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Personal care products disrupt the human oxidation field
- neuroelectron 1y ago[flagged]
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThat's far too often. I'm conserving water, the environment, money, and my OH field by only rolling around in the watering trough once a month. /s
- alwa 1y agoSpeak 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? https://www.fastcompany.com/90348480/how-this-bacteria-crawling-skincare-line-became-a-fast-growing-wellness-brand https://www.fastcompany.com/90348480/how-this-bacteria-crawl...
- maipen 1y agoThe price of living in society is that we must also be considerate of those around us…
- alwa 1y agoIf we’re all smelly, then none of us are smelly! 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.
- khalic 1y agoSome people are very sensitive to body odors, don’t generalize please
- alwa 1y agoFor 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…
- khalic 1y agoOh no apologies needed, but I appreciate it. Yes we can definitely share a sigh over that, followed by as much time as I can, holding my breath haha Take care
- HK-NC 1y agoI 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.
- ofcrpls 1y agoThis 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.
- flint 1y agoThis is why I get outside and sweat every day.
- peanut_merchant 1y agoNot well versed in the field, what are the basic implications of this for health?
- whitexn--g28h 1y agoThe article does not come to any health conclusions, just studies the impact on indoor air chemistry.
- PaulHoule 1y agoIn 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144358/detergent-like-molecule-recycles-itself-in-atmosphere https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144358/detergent-li...
- thaumasiotes 1y agoHow can something be a negative ion generator without simultaneously being a positive ion generator?
- parpfish 1y agoThis won’t lead to people using less lotion, but it will lead to fancy lotions adding “OH precursors” as the new science buzzmarketing term
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoWhich is funny since the exact opposite, anti-oxidants, have been a fad to add for the past 20years.
- thinkingtoilet 1y agoYou eat anti-oxidants. So unless you're eating your lotions this isn't related and can't be the opposite.
- iinnPP 1y agoSkin absorbs. So it's at least partially related.
- fredfish 1y agoIf 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> unless you're eating your lotions 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.
- woleium 1y agoAntioxidant 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”. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/205797 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/20579...
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- dylan604 1y agoThe 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.
- kstrauser 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anal_reactor 1y agoMy 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.
- iinnPP 1y agoNot showering for a week means I have a headache all day. So evidently not everyone is doing it for someone else.
- perching_aix 1y agoThat doesn't sound normal? Why would you get headaches from not showering? Never heard of such a thing.
- cma 1y agoCould be muscle tension or something helped by the warm water
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- maipen 1y agoUnrelated: 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)
- superkuh 1y agoCloudflare 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.
- mfro 1y agoI have this problem when using the JShelter addon if I enable the privacy switches. Your browser is probably resisting fingerprinting.
- perching_aix 1y agoThat is very curious, because I have both JS and all manners of clientside storage disabled, yet can access the site fine. I guess maybe my CGNAT IP is reasonably well trusted and that's the difference?
- userbinator 1y agoHint: TLS fingerprinting. (No problems with accessing this site without JS. You just need to make your client look like one of the officially-sanctioned browsers.)
- benibela 1y agothe internet is being ruined everywhere. 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
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- 12_throw_away 1y agoHeh, 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.
- EugeneOZ 1y agoActually it sounds kinda good.
- fwip 1y agoNot 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.
- ricardobeat 1y agoThat’s like saying diarrhea will protect you against ingesting unknown poisons. Disrupting natural processes rarely comes without unintended side effects.
- fwip 1y agoSure, 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.
- giantg2 1y agoWith 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.
- alwa 1y agoIn fact, it was specifically one of those alternatives which was under test here: “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?
- giantg2 1y agoYeah, my comment was just to add that scents have so many other issues than just what's in the article.
- rowanG077 1y agoThis is the first time I'm hearing they are bad. Could you share some research about this?
- amarcheschi 1y agoAt 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
- rowanG077 1y agoYes of course, there are a ton of bad substances. But I as not aware of something that is. Ubiquitously used, known bad and not banned in the EU.
- drabbiticus 1y agoFor a slightly more digestible take, see https://news.uci.edu/2025/05/21/lotions-perfumes-curb-potentially-harmful-effects-of-human-oxidation-field-study-finds/ https://news.uci.edu/2025/05/21/lotions-perfumes-curb-potent... 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.
- muhdeeb 1y agoThis 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.
- hackernewds 1y agoJust posting to not just upvote, but also say that you have a very calm thought process and write with clarity
- mannycalavera42 1y ago[flagged]
- photochemsyn 1y ago"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.
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- metalman 1y agowow!, 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.
- 8bitsrule 1y ago"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.
- amarcheschi 1y ago>When I look at the laundry-list of chemicals in personal-care products I often wonder how much effort goes into testing all of this gunk. A lot of effort
- hiddencost 1y agoGood news (sarcasm), they laid off all the people responsible for that.
- 12_throw_away 1y ago>> how much effort goes into testing all of this gunk. > A lot of effort Into testing the long-term biochemical and environmental consequences? lol no absolutely not. Source: I work in this field.
- amarcheschi 1y agoAt least in eu, regulation is present to at least try to ensure that products are quite safe for the customers and for the environment
- thefounder 1y agoI think there are no long terms and that’s the case for food as well
- dvh 1y agoOccasionally 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?
- userbinator 1y agoThis 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.
- rsync 1y ago"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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power,_Sex,_Suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power,_Sex,_Suicide
- fiatjaf 1y agoThis is impossible to read.
- 867-5309 1y agolimonene, linalool, "parfum" are the scourge of this age
- datameta 1y agoBut are great as part of a cannabis strain profile!
- indus 1y agoIs 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?
- sjducb 1y agoLots 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.
- pandarus 1y agojesus
- xeonmc 1y agoIs your name Richard, by any chance?
- const_cast 1y ago> 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.