds, lotion will help protect you against.
That’s like saying diarrhea will protect you against ingesting unknown poisons. Disrupting natural processes rarely comes without unintended side effects.
Sure, but it depends on what you consider to be "natural processes," and what you don't. The oxidation of sitting on a plastic^W vegan leather couch is not a "natural" process, but sitting on wood probably is. It's also not "natural" to be closed up with the results of that oxidation for most of the day, as most of our evolution happened with plenty of access to fresh air. We definitely have evidence that people were using oils and lotions for much longer than we've had modern synthetic materials or "air-tight" building methods.
The science is definitely still out, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think that inhibiting this reaction might be beneficial.
Antioxidant supplements provide no benefit, may even be harmful. See 2007 meta-analysis by Goran Bjelakovic, Dimitrinka Nikolova, Lars Gluud, Rosa G. Simonetti, and Christian Gluud, published in JAMA:
“Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis”.
If an actual nutritionist says you can eat it every monkey in a lab coat knows they can sell it as a lotion with substantially less work than testing something else.
Buddy of mine did research in Milan on common sunscreen ingredients. In a lab, those chemicals didn't tend to cross the dermis.
But put that person in the sun and you find detectable quantities of those chemicals in serum within minutes. Turns out the flushing (i.e. rushing of blood to the skin, in particular, to the surface of the dermis) increases permeability. Nobody really tested those chemicals for intravenous use.
So in a very real sense, you ingest in all but digestion the ingredients in your lotions.
This sounds like a good thing, in contrast to the doom-and-gloom "scary chemicals!!!11" articles that seem to have flooded journals and news in the recent years. I believe it's basically saying there is an antioxidant effect from lotions and perfumes.
Globally, PCP usage is widespread
Skimmed the article at first, and this made me chuckle. I wonder if that was deliberate.
"I believe it's basically saying there is an antioxidant effect from lotions and perfumes."
Which would be of no value.
There is no mechanism - no pathway - for ingested or applied "antioxidant" delivery into the cell where we believe we see oxidation or damage due to free radicals, etc.
... and even if there were it would probably have a terrible impact because it appears that the oxidation and free-radicals are an essential cell signaling mechanism which triggers apoptosis.
Which is a fancy way of saying: cells use these tools to kill themselves when they are performing badly. You would not want to interrupt this process.[1]
With how bad for us the common fragrances are in regards to things like cancer risk, endocrine disruption, etc, its surprising that nothing has changed. Most products have fragrance free alternatives.
I once worked for a large consumer goods company. We had a conference about scents.
We saw a clear correlation between richer consumers and a preference for subtler scents or even no scent.
This even applied across countries: third-world consumers liked aggressive floral scents, but in Northern Europe and North America, the scents are way less concentrated and tend to be more toward subtle alpine or linen.
All this was 15-20 years ago; today I notice that no soap in my house smells like anything at all.
I'm a perfume fan (hobbyist? I don't know how to name it), and I wonder if this still holds. Nowadays, the "luxury" brands such as the Arab ones, and even the "western" European niche catering to the biggest spenders are making a lot of oud fragrances, gourmands, incense perfumes... Basically anything thick, dense, almost syrupy. They don't limit to this, of course, but ouds became much more common in the last years
There's a particular Middle Eastern market I visit where the cash reeks to high hell of cologne.
It turns out a few of the customers douse their dollars with their personal scents to remind everyone who's spending money with them, and I suppose to see where it might be circulating.
Can you recommend some fragrances or a brand that does some contemporary subtle forresty mossy but also is not crazy expensive posh branding endeavour?
I'm not entirely sure I understood your request, something foresty? Not a lot into those, anyway
Helan vetiver and rum, don't know if it's available in usa. Has a rum note as well as moss, I've definitely heard people around me saying it smells like forest, to me it's more of a mossy scent
Erbolario Periplo, but it's more Mediterranean bushes
Sauvage is a big ambroxan offender, a cold sharp metallic note that pierces the brains around the person wearing it, who clearly has no brain for damage to be suffered (/s)
Personally, I prefer neutral lotions and detergents because I wear my own cologne. It could be because
It could also be because we’re using more products. If my face moisturizer and sunscreen had different scents, that would be unfortunate. It would limit my options to those that went together.
I don’t normally want my face to smell like anything (again, cologne) but if I did I would choose only one product that’s scented. Probably beard oil.
I've noticed it is really, really hard to purchase unscented laundry detergent in certain regions.
Two different Krogers in the same Houston metroplex, one will have only scented slop while the other has no fewer than 3 unscented options front and center.
You can tell just by walking through the neighborhoods what kind of inventory the grocery stores are pushing. The Febreeze infused Tide is like a chemical weapon when put through a clothes dryer. You can smell that stuff for miles.
At least in the eu there are quite strict rules regulating cosmetics. Hell, lilial in perfumes was banned just to stay safe because they couldn't determine an "average exposure" and went on by banning it in perfumes to reduce what would have been the real exposure, even if it wouldn't have caused issues by being used in perfumes standalone (so not how it's used in cleaning products)
They might not be perfect, of course, and they're always improving
EU is much better than the US for ingredient safety. I'm not sure of the EU stuff specifically, but it looks like there's still some concerns over some perfume ingredients, if not the fragrance itself. You'll probably have to do more research yourself.
There's tons more than this, but here's some high level stuff. The most concerning part is that some of the 4000+ fragrances in use are known and suspected carcinogens.
They've been around for a while, but they were harder to find. Even as a kid there was stuff like arm and hammer washing detergent that was scent free. Although now there are at least 5 free and clear choices at the Walmart.
In the 1970s there was a lot of talk about ‘healthful negative ions’ and a fad for negative ion generators even though many of those also generated hazardous ozone.
Hydroxyl ions are a significant kind of negative ion in the atmosphere and they’re known to be good because they react with and clean out pollutants like methane
Here's some more research, since I have a tiny ozone generator in my fridge and I got worried:
Ozone concentrations as low as 70ppb are hazardous when you're exposed to it for several hours [1]. Estimates for Ozone's olfactory threshold aren't trustworthy, since you go nose-blind to it pretty quickly [2], but it seems like it's probably around 20-40ppb before olfactory fatigue sets in [3,4].
My takeaway is that Ozone generators for rooms/basements/etc are definitely a bad idea. The best-cited olfactory thresholds are all in the same order of magnitude as that 8-hour hazard threshold, and with nose-blindness being a significant factor, you just don't want to mess around with that.
Inside a fridge, though? As long as you don't actually smell any ozone when you open the fridge, and you don't just shove your head in the fridge for hours on end, I'd think you're probably fine.
You're right but a lot of times the positive ion is far less reactive and/or more massive than the negative ion. Not so much for OH-. Charge is not the only thing that matters.
Well, in a similar way to how you can't generate a negative ion without simultaneously generating a positive ion... how do you use the negative ion in a reaction without simultaneously using the associated positive ion in the same reaction?
Unrelated: This is why reading comments is becoming useless.
People react to the news without opening the article.
Its so annoying.
Related: This article shows an interesting study but it’s hard for me to interpret what does this translate to?
I think we should minimize very complex and synthetic products to our bodies. Although sometimes it’s necessary when we harm our body (e.g. long sun bathing sessions)
Cloudflare products disrupt the human ability to read science.org articles. The article text available to me:
>Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue
Turning on JS and doing the captchas just results in more captchas, forever, with no end. I have emailed science.org about this in the past but they only fixed it on the blogs, not the main site.
But really, I wouldn't worry about the result of this study _at all_ in daily life. It's quite surprising to me that this would be the top HN article at the time of this comment.
wow!, we are emiting a potent biocidal gas strait through our skin!.....it explains so much!
and ya, O³ is going to chemicaly break almost anything it touches, which will definitly yield some bad to have on you stuff if the precursor is
just wrong.
also , most definitly there is a wide diference in peoples indidual chemistry, so this phenominon will join many others in waiting for a more nuanced understanding of how human biochemistry works.
Speak for yourself! The best defense against those sneaky Toxins is a good thick armor of crust… if you waste it on the trough, it’ll take months for you to build it back!
Remember personal care startup Mother Dirt, who briefly flirted with live “ammonia-oxidizing bacteria” as an alternative to soap?
This is like the Pollution Hypothesis for why Temperature gains due to Global warming trends lower in India due to higher particulate matter relative to the rest of the planet.
Only half-joking: I really do think people habituate quickly to fragrances and scent norms.
I’m hygenic but I (and the people around me) really do avoid scented personal care products. I really notice when I’m in regions or settings where kids schlump around in clouds of Axe Body Spray or Summer Strawberry Juicy Whatever Mist.
Or when an older person has become so habituated to their own perfume that they’ll tell you with a straight face they’re barely wearing any. Ma’am, I literally followed your scent trail to find you.
For sure. I’m among them—very sensitive both to human (and animal) odors and to fragrances. For me at least it tends to be fragrances—usually synthetic ones associated with body or room products—that people are able and willing to concentrate to an overwhelming intensity.
I certainly recognize that others’ sensitivities can go the other way, and I apologize for sounding dismissive toward the distress that can cause.
And perhaps we can share a sigh over people we’ve met who like to combine a pungent personal odor along with a pungent concentration of perfume or cologne…
I genuinely havent washed properly in over a decade. I wash my armpits, genitals and asscrack usually daily with some all natural "soap" and thats it. No baths or showers. I get compliments on my skin daily and when I tell people my "skincare routine", followed by that I'm eating healthy, sweating daily through exercise, sleeping good and getting sunlight, they assume the not washing part is a joke because I "would stink if that was true" and I would have dreadlocks in my hair.
Is soap included? I seldom use body soap during a shower. Probably once a quarter, when my SO threatens me with consequences.
I am not a researcher, but I have a simple evolutionary theory that soap was invented in the last few thousand years and became a mass-market product after the beginning of industrialization.
If we survived and evolved without the use of something in the last few million years, then why is that thing needed?
> If we survived and evolved without the use of something in the last few million years, then why is that thing needed?
Because we didn't. A lot of people died, actually. From germs. Before we knew about Germ Theory.
I see this same type of stuff when people talk about inductions or cesarean sections. "Well humans didn't need that before, so why do we need it now?" No actually... humans did need that before. Half of all infants died. Humans are unbelievably shit at giving birth.
Turns out, humans are bad at a lot of things. We die A LOT less now. Like... so much less that we can't even conceptualize how much less we're dying so then we start questioning if we need soap.
And, as a fun aside, the reason humans are so shit at giving birth is because of evolution. You ever wonder why seemingly ever other mammal is able to give birth and it's super chill but we just roll over and die in shocking numbers? Yeah, turns out evolving to be one two legs has disastrous consequences.
Lots of plants can be used as soap with minimal processing (crush the plant in your hand while rubbing it on something). It’s likely that most of our ancestors used soap and we evolved to expect it. Just like we evolved to eat cooked or ground up food.
All that aside, it’s an interesting thing to think about but it’s not a basis for any kind of personal health recommendation and the authors state that. I have relevant expertise and this is a very complicated area that people routinely want to be boiled down into black and white simple advice. What this article seems to say is that lotion can affect the oxidation chemistry nearby it, but it’s not yet known if that is an effect with consequences that are on the whole negative or positive.
I would criticize the authors for their use of the word disrupt, because of the negative connotation carried by that word when talking about human biological systems. They use a softer, more neutral word, perturb, to express the same idea later in the article, which I think better expresses the idea without an emotional tinge to it.
Personal health recommendation: You'd be better off rubbing down with olive oil or sunflower oil than with that concoction, most likely. The ancient Greeks got some things right.
What evidence can you point to that supports this "most likely" assertion that isn't purely naturalistic fallacy?
> The ancient Greeks got some things right.
The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?
In fact, in the ancient world the main use for vegetable oils was for massage and for perfumes, and not as food.
In the ancient literary sources, there are very few, if any, mentions of vegetable oil used as food, but countless mentions of massage with oil.
Already in the first version of the Gilgamesh Epic, almost 4 millennia ago (the Old Babylonian version), there were 4 pleasures listed as the benefits of being a civilized man as opposed to a savage: making love with a professional woman, eating bread, drinking beer and being massaged with oil (these were used to lure Enkidu into going to a city).
While in later times olive oil was the main oil used for massage, in the Gilgamesh Epic it seems that the oil that was used was sesame oil.
2000 years after Gilgamesh, e.g. in Pliny the Elder, similar accounts were given, i.e. that the main benefit from grapes is drinking wine while the main benefit from olives is being massaged with olive oil, both for pleasure and for a healthy skin.
While massage with olive oil or other vegetable oils was ubiquitous and daily for those who could afford it, for me it is a bit of a mystery how they cleaned themselves after that, in the absence of soap, because I have never seen any mention about this.
Fragrances made of what if not volatile chemicals? Did they disrupt the human oxidation field? Did the oil?
Anyway, drinking and bathing in mercury was also widespread practice for millenia from ancient greece to the 20th century. And now we know why so many people died prematurely from mercury poisoning.
Trepanation, bloodletting, smearing animal feces on the skin, all common practices of the ancient world practiced for thousands of years that we now know are generally bad ideas.
If one appeals to age-old widespread practice, that's fallacy. There needs to be more than "people did this for a long time" before we make claims about whether that thing is actually better than modern alternatives. People have a long history of doing stupid things for very long times until something new comes along.
The massage oils and the perfumes used by the ancients were not alcohol-based, but they contained only vegetable oil and oily extracts from aromatic plants.
From what is described in TFA, the oils and perfumes used in the ancient world would have had a much weaker disruption effect than modern products, if any, because they would have captured less of the hydroxyl radicals, while also generating some radicals themselves, possibly offseting the effects due to the captured radicals.
The various undesirable ancient practices listed by you have existed, but they cannot be considered as widespread or recommended by medical authorities, when compared with massage with oil.
Massage with oil was something as frequent as washing for anyone who would not be considered as poor. Massage with oil was praised as important for a healthy skin by the ancient physicians, e.g. from the Hippocratic tradition, for whom the majority of their advices about hygiene, healthy nutrition and exercises remains as valid today as they were 2500 years ago.
Phenoxyethanol is a phenol ether, not an alcohol. Olive oil contains a collection of phenolic acids, which are considered to be more toxic than phenol ethers, not less. We intentionally replace the acid hydrogen with an alkyl group specifically to lower toxicity. We do this because we actually study things like toxicity now, which the ancient Greeks did not.
> but they contained only ... oily extracts from aromatic plants.
Phenoxyethanol is an oily substance also sometimes found in aromatic plants! Green tea and chicory both contain it! People across the planet have been consuming chicory and green tea for thousands of years! (Oh no!)
Water (bath), wash cloth or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigil
For thorough washing of clothes and other objects they were using lye, but lye would be too harsh for skin.
Perhaps they were first using earth to absorb most of the oil, which was then removed with the strigil, followed by washing with water.
Reducing this to the naturalistic fallacy is inappropriate.
Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic. When we are working with incomplete knowledge (e.g. lack of studies on phenoxyethanol), naturalism is a useful probabilistic heuristic because we are /generally/ adapted to what was in our ancestral environment. It's also a useful heuristic to defer to things we have a significant amount of understanding of (olive oil) than things we have little understanding of (a concoction invented in the 2010s).
When we say "natural", by the way, we are approximately referring to what humans adapted to by natural selection. Eating large amounts of cyanide isn't "natural" just because it's in nature; that's semantic confusion.
No one objects to saying a zoo animal should be eating its "natural" diet, and that its enclosure should represent its "natural" habitat, because this is a generally true useful heuristic. Maybe the apes are going to be healthier if you put them in a VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx and feed them protein shakes -- where's the research? -- but I'm not going to put that on equal footing until the research is out. Until then, I'll go with naturalism.
There are artificial things that are very good for us, such as vaccines. But we know this because we have sufficient research. When we don't have sufficient research, heuristics like naturalism are going to give you better results on average.
>The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?
He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.
> Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic.
They are using a purely appeal-to-nature-and-antiquity-without-any-other-justification heuristic. If your objection is that I should have said "appeal to nature and antiquity without any other justification" because you think "naturalistic fallacy" means something else (which it might), then ok let's go with that, but otherwise it's very appropriate.
"Most" likely is a decision about the balance of merit.
Show something beyond "people did it without chemical analysis" that doing one is actually better than doing the other, especially in the way being discussed by the article. Show that rubbing olive oil on your body won't likewise disrupt your oxidation field. Show that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in olive oil aren't individually disruptive to skin chemistry despite suspected or known links to cancers, cardiovascular disease, and poor fetal development.
> He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.
Picking which things were right and which ones were wrong requires analysis of the merits. They did none of that.
ps. Do we have a reason to call them "he"? I didn't see anything in their profile or comment history.
I'm wondering if you have its informed consent.
edit: I am fully aware that not washing leads to less oil build up over time, but I have tried and doctors have tried and that boat has sailed.
I wonder that over time your scalp produces enough of some chemical to give you a headache, and so you need to rinse it away before that happens? Especially since you mention that any wet wash helps, so the chemicals in the shampoo aren't actually relevant for it. Interesting issue though, don't envy you.
Also sex is a different thing from dating.
Also, the smell of sweat of someone attractive turns me on really hard.
> Babe I love it how you naturally smell
> That's great but I just bought a new generic cherry shampoo
some of us live in hot climates where a cold shower genuinely feels amazing and cools the body down.
some of us enjoy showering daily, because the bed sheets get less dirty that way, which means less laundry to do, and reduces my stress.
some of us are married to a lady and want a happy home life (lol).
a sample size of 1 (you) does not mean it’s true for everyone. Just saying. :)
Having said that, I absolutely love the moments when I'm talking to someone and the other person tells me something that is indeed valuable. That's why I do put effort into maintaining friendships with people who aren't NPCs.
> I want to be right
Ok, well, this is only right if you don't benefit from others not being viscerally disgusted by being near you. This is almost never actually the case for anyone. Social benefit is also a health benefit.
The effects of ritual bathing (soap, scrubbing with washcloths, etc.) on the skin may also be "poorly understood". Many people also wear regularly-washed clothing.
When I look at the laundry-list of chemicals in personal-care products (soaps, shampoos) (and in foods ... sometimes, wow!) I often wonder how much effort goes into testing all of this gunk.
A lot of effort
> A lot of effort
Into testing the long-term biochemical and environmental consequences? lol no absolutely not. Source: I work in this field.
“If we buy a sofa from major furniture company, it’s tested for harmful emissions before being put on sale. However, when we sit on the sofa, we naturally transform some of these emissions because of the oxidation field we generate,” said lead author Jonathan Williams, who heads the study of organic reactive species at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. “This can create many additional compounds in our breathing zone whose properties are not well known or studied. Interestingly, body lotion and perfume both seem to dampen down this effect.”
Which, if you're worried about the effects of unstudied compounds, lotion will help protect you against.
The science is definitely still out, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think that inhibiting this reaction might be beneficial.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/20579...
Buddy of mine did research in Milan on common sunscreen ingredients. In a lab, those chemicals didn't tend to cross the dermis.
But put that person in the sun and you find detectable quantities of those chemicals in serum within minutes. Turns out the flushing (i.e. rushing of blood to the skin, in particular, to the surface of the dermis) increases permeability. Nobody really tested those chemicals for intravenous use.
So in a very real sense, you ingest in all but digestion the ingredients in your lotions.
Globally, PCP usage is widespread
Skimmed the article at first, and this made me chuckle. I wonder if that was deliberate.
Which would be of no value.
There is no mechanism - no pathway - for ingested or applied "antioxidant" delivery into the cell where we believe we see oxidation or damage due to free radicals, etc.
... and even if there were it would probably have a terrible impact because it appears that the oxidation and free-radicals are an essential cell signaling mechanism which triggers apoptosis.
Which is a fancy way of saying: cells use these tools to kill themselves when they are performing badly. You would not want to interrupt this process.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power,_Sex,_Suicide
We saw a clear correlation between richer consumers and a preference for subtler scents or even no scent.
This even applied across countries: third-world consumers liked aggressive floral scents, but in Northern Europe and North America, the scents are way less concentrated and tend to be more toward subtle alpine or linen.
All this was 15-20 years ago; today I notice that no soap in my house smells like anything at all.
It turns out a few of the customers douse their dollars with their personal scents to remind everyone who's spending money with them, and I suppose to see where it might be circulating.
Helan vetiver and rum, don't know if it's available in usa. Has a rum note as well as moss, I've definitely heard people around me saying it smells like forest, to me it's more of a mossy scent
Erbolario Periplo, but it's more Mediterranean bushes
Dsquared original wood
Maybe lalique encre Noire or encre Noire sport
I'd suggest to try them before buying them
It could also be because we’re using more products. If my face moisturizer and sunscreen had different scents, that would be unfortunate. It would limit my options to those that went together.
I don’t normally want my face to smell like anything (again, cologne) but if I did I would choose only one product that’s scented. Probably beard oil.
Same here, and all ja e store branded products certified allergy friendly.
Two different Krogers in the same Houston metroplex, one will have only scented slop while the other has no fewer than 3 unscented options front and center.
You can tell just by walking through the neighborhoods what kind of inventory the grocery stores are pushing. The Febreeze infused Tide is like a chemical weapon when put through a clothes dryer. You can smell that stuff for miles.
“a fragrance-free body lotion containing linoleic acid (Neutral, Unilever body lotion for sensitive skin; 0% colorants and 0% perfume)”
Sounds like they blame the phenoxyethanol? Which serves a preservative kind of role?
They might not be perfect, of course, and they're always improving
https://taenk.dk/system/files/2022-01/Whats-that-smell-repor...
https://health.osu.edu/health/general-health/how-fragrances-...
That itself is a big change that took a while.
Hydroxyl ions are a significant kind of negative ion in the atmosphere and they’re known to be good because they react with and clean out pollutants like methane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144358/detergent-li...
Ozone concentrations as low as 70ppb are hazardous when you're exposed to it for several hours [1]. Estimates for Ozone's olfactory threshold aren't trustworthy, since you go nose-blind to it pretty quickly [2], but it seems like it's probably around 20-40ppb before olfactory fatigue sets in [3,4].
My takeaway is that Ozone generators for rooms/basements/etc are definitely a bad idea. The best-cited olfactory thresholds are all in the same order of magnitude as that 8-hour hazard threshold, and with nose-blindness being a significant factor, you just don't want to mess around with that.
Inside a fridge, though? As long as you don't actually smell any ozone when you open the fridge, and you don't just shove your head in the fridge for hours on end, I'd think you're probably fine.
[1]: https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/SH.html [2]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-H... [3]: https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/full/10.5555/19602703... [4]: https://spartanwatertreatment.com/ozone-safety/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_membrane
Another, that you might be interested in, but it's more confusing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-exchange_membrane
https://www.fuelcellstore.com/introduction-ion-exchange-memb...
Each ion of salt participates in a different reaction
HA ⇌ H+ + A-
TIL that Hydroxyl ions bind to methane and thereby clean the air?
Air ioniser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_ioniser :
> A 2018 review found that negative air ions are highly effective in removing particulate matter from air. [6]
But the Ozone. Ozone sanitizes and freshens, but is bad for the lungs at high concentrations.
Related: This article shows an interesting study but it’s hard for me to interpret what does this translate to? I think we should minimize very complex and synthetic products to our bodies. Although sometimes it’s necessary when we harm our body (e.g. long sun bathing sessions)
Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are basically crushed rocks that absorb UV and are used in sunscreens.
>Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue
Turning on JS and doing the captchas just results in more captchas, forever, with no end. I have emailed science.org about this in the past but they only fixed it on the blogs, not the main site.
(No problems with accessing this site without JS. You just need to make your client look like one of the officially-sanctioned browsers.)
I guess maybe my CGNAT IP is reasonably well trusted and that's the difference?
This week I wanted to download some old HN front pages on the command lines and only got "403 sorry"
although I do not get that now
But really, I wouldn't worry about the result of this study _at all_ in daily life. It's quite surprising to me that this would be the top HN article at the time of this comment.
Remember personal care startup Mother Dirt, who briefly flirted with live “ammonia-oxidizing bacteria” as an alternative to soap?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90348480/how-this-bacteria-crawl...
Only half-joking: I really do think people habituate quickly to fragrances and scent norms.
I’m hygenic but I (and the people around me) really do avoid scented personal care products. I really notice when I’m in regions or settings where kids schlump around in clouds of Axe Body Spray or Summer Strawberry Juicy Whatever Mist.
Or when an older person has become so habituated to their own perfume that they’ll tell you with a straight face they’re barely wearing any. Ma’am, I literally followed your scent trail to find you.
I certainly recognize that others’ sensitivities can go the other way, and I apologize for sounding dismissive toward the distress that can cause.
And perhaps we can share a sigh over people we’ve met who like to combine a pungent personal odor along with a pungent concentration of perfume or cologne…
Take care
I am not a researcher, but I have a simple evolutionary theory that soap was invented in the last few thousand years and became a mass-market product after the beginning of industrialization.
If we survived and evolved without the use of something in the last few million years, then why is that thing needed?
Because we didn't. A lot of people died, actually. From germs. Before we knew about Germ Theory.
I see this same type of stuff when people talk about inductions or cesarean sections. "Well humans didn't need that before, so why do we need it now?" No actually... humans did need that before. Half of all infants died. Humans are unbelievably shit at giving birth.
Turns out, humans are bad at a lot of things. We die A LOT less now. Like... so much less that we can't even conceptualize how much less we're dying so then we start questioning if we need soap.
And, as a fun aside, the reason humans are so shit at giving birth is because of evolution. You ever wonder why seemingly ever other mammal is able to give birth and it's super chill but we just roll over and die in shocking numbers? Yeah, turns out evolving to be one two legs has disastrous consequences.