My dentist recommended me a stupid toothpaste called “Pearls & Dents” which also contained literal plastic balls. Such a stupid and corrupt person. I believe Dentists are paid by Elmex in germany too.
They are. I went through pre-med for my postmortem science degree and am still close with my doctor/dentist friends from the program. They get kickbacks from companies if they successfully sell a brand. Sometimes the results are great, like Wakix (my Narcolepsy medication that actually helped), but other times, it’s a garbage product. If the medical professional has a fancy pamphlet or offers you coupons for the product, that means the company is paying them.
Do you have you pay for medication in Germany?
I was once offered a job peddling prescription drugs to GPs on behalf of several manufacturers. These marketing companies are mass-interviewing, you know. And so, there’s never a shortage of these hawkers.
Ever wondered why you have to sit in the waiting room for a full hour when your appointment is scheduled at 8? Your doctor is talking to salespeople.
Genuine question, what’s the purpose of putting plastic balls in a tooth paste? Texture or something?
Abrasives. Same thing as charcoal. Tiny hard particles help remove gunk when you brush them against something.
Most toothpaste contains abrasives. Look in the ingredients list on your toothpaste, it’s likely silica.
The point of using plastic is because the petrochemical industry makes money if they use plastics.
A few years ago there was a brand in some shops with literal pearls of something suspended in the gel.
Not very unlikely they were just plastic pearls.As opposed to metaphorical microplastics?
Figurative micro plastics.
Micro surgeries
Language evolves over time. Prescriptivism always fails.
I thought they were using natural materials like ground coffee. Did some of them actually use plastic beads?
Yes, most used micro plastics for a long time, charcoal and coffee grounds are a fairly new advent in the last few years.
Some 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.
Can confirm as I am allergic to walnuts.
I have been using that stuff for years and I’m very satisfied!
I didn’t realize America has banned them. Good. I just figured they were a fad.
Hey we’re actually ahead of the EU in something!
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.
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.
U! 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!
LUSH uses almond hulls in their products, so they are fully compostable. If you want something with a scrub, check them out for sure.
That’s really a shower thought…
A shower memory.
microbeads!
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.
Exfoliating plastics!
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
God 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 micro plastic.
Most conditioner is silicone-based. For anyone curious, if your conditioner lists dimethicone or any other -cone in the ingredients list, that’s silicone.
I 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!
Is 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 Wild 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.
Silicone is a far cry from plastics though. It’s a non carbon based oil. Plastics are polymers. There’s no commonality whatsoever.
Silicone is made from sand, and hydrocarbons that come from oil or natural gas. Silicone is still a petroleum product.
Don’t confuse silicone for silicon. The names are similar, but one is basically rubber and the other is a crystal.
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.
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?
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.
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
Its not even a decade ago. Its closer to 5 years ago that they got banned
It is as Benjamin Franklin once said: “Life is microplastics, it’s micro-fantastic.”
Hold up- when I read micro infiltrated blood, Intuit breast milk, glaciers etc, I pictured microscopic. You’re telling me plastic materials large enough to see and feel are what they’re referring to?
As I understand it, there’s a range of sizes that are problematic, from small to micro to nano and beyond.
The problem is the more plastic we make, and the smaller it starts, the easier it is for it to get worn down into smaller and smaller bits that become more problematic for us.
One of the problems with all the macro plastics in the ocean is that that as they get churned up and baked in the UV from the sun, smaller and smaller bits break off and become part of the… Everything.
Micro plastics are so prevalent that they can’t even do proper studies on how harmful it might be to us, because there are no control groups that have no plastics inside their bodies to compare against. Even babies in the womb have plastic in them. You have plastic in you right now, almost a 100% guarantee.
There’s probably more to it than that even, but that’s my understanding of it.
Ahhh… that whole, plastic seeps into your possessions thing… That might be the ocean, not the hot soup in your nalgene. Man… there is a lot of macro in the ocean to break down. I’ve been following environmental news and science for almost 35 years and I keep learning new and exciting shitty things for the first time. It only gets worse!
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?
Somebody 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.”
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 https://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