Samantha Holender

I use one product and one product only, and that is beef tallow.

I think the reason beauty products are part of the conversation first and foremost, besides food maybe being the other one, is because they're so intimate.

You're putting lotion on your naked skin and maybe you don't think as much about the chemicals that might be in the paint on your walls or the packaging that your new purse came in or the purse itself for that matter because you're just carrying it around. But there's something about your skin is porous.

You're in an intimate act when you put on cosmetics and skincare, and that makes you like especially primed to be fearful of these quote unquote toxins.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

See, I feel like I've been seeing it like in the last two years or so since the pandemic. And there was such an interest in skincare then. And then when the homesteading movement sort of... came about online. But I would also say it's even in other countries I've seen it earlier, like a facialist I know who's in Australia mentioned that that's been around for at least 10 years.

But the social trend and the way that it's popped off recently, yeah, I would say in the last year or so.

It's so soothing, right?

I think there's two reasons for that boomerang. One is skincare and beauty products have sort of gone the way of fashion. So we're used to these boomerang trend cycles with fashion, and we're starting to see that a little bit in beauty because it's following the same way. The other is sort of what you mentioned with the skin barrier.

When everybody was using all these products, they were introducing a lot of foreign substances. Foreign sounds negative, but I just mean things they hadn't used before. So their skin barriers were reacting, whether it was an acid or maybe it's just like okay, you're using three things.

That's introducing so many more ingredients that your skin hasn't been used to that you just might have like an irritation to. So people were, I remember it was like 2019. I wrote this whole story about how people were messing up their skin barriers with all of the 10 step beauty. And I was already starting to see some pushback towards a simpler type of routine that

We were primed to sort of chill out on that. The pandemic threw a wrench in that whole thing because then it was like, well, we're staring at ourselves on Zoom all day. But now that that's settled down, I think that boomerang is really just coming in like you said. It was too complicated and we want it to be simpler.

And we also want to have our skin chill out because maybe it was a little irritated.

Oh, I have so many reasons for this one. I think it's confusing for a lot of people to look at a skincare ingredient list right now. Those are long names. They're chemical names. But just because they're hard to pronounce and maybe you don't have experience with them does not mean they're unsafe. So that's one thing.

The other thing I think a little bit is just mistrust in general of corporations and government. I mean, we've seen in like study after study that Americans are less trustful of corporations. And I think part of that reason is because – you know, we don't feel that we always have control over our health care choices. And skin is part of health care.

So it feels nice to think of something as natural. That said, there's also studies showing like certain ingredients that have historically been used in cosmetic products are not great for your skin. You know, the FDA bans, I believe, about a dozen now in the EU. It's about 1,200. And say what you will about these lists, and experts will say a lot because...

Some of these ingredients aren't even used in skincare. But that makes people scared. Like when you hear there's a list of 1,200 things in the EU that people aren't allowed to use in cosmetics, you're like, what are they?

Historically, yes. I mean, there's things like talc that might have asbestos contamination that we no longer use in certain ways, triclosan, certain formaldehydes in hair relaxers, for example.

Over the course of like the last hundred years of modern cosmetics, we found a couple of things that are really bad. But generally speaking, most of the ingredients used in cosmetic products have a huge safety record. They've been around for a while. And it's true. Our FDA here in the U.S. does not test products. I don't know if people know this, but...

They don't test products before they come to market. There's no like, hey, we gave this to FDA. They said it's safe. Now we're selling it to you. It's just not how our government is set up. I didn't know that. Okay. No, you are free to sell a product. You have to show that it's safe, but you don't have to show it to the government. You just have to have that information should something happen.

Drugs are different, obviously, and some acne products over-the-counter are considered over-the-counter drugs, so that would be different. But with cosmetic skincare, no.

Ones I've smelled are just like kind of, they're just fatty. They don't smell like beef or cow.

The possible benefits are the vitamin profile is great. The fatty acids are great. The other thing I have to point out just about this preservatives thing is when something is just fats or just oils, even if it's commercially made, you don't necessarily need preservatives because bacteria grow in anything with water, as Sam alluded to. That said, animals are full of bacteria.

And if it's not purified correctly and manufactured in a way that is tested for purity and maybe just made in someone's backyard, you might already have bacteria in that product before it even comes to you. So that's a little bit nerve wracking as well.