CorkyskogRemember when the body washes contained literal micro plastics and were advertised as such?
originalucifermicrobeads!
redcalciumI thought they were using natural materials like ground coffee. Did some of them actually use plastic beads?
ChicoSuave
I didn’t realize America has banned them. Good. I just figured they were a fad.
AltoHey we're actually ahead of the EU in something!
I want to see more regulations around plastics. We have the ability to make biodegradable plastics and we can research better ones. Plastic is a bane to the environment.
Shit we can’t allow that. I’m gonna go to the Euro Parliament to lobby for banning 10 random things.
Ban bans, and brands while you’re at it.
Just random? Like maybe ban ice cubes and fitness gyms and people with braces? Just randomness lol
BizzleU! S! A! U! S! A! 🦅🇺🇸
I’ve been wondering what happened to that fad. Amazing that they were banned! Let’s do more
I remember my sister telling me to use facial wash for acne with stuff like that in it. Thank fuck I’ve ADHD and never got a routine going with using it.
I used it because I never thought about how bad it would be for the environment. Switched to dissolving exfoliants like salt as soon as they were available though!
Admiral PatrickSome used pumice (I think Lava Soap or something along those lines) but it’s more harsh than the plastic microbeads OP is referring to.
I know St Ives uses crushed up walnut shells and apricot pits for theirs.
Whiskey_iicarusI have been using that stuff for years and I’m very satisfied!
Aviandelight Can confirm as I am allergic to walnuts.
Yes, they all used micro plastics for a long time, charcoal and coffee grounds are a fairly new advent in the last few years.
LUSH uses almond hulls in their products, so they are fully compostable. If you want something with a scrub, check them out for sure.
I’ve been buying face scrubs that have ground apricot pits in them. They are great. Just the right amount of abrasiveness and totally biodegradeable. These have been around for decades. The microbead shit was cheaper, I suppose. And maybe some squeamish people don’t like the brown grainy appearance of apricot pit scrub.
That’s really a shower thought…
A shower memory.
iAmTheTotAs opposed to metaphorical microplastics?
Figurative micro plastics.
Micro surgeries
Language evolves over time. Prescriptivism always fails.
Exfoliating plastics!
I remember ads claiming it was cutting edge nanotechnology! And I thought oh cool, you mean like there are tiny robots running around in the shampoo? But no, it was microplastics.
Damn is that what they were? I thought it was sand
Sand is too expensive
I thought Axe Snakepeel was so cool. I thought it had titanium beads. Turns out, the beads were plastic and titanium (dioxide) was normal soap stuff (though I think just to artificially make the soap opaque). It disappeared before I was aware
Titanium dioxide is often used as a white pigment
I work in the plastics industry. TiO2 is definitely our pigment of choice for white colorant
BlueÆtherGod knows how many KG of that I lifted in the few years I worked in plastics
There’s still shampoo with silicone as an ingedient, so your hair feels silky smooth. Because it wraps every single hair in invisible microplastic.
Most conditioner is silicone-based. For anyone curious, if your conditioner lists dimethicone or any other -cone in the ingredients list, that’s silicone.
paraphrandIs this the part that I find so objectionable to my senses when I’m touching it and using it in my hair? I hate the feeling of conditioner in my hands when I’m applying it.
Probably! I have a conditioner that’s all-that-stuff free and it no longer grosses me out to touch.
And thank goodness because I have big, curly, loooong hair
Thanks for replying. What conditioner do you use?
This is going to sound crazy, but I use Suave Essentials Wold Cherry Blossom. It’s like 1 or 2 bucks a bottle and thank goodness because I have to use half a bottle when I wash my hair. What I used to spend…
I found it through the Curly Girl approved products list. Here’s a copy-paste of the entire ingredients (in case someone more knowledgeable comes along to tell me it has stuff in it I didn’t know was bad for me).
Ingredients: Water (Aqua), Cetearyl Alcohol, Stearamidopropyl Dimethylamine, Fragrance (Parfum), Lactic Acid, Potassium Chloride, Disodium EDTA, PEG-150 Distearate, Tocopheryl Acetate, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothiazolinone, Fragaria Vesca (Strawberry) Juice, Benzyl Alcohol, Hexyl Cinnamal, Limonene, Linalool, Red 33 (CI 17200), Yellow 5 (CI 19140).
The Curly Girl site I use says that the methyl ingredients can cause itchiness in a sensitive scalp so keep that in mind if you try it.
+1 for Curly Girl method being mentioned.
It’s unfortunately named since this is good for anyone, not just women. Have been using various “free” products for about 6 or 7 years now and my hair always feels great and all the natural waviness of my hair came back.
SoleInvictusI have to admit, I saw your comment and was like “no fucking way”.
So I looked it up and… Yes fucking way. That’s crazy!
Silicone is a far cry from plastics though. It’s a non carbon based oil. Plastics are polymers. There’s no commonality whatsoever.
Silicones are also polymers. Polymer means many-chains. Any repeated chemical unit is a polymer. Another example is PLA (poly lactic acid) is a non-petroleum based polymer. It’s literally lactic acid.
Are you trying to say that silicone isn’t a petroleum based product?
Even if they are trying to claim that silicone isn’t a petroleum product, they are incorrect. Silicone is made of sand, and hydrocarbons that are derived from either oil or natural gas.
hydrocarbons that are derived from either oil or natural gas.
…which makes it a petroleum product.
That’s what I said.
Somehow I missed part of your comment, and thought you were saying silicone isn’t a petroleum product.
I’ll just… idk, seems a little late to take a break
You’re right, I got confused. My point is silicone can be washed away with soap, you can’t do that with plastics. It’s not fair to compare both.
Silicone is made from sand, and hydrocarbons that come from oil or natural gas. Silicone is still a petroleum product.
It’s not a plastic. It doesn’t bioaccumulate, it’s basically non toxic and can be washed away with soap. Trying to fight silicone use when we have so much plastic going on it’s just wasting effort for no real benefit.
I totally thought those were some kind of thing that would dissolve at first. I thankfully just didn’t like those body washes anyway, but I was super disappointed when I found out those ‘exfoliating beads’ were just micro plastic. What evil fuck ok’d that decision?
It would have been a chemist right? At some point some chemist who knew they don’t dissolve pitched the idea that their company could use microplastics.
A search engine that could pull up meetings in company minutes would be so much fun. A mini wikileaks that acted as a repository for internal emails would be so much fun. Something like www.climatefiles.com/collection-index/
It didn’t have to be an evil fuck. Could have just been an ignorant fuck. “Do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by ignorance”.
Disregarding what we know now: it would be great to have an exfoliating bead that didn’t break down or decay. I used it, sometimes, and it worked well for its intended purpose. We just didn’t think anything about it, and they probably didn’t, either.
Hanlon’s Razor should be required curriculum in all schools
Captain AggravatedSomebody somewhere figured out that you can sell grit to women if you refer to it as “exfoliant.” Because that terrycloth towel you’re going to dry yourself with isn’t nearly rough enough to remove dead skin cells, right girls?
Meanwhile washing a man is mostly a matter of degreasing which is why a man’s shower has one bottle of mostly sodium laurel sulfate in it labeled “everything wash.”
There is a bar soap currently for sale that does that
Well, ain’t that old fashioned - bar soap! I can remember my Mother and Grandmother making soap every fall at home. Stuff could take the hide right off you some years, but you got clean for sure. It also made a fine laundry soap too. I can remember watching my Mother shave slivers of it off into the washing machine when I was little.
But thanks for reminding me, I need to put bar soap on my shopping list. I need to also order another puck of shaving soap too.
Sounds like you need to make some soap this fall.
I have made some soap when my Daughters were younger and still at home. Mostly so they could learn about what “the old days” were like when Dad and Mom were their age. Soap making is kind of expensive to do these days. A lot cheaper and easier to just buy a bar of soap from the store. But they had fun learning.
We taught our Daughters a lot of things that aren’t commonly done these days. But were things we did everyday to have a normal life. Everything from gardening and canning to sewing to soap making to how to raise and kill and butcher an animal.