Debunking the worst haircare misinformation on TikTok

well I've been on TikTok again it's Michelle of Lab Muffin Beauty Science chemistry PhD cosmetic chemist although these days I feel like what I am is more of a misinformation connoisseur I have plunged into the depths of TikTok and I brought back some gleaming steaming piles of manure that is one big pile of misinformation just goes viral really easily on TikTok it just hooks into that algorithm so well last time I did skincare this time I'm going to debunk hair care myths using science I'll be talking about silicone sulfates preservatives formaldehyde benzene washing your hair

twice heat protectants and more I've debunked a lot of these on TikTok and Instagram before but I can never really go into that much detail cos those are so short so here we go dmdm hydantoin is considered a formaldehyde releaser which doesn't sound so healthy for your scalp okay so Dr Tony Youn is a "holistic plastic surgeon" he's huge on every platform I've heard that his plastic surgery stuff is pretty interesting and informative but he also talks a bit about beauty products and it's just not correct he pushes a lot of that clean beauty pseudoscience

maybe because he does have a clean beauty brand it could also be just an overconfidence thing that some doctors have this is a continuation of that and this particular TikTok is actually part of like my TikTok origin story back in 2020 I came across this and a bunch of other videos and they annoyed me so much I had to join TikTok so before we keep going I just want to talk a little bit about medical doctors some people say I'm a bit too mean to medical doctors who are spreading misinformation online but I do think

that they really should be held to a higher standard I get really annoyed because they do have the privilege of being educated enough to know better and I also consider myself being privileged enough to be able to do a PhD so I also hold myself to this higher standard I also know a lot of doctors do a lot of my friends in real life are doctors and a lot of my misinformation debunking friends online are also medical doctors so this isn't like a blanket diss of doctors it is just about the ones who say a

lot of daft a lot of doctors do use their authority to build their platform and again I mean I do too I think it is valid to tell people where your expertise is coming from what actually informs your content and people just do respect titles and it is kind of handy because you know as an Asian woman who looks younger than she is and I mean I've got purple hair I get disrespected a lot and just waving my PhD around has become a bit of a shortcut to get people to actually listen to what I

say before they dismiss me for very superficial reasons it's kind of like a relatively superficial reason that undoes some even more superficial reasons anyway the problem is if you do have that extra authority bias I really think you need to be more responsible about what you say that authority bias that comes with having a title being being a medical doctor that really superpowers any misinformation you spread and there are a lot of doctors who kind of play that up like they dress in scrubs they film in front of their wall of medical diplomas and I

really just think that with great power comes great responsibility dmdm hydantoin is considered a formaldehyde releaser which doesn't sound so healthy for your scalp okay so the way he says this is a little bit weird like considered a formaldehyde releaser it just is a formaldehyde releaser it is how it works dmdm hydantoin is a preservative like all of these other preservatives he's also got these are needed in products to kill microbes so I mean they are killing living things and so at some level they are also going to be harmful to people the trick is

to have such a small amount that is fine for people when they put it on their skin but also will harm the microbes when they're swimming in it so yeah formaldehyde does maybe sound bad and it is bad if you inhale a whole bunch of it it does cause nasal cancers I've talked about it before in my video on the not so pretty documentary series on that nail episode but if you have a small enough amount and you are exposed to it in the right way like on your skin rather than up your nose then

it is safe this is something called hazard versus risk so hazard is something that's harmful in some way but the actual risk how much in danger you are that also depends on exposure so if your exposure is really low even if the hazard is high together that can mean that your risk is still really low so you can look at my video on clean beauty which talks a lot more about that I've got a toxicologist there explaining all of these principles so formaldehyde is actually also in lots of living things like we produce it inside

our bodies it's in things like pears we actually produce about 50 g of formaldehyde a day which is like 1/5 of a cup it's not that great for us our bodies have evolved a lot of systems to deal with it and limit its damage but the amount on your scalp is like a fraction of of a milligram it is really just not that big a deal and I mean he should know this because he is a plastic surgeon he's familiar with Botox and the logic is exactly the same so Botox if you didn't know is

one of the most toxic substances in the world possibly the most toxic something like a few kilograms of it can kill everyone on Earth but at the same time millions of people have had it injected into their face and it's been fine because of exposure it's being injected in a low enough amount at the right place now this thing where he says formaldehyde doesn't sound so healthy toxicology and biology isn't about how something sounds it's not about you know the feels or The Vibes I really hope as a doctor he is not going on how

things sound for like freaking surgery I really hope he's looking at actual evidence and it's disappointing that he isn't here so he's really just playing to people's fears here this is really frustrating because it is the kind of logic that antivax anti-science movements use if something sounds bad it is bad don't bother looking at the evidence just go with your gut feel I have a very bad feeling about this so one of the reasons I am so passionate about clean beauty is that there are lots of links between clean beauty and the antivax movement especially

with the whole measles vaccine thing with autism back in the early 2000s and one of the links is actually formaldehyde if you look at infographics for clean beauty and anti vax they are just like very very similar tiny amounts of formaldehyde are in lots of vaccines and you see it all the time on these like infographics it will say things like you know this is so bad it's bad for you it gives you cancer you don't want to inject it into your baby you also just don't want to put it on your scalp according to

the same logic and it drives me a bit mad that people who are into public health don't really see this as what I think is a huge problem we have huge beauty stores like Ulta and Sephora just teaching a really big chunk of the population this logic from their early teens this whole idea that if it has formaldehyde then it is unclean and you need to avoid it it's going to be really hard to undo all this indoctrination by the time someone is having a baby and they're asked whether or not they want to inject

a vaccine with a tiny tiny amount of formaldehyde into their precious baby and there actually is a class action lawsuit going on right now all right so class action lawsuits get brought up a lot in social media posts about different ingredients the thing is anyone can bring a class action lawsuit that just doesn't really tell you if they have a good case and even if they do end up settling and the people end up getting a bunch of money it's not an admission of guilt settlements happen all the time for other reasons like avoiding a

long protracted expensive lawsuit and just all the bad publicity that gets wrapped up into that so for these dmdm hydantoin lawsuits it does mostly just seem to be people with allergies there is a small percentage of the population allergic to most ingredients so for formaldehyde it seems to be somewhere around 1% of people so if you are allergic to formaldehyde it can cause itching and hair loss but that doesn't mean it's causing hair loss for people who aren't allergic allergies are when your body is just overreacting to something that is normally safe now I have

noticed that there's been a lot more hair loss lawsuits lately with lots of brands whose formulas haven't actually changed much in years maybe decades and I think the explanation that makes the most sense is the pandemic covid is linked to hair loss and a lot of people even if they haven't had covid they've been stressed which is also linked to hair loss and hair loss just varies over time as well so people tend to lose more hair in Spring and lose less hair in Autumn there's also things like pregnancy so there are a lot of

things that can cause hair loss and saying that it is definitely linked to one thing like a shampoo or a specific ingredient in a shampoo that is just really difficult to do without looking at science so it's really just correlation isn't causation I can't believe how long I've taken debunking this 10-second video there's something called brandolini's law which is also called the BS asymmetry principle basically it just says it takes an order of magnitude like 10 times more effort to debunk misinformation than to spread it and it is always harder to debunk when it's someone

who you would expect to be well informed like a medical doctor and then on top of that there's just so many more non doctor people spreading misinformation so support me by liking and subscribing I swear I didn't say that just to get in this pitch there's actually a really good reason your shampoo bottle says rinse and repeat on the back and no it's not just manufacturer's way to sell more shampoo but I used to think the same thing let me take you over to my how shampoo works poster and yes I made this cuz I'm

a nerd and I love talking about shampoo but basically this is why it works okay when you are you know needing to shower you have a dirty scalp you're going to have sebum you're going to have oil on it what happens is that when you shampoo you're going to have these little purple things that are called surfactants they're going to attach themselves to the dead skin cells the oil the grime the dirt all of that and it's going to create what's called a micelle this micelle is hydrophobic and hydrophilic and it's going to release when

the water that you wash it off with touches that okay so then it's going to wash way down the drain a lot of people tagged me in this video because she claims that it's just how science works you have to wash your hair twice so my PhD is partly in supramolecular chemistry which is the science of how molecules interact without actually going through a chemical reaction which is what all of this stuff is now I am all for making your own diagrams when you don't like the ones that already exist I do it all the

time but I don't love her explanation and I wonder if this is actually why she is confused when you're washing your hair and you've got the surfactant interacting with the oils it actually breaks up into lots of little emulsion droplets which aren't really called micelles but that is really just a technicality it's not all lifting off in one giant blob it's just lots of little dots and it suspends before you start washing it off it isn't like the water hits it and then it suddenly like lifts off or something it doesn't suddenly release because there

is already water around it's already touching it it is already going to be lifting off and turning into droplets here's the thing your scalp is not totally clean after this one process so after most of those get washed away there's still going to be a little bit of dirt and grime and dead skin cells on your scalp okay that's just how it is and you need to repeat so at that point you can get all of the oil surfactants are going to create a micelle and then the micelle is going to wash it away and

at the end of your second wash you're going to feel a huge difference compared to the first wash there is nothing in the science that says one wash with surfactants can't lift off all the oil and dirt it is just the same chemistry as washing plates when you're washing plates you don't necessarily need to wash them twice sometimes you do it depends on how dirty it is how dirty your plates or your hair is it depends on your technique it depends on what products you're using if you're using a product that just isn't very good

at cleaning or if you didn't use enough of the product even things like the temperature of your water will make a difference so you might find that your hair is better if you wash twice but most shampoos are designed to wash off with just one wash now I did get a bunch of people asking me if I don't need to wash my hair twice why do I get more foam on the second shampoo so the reason you get less foam is because the surfactants are in charge of both lifting the oil off your hair as

well as forming foam so if you have more surfactants tied up in the oil you're going to have less to create foam but the thing is this doesn't actually tell you anything about whether or not the second washes is doing anything so all this tells you is that in your first wash you have some of these surfactants tied up in the oil you have less surfactants tied up in the oil in the second wash but you could also just have no oil even if the second wash was doing nothing you would still get more foam

if you washed your hair a third time and you got a lot more foam than the second wash then that tells you your second wash was doing something the third wash tells you nothing about the third wash the second wash foam tells you nothing about the second wash and it's interesting that she says this at the start like all shampoos say to rinse and repeats but most shampoos that I've looked at in my collection most of them say to repeat if necessary if they even mention repeating at all someone in my comments mentioned that the

shampoo bottle she's holding is Monat which is a multi-level marketing brand she is selling it and I've noticed that Monat sellers tend to spread a bunch of misinformation online I don't know if it's officially sanctioned or if it's just you know people being creative and entrepreneurial but honestly from what I've heard of this company I wouldn't put it past them to just have this on the shampoo to make you buy more so yeah this is an example of like the bad Monat tests that they've been spreading the thinking which if you can call it that

is that if you get a cotton bud and you put the heat protectant on it and then try to light it on fire it won't light if it's a good heat protectant but that is not how heat protectants work a hair stylist online got her toddler to explain it and he actually explained this really well so I'm going to play that I'm going to cover up his face cuz it's kind of weird to have someone else's toddler in your video hi hairdressers just because something isn't flame retardant that doesn't mean that they're not heat retardant

heat isn't fire yes so that is literally it if you have a heat protectant it spreads heat out really nicely and so you're not getting hot spots in your hair fire is combustion it's something reacting with oxygen and burning so cotton for example is actually used in oven mitts it's really good at protecting your hands from fire but it's going to burn they are two completely different properties of substances most of the time what these videos are actually showing is that some products contain water which is really good at not lighting and other things will

contain oil or alcohol and they will light on fire it is just a test for combustion so I guess the ironic thing is that too much water is actually bad in heat protectants because water can absorb into hair and boil it doesn't evaporate as easily as alcohol but it boils a lot more easily than oil and so what happens is inside your hair it can boil explosively so it goes kind of like popcorn and it causes something called bubble hair which is literally like popcorn three high street shampoos that you need to avoid like the

plague number one head and shoulders there are much better shampoos that you can use for dandruff that you can get from your local pharmacy Head and Shoulders contain sulfates which can dry out the scalp and over time leave your hair looking dull and dry also Head and Shoulders can lead to color fade outs if you spent dollar dollar dollar on having amazing dyed hair this may fade it a lot quicker than you want it to go something that I've noticed is so many of these videos warning people to stay away from particular hair care products

they always say things like avoid these like the plague which I guess people aren't really avoiding the plague but also things like avoid at all costs which is a really common thing I see I sort of half expected her to say this I don't know why I never hear this phrase in real life and my conspiracy theory is that they're usually about to recommend a really expensive alternative that maybe they are selling in their links and so they kind of want to prep you with the word cost anyway Head and Shoulders is one of those

brands that a lot of people keep warning people about and I think it is because it is a really nice affordable brand and yes there are other options for dandruff but Head and Shoulders is a really solid choice they are a Proctor and Gamble brand they invented a lot of new technology around getting zinc pyrithione which is the active ingredient that kills the fungus that is causing the dandruff they've got a lot of tech on getting that to deposit on the scalp so it is really not a bad choice now sulfates is one of my

like passion topics they are not automatically harsh and stripping I've talked about it in my shampoo myths video the reason is the way surfactants work to clean your hair is a supramolecular process it is sort of like molecular choreography all of these little tadpoles are working together to lift the oil off the hair I keep on showing this diagram and the lead author of the paper actually dmed me on Instagram so hi if you are watching thank you again for this diagram it is just so handy for explaining cleaning so not all of these pink

tadpoles are the same and all these surfactants are working together in the product to lift off the oil in pretty much every shampoo you get these days you will see multiple surfactants and so the sulfates if they have sulfates are just going to be some of these pink tadpoles so how much a shampoo strips isn't just about whether or not it has sulfates yes or no it's also about everything else that's in there which is the surfactant but also the other ingredients that aren't shown in this diagram like polymers they all interact as well and

some of these ingredients can keep the sulfates from going deeper into hair or deeper into skin so it's about what the final combination of everything is overall it's sort of like Nicolas Cage movies you can't tell just by whether or not it has Nicolas Cage or if it's Nicolas Cage free whether or not it will be a good movie Nicolas Cage good or bad a challenge certainly but not unsolvable it's about everything else in the movie like who the director and the writer are now if you do have colored hair like me I think you

would probably be better with a color protection shampoo that is actually optimized to protect your color Head and Shoulders don't have one in Australia anymore but someone told me that they do have one in other countries and there's a Good Housekeeping test where they tried lots of different color protection shampoos the one that stripped dye the least had sulfates in it now I did get a lot of comments saying that people love sulfates because they get their hair clean and I do appreciate the energy but it still isn't about sulfates or not it is still

the overall formula that's important you can make a really mild sulfate shampoo you can make a really stripping sulfate free shampoo number two Tresemme now these products contain sulfates again dry out the hair but also contain silicone which can build up on the scalp and cause itchiness and irritation of the scalp so I would recommend not to use Tresemme so silicone can build up on the scalp it's just like any other conditioning ingredient but generally it's not an issue with shampoos there really isn't that much conditioning in shampoos there's really just enough silicones to make

your hair not tangle when you're washing you do need a bit of conditioning agent in shampoos otherwise your hair gets really tangled and matted and damaged because when your hair is wet the cuticle sticks up a bit bit more it's going to be rougher it's going to be a bit more fragile and you are moving it around a whole bunch so it is really prone to getting damaged if different hairs snag against each other and break off bits of cuticle now most of the time in shampoos it's not silicones that are conditioning it's actually polymers

possibly because people got scared of silicones I do see a bunch of people saying why would I want a shampoo that conditions I just want it to clean and I get that but if you do try a shampoo that doesn't have any conditioning agents it is a horrible experience number three OGX now this brand which is quite popular and is available in most drug stores has actually got an alleged lawsuit against it now I'm not sure of the ins and outs but I think it's because of hair loss or hair thinning now they do contain

chemicals which can be quite strong on the scalp and can lead to irritation they do claim to be sulfate free however but again I would just avoid this OGX lawsuit is about formaldehyde I talked about that before but it is kind of wild to me that we have like a medical doctor here with a stethoscope and scrubs she is an aesthetic doctor so I'm not sure what she's doing with the stethoscope anyway why would you not at least look it up before [telling] people to avoid it like the plague again it is just that lack

of responsibility that's really annoying me having that doctor's endorsement really does superpower the misinformation people are more likely to believe it I got this comment on a video and I don't know if this person is joking or not but this is literally how a lot of people think and it's not necessarily a bad thing we should be able to trust experts but but a lot of these perceived experts are spreading misinformation and pretending they have the right expertise to know more about it when they don't and it is usually all these really affordable brands that

get all these warnings against them and it's really frustrating because these drugstore products are good products and a lot of the alternatives that people are recommending instead they don't do their own R&D but they charge so much more and it's just kind of gross and elitist to me that these people are trying to get people to spend more money for a product that will probably have less benefit and yeah people do get higher commissions and higher affiliate income off higher priced products also this is kind of just hilarious to me but every time I debunk

one of these videos with a side by side do I get a whole bunch of comments saying something like her hair is really shiny your hair is really dull why would I listen to you and this is just hilarious to me because I think it's pretty obvious that you know I'm East Asian my natural hair color is black bleaching is possibly the most damaging thing you can do to your hair to get my hair to this color I had to sit for a full 9-hour workday at a hair salon that specializes just in bleaching the

crap out of Asian hair so this was bleached to a level 9 or 10 it is pretty much a miracle that my hair is still attached to my head before olaplex really became a thing a lot of hairdressers would just refuse to do this a lot of hairdressers still refuse to do this so it feels a lot like saying Icelandic people know more than Australians about sun protection because Australians have more sun damage and the amount of exposure and the conditions that the hair slash skin has gone through is just so different in the two

situations and honestly before I did this to my hair it was a lot easier to manage my hair was always really shiny and it looked fine but I knew so much less about hair then compared to now and I'm not saying you have to have super damaged hair to understand hair but it does give you an extra incentive to learn more about how to deal with your hair anyway the two aren't correlated it's a weird comment stop using these products they are ruining your hair do I even need to go into detail batiste is far

too heavy to be using on your hair frequently the reason why it's an issue is cos it's really difficult to completely shampoo out of your hair unless you're using a detox shampoo if this isn't washed out properly it builds up on the scalp it can block hair follicles and that can lead to hair loss or lack of hair growth if we look at what ingredients are in batiste I'll put them up here the first three are gases butane isobutane and propane so they're just going to evaporate and disappear so will the alcohol and the fragrance

so the stuff that's left on your scalp we've got rice starch that's not that hard to wash off your hair I think we've all seen rice starch going down the drain when you wash your rice cocoyl hydrolysed keratin this is little chunks of keratin protein attached to fatty acids that's the cocoyl bit that's generally not that difficult to wash off the cetrimonium chloride and distearyldimonium chloride these two are cationic surfactants they're really common in conditioners they are pretty much the most basic type of conditioning ingredient again they're not really anything that special and they're not

something that won't wash out without a detox shampoo she does kind of have a point here which is that dry shampoo might mean you're washing your scalp a lot less and then yes buildup can happen on your scalp and that can mess up your hair follicles it can also mess up the microbial balance on your scalp and this is important because it's one of the main causes of dandruff this is the yeast and if you have too much of those they can cause scalp irritation they eat up things called triglycerides which are part of your

skin oils they spit out fatty acids and those can be irritating and that can all lead to inflammation which can mess with hair growth but this is with anything that you spray onto your scalp it's not really the batiste itself that's an issue but people who wash their hair less than they should might be using batiste a lot because it is such a popular dry shampoo the only miracle about this is that it's still being sold this is really really not good for your hair it has insoluble silicone in there insoluble silicone is silicone that

cannot be broken down by water which means it's very very difficult to wash out silicone is essentially plastic if that builds up on your hair and you're also heat styling you're essentially melting your hair just waiting for it to break off really isn't a very good conditioner I know it can make your hair feel great but it's all just superficial okay there is a lot here she just kind of rattled off a whole bunch of really common myths about silicone so I'm going to try to get through these somehow so first off silicones aren't plastic

this stuff here is dimethicone you can see it is a lot more like an oil it's a liquid plastics are solid point two this is obviously not in order silicones do not melt hair I'm not entirely sure where this comes from but there is a lot of stuff with hairdressers saying that when they bleach hair it heats up and then they can see silicone dripping off which is an observation but the explanation isn't quite right the heating is probably from metal ions in the hair these can come from dyes or tap water and that's reacting

with some of the ingredients in bleach but it is not the silicone doing it silicones are really stable to heat and that is why they're used in so many heat protection products they won't react and produce more heat so with these silicones that are really unreactive like dimethicone which is the main one that people mention this with they can only really get as hot as whatever hot tool you're using and the reason they work so well for heat protection is because they don't react they form a layer that helps spread out heat more evenly it's

sort of like when you're using a frying pan versus if you're directly cooking on a fire having that extra layer there spreading out the heat - it stops you from getting hot spots where your hair will just start decomposing while there are other bits of your hair that are still too cold and they're not being styled they're not actually curling or straightening or whatever you're doing okay next point um it doesn't condition well because it is just superficial superficial conditioning is actually probably the most important part of conditioning the reason: things that are on the

surface make your hair feel great is because it's been smoothed out so when you're touching your hair your skin all the tiny microscopic little jagged bits in your skin they're not getting caught on the rough bits of your hair and so that means your smooth hair is also more protected it's not getting caught on brushes and straighteners it's not getting caught and getting stretched which is one of the biggest causes of the damage you get when you're grooming your hair when you're brushing or styling she also mentions soluble versus insoluble silicones and I think this

might come from maybe the curly hair method thing this thing in itself has like a lot of layers first off it doesn't matter if the silicones are soluble or not you don't need to wash out all of your conditioner because conditioners they don't form a continuous film on your hair they form more sort of like little blobs so it's not like your conditioning layer is blocking stuff from going in or out of hair it can just stay there it's sort of like protective paint on a drink bottle or something you don't need to like scrub

off all the paint every time and apply more paint you can just leave the paint on there now insoluble things wash off hair all of the time so oils for example aren't water soluble that is the whole point of putting the surfactant in the shampoo they have that oily part which grabs onto things that are not water soluble water soluble also doesn't mean it comes off the hair more easily so hair is really good at something called hydrogen bonding that means it forms these relatively strong intermolecular interactions and water is really good at this as

well so ingredients that hydrogen bond more tend to dissolve better in water so more hydrogen bonds means that it mixes better with the water and spreads out so hyaluronic acid and citric acid both can form hydrogen bonds that's why they are water soluble and that's also how they stick to hair but it can actually also mean that they stick to hair too well so some of the most like sticky haircare ingredients that build up on hair are actually charged and relatively water soluble there was no way we were going to get through a TikTok misinformation

video without Bobby this guy is Bobby Parish he's also known as flavcity he usually talks about food and he talks a lot of pseudo science there as well and there's a whole bunch of food science people that I'm going to put up here who I recommend who have specifically debunked him you know those commercials or the A-list actors waving their hair for Head and Shoulders spoiler alert they ain't using it and sometimes when you can't read or pronounce ingredients it doesn't mean they're bad but in this case it does these two are harsh preservatives that

are known allergens skin irritant and neurotoxins I'm sorry put it back it's kind of nice that he finally admits for a change that being able to pronounce a word just doesn't mean very much so these ones are pretty easy for me methylisothiazolinone methylchloroisothiazolinone but I cannot pronounce botanical names like raspberry is rubus [sad attempts] a curry plant is [more sad attempts] anyway I'm pretty sure it is better for me to eat raspberry and curry leaves than it is for me to eat a whole bunch of these two ingredients and I am actually personally allergic to

these so I kind of feel this these are preservatives but they're being phased out because when they were introduced they sort of caused this so-called epidemic of allergy and that word epidemic is is actually used in the peer-reviewed journals some authors have actually suggested that these became more common in products because people like Bobby were freaking everyone out about parabens like what he was doing in my last set of videos parabens actually won the title of non-allergen of the year in 2019 because they are relatively non-allergenic compared to these ingredients that might have replaced them

but again even though they are a more common allergen if you're not allergic to them you don't really need to avoid them but these two do tend to cause you to develop allergies to them and they're kind of common so if you do feel itchy with a lot of shampoos and laundry detergents you might want to look into that again he is using the ewg database like last time they are a really crap source I went into tons of detail about them in my last misinformation video but basically they are very much in the business

of selling fear their whole shtick is a bit like please be scared of all these common things but conveniently we are the only people protecting you against them every time you go on their website they just just give you all these popups for donations and they seem to have a lot of funding from the organic industry so obviously having this sort of database of ingredients to watch out for is just ignoring the whole idea of hazard not being like risk the whole idea of dose and exposure again it is this antivax logic and it is

hard for me to believe that they're not operating in bad faith like I mentioned last time they kept on going on with the whole vaccines cause autism thing well after it was very obvious that the whole Wakefield study was just BS now the funny thing here is is he does mention neurotoxicity if you look at the thing he's showing it actually says that it is a low risk if you look it up in their database and actually click on it it says that it is on in vitro tests on mammalian cells so in other words

they must have gotten some neurons out of some mammals and then chucked it into like a little bath of MI and again it is a matter of concentration and exposure the chance of having like your brain cell swimming in MI after you use a shampoo is just super low the ewg have gotten so lazy with their referencing or maybe they just got sick of people looking up the studies and critiquing them because like "open scientific literature" and then their data sources are like "open scientific literature/peer-reviewed literature" that is just like we looked it up on

Google and then they've got "nlm 2012 PubMed online scientific bibliography data" that is literally like saying your source is Google search but it's worse because it's like Google search from 2012 anyway I found the study it is on rat brain cells and the concentration of MI where they saw an effect was 100 micromolar so I got out my little calculator because you know Brandolini's Principle I'm going to have to do way more work than Bobby's doing it converts to 0.001% MI now in 2010 the US limited MI to 0.01% now this was a cosmetic ingredient

review recommendation it's not like a binding law but it is the sort of thing that you follow if you're a big brand unless you really want to open yourself up to litigation so if we have this maximum recommended concentration your brain cells would have to be swimming in the shampoo only diluted by less than 10 times so a big blob of shampoo in your hand is 5 grams so you would have to be using less than 1/5th of a cup of water with that giant blob to get that concentration anyway I would avoid the ewg

and anyone citing it like the plague I would avoid them at all costs it absolutely blows my mind that so many women do not know this but there is an ingredient in pretty much every shampoo that is destroying your hair it's called table salt that stuff is in your shampoo and it's also drying out your hair and the crazy thing is it's in almost every single shampoo I've looked at over 2,000 shampoos and at least 85% of them had table salt in it if you don't believe me go to your bathroom right now check your

shampoo if you see the ingredient sodium chloride in there then that is table salt this one is just kind of hilarious to me like we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here we're trying to freak people out about salt so yeah sodium chloride is used in a lot of shampoos because it is a really good way of thickening up some surfactants so it is some particular anionic surfactants like sulfates basically anionic surfactants are negatively charged and the ions from the salt will interact with these heads of the anionic surfactants and it changes how

they're arranged so it makes the micelles inside your shampoo sort of turn into long noodle shaped micelles and those get tangled up more that means that it becomes a lot thicker they kind of like get tangled up in each other before they get poured out and so you end up with a blob in your hand instead of like water it's really cool and neat but the amount of salt you need is actually really low it's usually like 1% or perhaps even less even sweat has more salt than this sea water has like three times more

plus you also dilute your shampoo before you put it in your hair and then you wash it out after maybe a couple of minutes maximum so it's not like your hair is soaking in the salt the thing is when you use a product that contains table salt it will over time cause your scalp to dry out and this can cause flaky scalp hair loss and not only that it also dries out your strands which can cause split ends breakage and just brittle hair overall your hair is getting attacked from all sides so yeah your hair

is not soaking in the salt your scalp isn't soaking in it either but even if your scalp was soaking in the salt the reason that salt dries out your skin is because of osmosis that's when water is getting pulled out because the liquid outside your cells has like more concentrated salt than the liquid inside your cells but your diluted shampoo is really not that salty if it is drying out your scalp it's probably other things in there like the surfactant and just the water from your shower maybe it's like warmer and just washing out the

oils from your scalp that's going to be making a much bigger difference than like the tiny tiny sprinkle of salt okay we're doing it let's talk about the 1.5 million dry shampoos that have been recalled in the US and Canada this past week if you haven't seen tons of dry shampoos right now are being recalled for having a cancer-causing ingredient in them called benzene so yeah this video was back from the recall of dry shampoo because there were traces of benzene found in them a whole bunch of products have been recalled sunscreens as well and

hand sanitizers and they're almost all because of one lab called Valisure I've talked about the sunscreen recall in another video that breaks it down in a lot more detail but in short the lab says a lot of really questionable things that make it really sound like they're trying to fearmonger I might do a longer video breaking down the background behind this lab and some of their pretty dubious things I don't know maybe a bit later but the amounts of benzene found in these products were really low but like with formaldehyde it is pretty easy to

freak out about benzene if you don't know a lot about it back with the sunscreen story a lot of dermatologists were posting really fearmongery videos based on that Valisure press release because that press release itself was pretty fearmongery now I don't really blame people for freaking out a bit when you first hear these sorts of stories but you should really do a fact check when these stories come out before you throw out your products maybe just put them in the back of a cupboard for a while until more info comes up and it gets a

bit clearer and you should definitely not film a video warning all of your many followers about it now if you don't know anything about benzene it's a chemical that's normally found in car emissions and gasoline it's been found to cause temporary symptoms of anemia memory loss skin irritation but the most concerning it's a carcinogen which means it's a cancer causing agent so all of the recalls were done out of that whole abundance of caution thing the brands all go to lengths to say that the amounts of benzene weren't expected to cause any harm and the

Valisure data does actually support that again check out my older video on benzene and yes car emissions are one of the big sources of exposure if you want to drop your benzene exposure the best thing to do is actually just not to park your car in a garage that's attached to your house even if you inhaled all of the benzene coming out of one of these products which is unlikely because you know spray products go into the air not just all into your lungs it is still less exposure than breathing city air for half a

day so all of these effects she's talking about like anemia memory loss skin irritation cancer all of these are from occupational exposures to much higher amounts of benzene again the dose is really important for your actual risk it's not from these tiny amounts you getting from a hairspray and not only are these aerosol cans causing us to inhale this stuff but your scalp actually absorbs things into the bloodstream in just 26 seconds so that crap is all up in your bloodstream I'm not really sure where this 26 seconds like factoid comes from but benzene isn't

easily absorbed through your skin or your scalp most of the exposure you get is mostly through inhalation and there was actually a study where some dermatologists got annoyed enough to look at the blood levels of benzene measured in people who use different amounts of sunscreen and they found that there was just no connection between how much sunscreen you used and how much benzene you have in your blood which again given how much benzene has been found in these products it's just not really that surprising and take a look at the first few ingredients on your

dry shampoo I'm willing to bet it's either propane butane or isobutane now how this crap is even allowed in our beauty products beats me but let me give you a little history lesson so you can kind of understand how messed up beauty products in the US are there is nothing wrong with these ingredients they are all propellant gases that push the dry shampoo out of the can and they're not toxic at sensible amounts just you know don't huff your can of dry shampoo they're hydrocarbons and they're the same stuff that you get in like hot

pot gas cans and in cigarette lighters but this just really has nothing to do with benzene I think she's just kind of gone down like this scary names rabbit hole there has not been a law as to what cannot go in our beauty products in the US since 1938 84 years ago and the US only has 11 ingredients banned from our products whereas the UK has over 1,300 ingredients banned from their products something is just not adding up here like why there are so many myths about us versus EU slash UK regulations I talked about

some of these before in my video on EU versus US sunscreen regulation but this whole 11 versus 1300 banned ingredients thing this just really doesn't tell you much unsafe ingredients are banned in both regions and basically these lists are just examples of ingredients that would make a product unsafe to my understanding the reason the EU/UK list is longer is mostly just historical and political reasons when the UK was part of the EU they used the EU list and then since brexit they sort of split it and now the UK list is slowly sort of like

evolving and changing compared to the EU one basically when the different countries banded together to form the EU there was like a lot of smooshing of regulations and so that's why you find really weird stuff on that list like things like jet fuel and radioactive materials so it's just like the EU has a lot more examples and a lot of these examples have never actually been in cosmetics they're just included for weird historical reasons and the FDA has issued warnings for products that contain lots of ingredients that aren't on this 11 banned ingredients list so

clearly there are more than 11 banned ingredients things like prostaglandin analogues and those are eyelash growth ingredients that have been found out side effects they're what's in bimatoprost and the thing is all of the ingredients she's mentioned in this video are allowed in EU and UK products like butane propane isobutane are commonly found and even traces of benzene are allowed and having a recall is actually a good thing so notice that the US and Canada did have recalls but the EU and the UK didn't and this isn't because there's no benzene in those EU and

UK products based on how the benzene got into the products it's probably in lots of different countries' products as well I know people who work in EU regulations and they've mentioned that the US does have a more litigious culture and that's maybe why the products are so similar in both regions even though the regulations do look quite different but there are new regulations coming into the US called MoCRA and this will be nice because it does make the regulations more similar to the EU the biggest problem with the US regulations that I've heard from regulatory

people is that the regulations are pretty unclear so it's hard for smaller brands to really understand what they can and can't do what are good practices when making and launching cosmetics a lot of those like homemade kitchen products that you see from small brand selling on places like Etsy they are sort of like the beauty equivalent of pink sauce there's just not a lot of you know normal safety practices going into making those and this is a lot less of a problem in Europe because you do need to register any products that you sell so

there is a sort of at least basic gatekeeping that stops a lot of people from just launching weird unsafe products again I think I've managed to make a video that is like way too long on this I don't know how I managed to keep all this to like oneish minute when I was debunking them on TikTok there are just a lot of layers to all of these myths but yeah a lot of these videos have had millions of views and it is really quite scary how this like perfect mix of fear and short explanations just

really hooks into social media algorithms it's really easy to get people's attention in a short time span with this sort of content and most people do care about their friends and family so when they see these they will forward it to them and make sure you know they aren't harming themselves and all of this sharing and saving is just rewarded really well by all the platforms so I guess the message here is just be really careful when you're sharing scary videos even if you are doing it with good intentions which I'm sure most people are

I mean you can share with me so I can find out more about them and debunk them but you know don't share share it if it's something that's scary or surprising that is like an automatic red flag for misinformation it's not always the case because scary stories are sometimes true but most of the time if something is surprising that means that it isn't really supported by the body of evidence it's not a robust finding that's been confirmed again and again which is how science works also look for the consensus of relevant experts and yes we

did just see some people who seem like experts sharing this information but a lot of the time medical doctors on social media aren't really automatically experts on things like toxicology and cosmetics those aren't really topics that they learn in any sort of depth in med school and again there are huge teams of scientists working at a lot of these companies the chance that someone with no training or expertise can look something up on an app and find out it's toxic in 5 seconds it's just really not something that all of these scientists have missed or

they're staying quiet about it's just really really improbable that there's this huge conspiracy going on so most of the time if a bunch of relevant experts are overwhelmingly saying the same thing it is probably going to be true based on the current evidence if you see videos on TikTok and Instagram that need debunking please send them to me of course it would be great if you follow me on those platforms as well if you enjoyed this video click the like and the subscribe teach the algorithm that this is what you like seeing also let me

know what other myths you see all the time that you want me to debunk especially if it's on silicones I feel like I could probably make a whole video just on silicone myths if you want to watch more mythbusting videos I have a whole playlist here if you want something a bit less infuriating I also have a whole bunch of cosmetic science videos