Personal care products disrupt the human oxidation field

[muhdeeb]

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.

[hackernewds]

Just posting to not just upvote, but also say that you have a very calm thought process and write with clarity

[photochemsyn]

"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.

[dylan604]

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.

[kstrauser]

[flagged]

[8bitsrule]

"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.

[dvh]

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?

[amarcheschi]

>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

[WalterBright]

I agree. We should go back to the Roman days when clothes were washed in urine.

[12_throw_away]

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.

[EugeneOZ]

Actually it sounds kinda good.

[maipen]

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)

[heavyset_go]

> 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.

[superkuh]

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.

[neuroelectron]

You get what you pay for

[parpfish]

This 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]

Which is funny since the exact opposite, anti-oxidants, have been a fad to add for the past 20years.

[drabbiticus]

For a slightly more digestible take, see 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.

[userbinator]

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.

[giantg2]

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.

[FredPret]

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.

[alwa]

In 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?

[rowanG077]

This is the first time I'm hearing they are bad. Could you share some research about this?

[cma]

> Most products have fragrance free alternatives.

That itself is a big change that took a while.

[flint]

This is why I get outside and sweat every day.

[peanut_merchant]

Not well versed in the field, what are the basic implications of this for health?

[PaulHoule]

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144358/detergent-li...

[whitexn--g28h]

The article does not come to any health conclusions, just studies the impact on indoor air chemistry.

[GeoAtreides]

if only there was a 'Discussion' section in the article, that goes over the basic implication of the study results... if only.

[metalman]

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.

[fiatjaf]

This is impossible to read.

[867-5309]

limonene, linalool, "parfum" are the scourge of this age

[datameta]

But are great as part of a cannabis strain profile!

[burnt-resistor]

That'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

[indus]

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?

[sjducb]

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.

[const_cast]

> 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.

[xeonmc]

Is your name Richard, by any chance?

[pandarus]

jesus