The Truth About Skin Moisturizer

Firstly, be aware that "moisturizer" is a marketing term with no scientific or clinical definition. For all intents and purposes, ordinary old tap water, absorbed into the skin via a warm bath, relaxing sauna or cooling swim, is a "moisturizer". That's why your skin feels so nice and soft after those activities ... at least for a while.

Secondly, you must understand that the "moisturizer" branch of the cosmetics industry is a high-stakes, billion dollar game played by a thousand vicious competitors who are all forever seeking an edge in the marketplace, and therefore consumer deception is a common, even universal practice. Thirdly, be advised that the vast majority of their research and development expenditures are focused on marketing and persuasion - certainly not on something as peripheral to their bottom line as producing a better formulation, or anything. In fact, most manufacturers devote far more time, money and energy to designing and producing an attractive container and label, than they ever do on designing, producing or improving their actual product.

As to your actual question:

Be they the $60-for-a-tablespoon-in-a-crystal-pot variety, the ubiquitous, sink-side blue jar variety, or your drugstore-brand "family size" pump bottle of white goo, all commercial "moisturizers" work in exactly the same way. They all provide a bit of water that penetrates cell walls membranes to rehydrate and plump up the outermost few layers of dead skin cells that form your epidermis. Typically, their water content is around 65%. In addition, they all contain (@~25%) some sort of grease, wax or oil to trap that water inside, so it isn't just immediately evaporated away again by your excessive body heat ... you sultry thing, you.

In that regard, the only advantage all those hundreds of modern "moisturizers" have over your grandmother's go-to for dry skin - petrolatum, aka Vaseline - is that makers have gotten more sophisticated at finding different formulations and combinations of grease, oil and/or wax that don't feel quite as slippery or greasy to the touch, once the cells have absorbed all they can, and the leftovers remain on the surface of your skin.

This is the reason why, for example, Johnson's Baby Oil encourages you to slop on their product immediately after you shower: to seal in that tap water you've just absorbed (which needs to be done within 5 minutes of showering, or it's gone), and to ensure that any excess oil you might apply will rub off on your towel and/or your fresh clothes, and thus appear to have been successfully "absorbed" by your skin. (What - did you think there was some sort of magic involved? JBO is merely a fine mineral oil with some scent added; buy a store brand and save some money.)

Some expensive products meant for the delicate skin of the face contain a proprietary dermal irritant like CEF. Such products basically inflame the dermis, which causes its cells to temporarily inflate by taking up plasma, which in turn reduces the appearance of facial wrinkles for a few hours (rather like blowing up a withered, half-deflated balloon). But eventually the irritant is neutralized by the body's defenses, the dermal irritation subsides and its cells deflate themselves, allowing wrinkles to re-emerge - thus setting up a new and lucrative cycle of product consumption.

There are many other formulations. Some makers add a preservative like paraben to extend shelf life. Some add a humectant to absorb and trap additional water for a longer-lasting experience. Some add collagen, which is nothing more than un-absorbable connective tissue, typically sourced from that rubbery skin inside eggshells; you might as well rub yourself with actual eggshells, for all the moisturizing benefits topical collagen will provide. Same goes for added keratin, which is mostly sourced from cattle horns and hooves acquired from slaughterhouses. I know: eww, right?

Some products increase their appeal by including pleasant odourants, like rosewater (St. Ives) or menthol (Noxema). Some add vitamins, in the hope they will appear to consumers as being able to "nourish" skin (hint: they can't).

Both useful and useless additions to moisturizers come and go in phases. At one time, sheep lanolin was popular; but it's stinky, and was largely abandoned when less pungent plant-based greases were developed. Chlorophyll was once a widespread addition, though nobody ever got around to explaining its benefits, or the supposed parallels between plant and skin chemistry. A few years ago, PABA was all the rage as a UV-blocking additive, until someone pointed out that the living tissue of the dermis was actually incapable of absorbing topical PABA. In fact, the only way to get it into dermal cells where it could do some good was to drink the damn stuff, eight hours before exposing oneself to the sun. Vitamin E is/was a popular addition, at least until clinical studies indicated it actually had no better moisturizing effect than any other fine, plant-based oil. And the most recent additive fad seems to be hemp oil, Harrelson help us.

BTW, dry skin isn't actually a health issue, unless it's so profound that cracks appear in the epidermis, exposing the living dermis to the outside world and all its microscopic creepy-crawlies. It's really more of a comfort and aesthetic issue. Still, if severe enough, it can interfere with quality of life, and it makes some people quite miserable.

I provide a couple of citations, below. There's a lot of good info out there, but I would recommend that readers stick to those sites offered by legitimate medical and research facilities, universities with teaching hospitals, and so on. Don't rely on general interest sites or any site offering to sell you product.

Even worse for providing dubious information and specious assertions are the commercial web pages of the retail cosmetics industry. If the link has a little "registered" symbol in its name, just walk on by. It is revealing that the first 500 or so links provided by any Google search for "moisturizers" consist almost entirely of cosmetic manufacturers' websites, rather than to legitimate clinical information. It's the same reason why the first thing one encounters upon entering a department store, is the makeup counter. (Hint: $)

Here, to start readers off, are a couple of authentic medical citations regarding moisturizers:

Mayo Clinic: Getting the Most out of Your Moisturizer

Harvard Medical School: Moisturizers: Do They Work?

University of Tennessee Medical Centre: The Importance of Moisturizing

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics: Winter Dry Skin

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Blueprint for Learning SEO and Online Marketing

I teach people (online store owners) marketing skills. Here's the curriculum I recommend starting with. The blessed thing about marketing is that a) the actual skill curve is fairly shallow, as long as you can think with data and write fairly well and b) everything you need to surmount said skill curve is available online, often from the platform publishers themselves.

Moz - a company that publishes a package of niche tools for fetching various data about site marketing performance - publishes the excellent, excellent Beginner's Guide to SEO.

Google offers free, online certification programs in Google Adwords, their ad platform, that will get you credentials you can put on your LinkedIn profile, as well as a slightly less intense one in Google Analytics. You'll ideally want both certifications, since those two applications play so closely together. 

Similarly, getting certs in Social PPC (pay-per-click) will only make your resume stronger. Facebook offers Facebook Blueprint, fairly similar to the Adwords certification course, but for social ads. 

Altogether, these will give you the conceptual background you need to be able to understand how on-site content and off-site marketing contribute to organic search, how to run ads on various platforms to stimulate paid traffic, and Analytics will (kinda) help you understand how those things fit together into your marketing mix and where you're failing with each of them.

Creative Suite you can master on your own with a million Youtube videos. Focus on Illustrator, probably. This isn't critical, but sometimes when you're making a social ad or creating a content page, you need a graphic on the fly. You'll be a way stronger candidate if you don't have to wait on the art department to make it.

Learn the shit out of Excel. Real digital marketers are all about data-informed decisions. Excel allows you to take the data from several programs and use it to highlight trends. By Excel, I really mean learn the "advanced" Excel skills like PivotTables, =VLOOKUP, =LEFT/=RIGHT, formulas (others include =SUM, =AVERAGE, =CONCATENATE), Find/Replace, Text-to-Columns, and autofilling.

Optional bonus points: a light background in front-end dev languages like HTML/CSS or JavaScript can help you when you're creating content pages and need to understand why something's not rendering correctly. It also lets you talk to the dev monkeys a little bit whenever your boss wants you to do something drastic in a client's CMS. 

Learn a little SQL - it can help you dig in and get the reporting you need out of a client's CMS when it's not data you can get from Analytics. Finally, learn to work with a few CMSes themselves - the most popular one by a longshot is Wordpress.

So here's what you do with all of that: 

think of a business idea. 

• Start a free Wordpress site for it
• Build content pages and customize the design - that demonstrates your writing ability and gets you a little grease with CSS
• Launch the site
• Use SEMRush to learn that you didn't make the content pages keyword-rich enough
• Do some keyword research, then rewrite them
• Specify meta titles/descriptions for every page
• Verify the site with Google Search Console
• install Google Analytics and Adwords tracking code
• Spend $25 to get $75 of free Adwords credits
• Do something similar with Facebook
• Divide those budgets in half
• Set up campaigns in each ad platform to target what/who you think you should target
• Observe the results and figure out what you did wrong
• Use the other half of your budget to improve those results
• Make notes about what changed
• Finally, export all this data into Excel and try to use some PivotTables to demonstrate how this data changed over time

That's your practice course.

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Susan Komen, the Pink Ribbon, and Breast Cancer

As someone with tatas, and a mother-in-law with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, I figured I’d chime in.

Breast cancer is FAR from an easy, curable disease. We hear that if you get regular mammogram screenings, and it’s caught early, you’re practically in the clear. These are the stories Susan G Komen shares - the “For the Cure”, the Pink Walks, the I’m a survivor because of Susan crowd. There’s this guise of breast cancer being an easy-to-cure disease because of so many success stories… pushed by Susan Komen. How many Stage 1 and Stage 2 people do you hear of dying from breast cancer? You don’t. Instead, you hear that they fought it, got heavy chemo, and walked away a year later back to their lives.

Something that you don’t hear is this: “20% to 40% of all breast cancers will metastasize at some point.” Resource.

We’re told that 30% of all breast cancer patients will become metastatic in the future, spreading to other organs or areas and killing you. And metastatic breast cancer is the ONLY cancer of it’s kind that is not curable. There is no chemo for it, there is no treatment plan, there is no funding from Susan G Komen for it.

Take a few quick moments to look at what those pink ribbons pay for. The money you donate for those ribbons, in your checkout line, in the coin drop at the gas station, and walking in a pink shirt does not go to metastatic breast cancer research. Heck, it doesn’t even go to breast cancer research. It goes to awareness. You’re buying a pink ribbon so that they can make more pink ribbons, and advertise, and run marketing campaigns to sell more ribbons.

Remember when Susan G Komen sponsored the KFC buckets? Or the pink labels on yogurt containers? These foods contain chemicals that cause the cancers they’re supposedly trying to cure. Here’s a good article: Pink Ribbon Facade.

For even more of Susan’s brilliant pink washing campaigns over the years, which our donations and pink pride have paid for, check out this article.

There is a huge outcry from the metastatic breast cancer crowd, and once you’re in it, it’s hard to see the color pink as anything but an effing stain on real cancer research. It’s truly disgusting to see how many people are dying from a disease that the world thinks is curable, low-risk, and not nearly as important as lung and brain cancer.

“Sixty percent of the 2,000 people surveyed knew little to nothing about MBC while 72 percent believed advanced breast cancer was curable as long as it was diagnosed early.” Resource

Here’s something I learned very early on after my MILs diagnosis - all of the studies, articles, blogs, and support groups created by women with metastasized breast cancer are dead. There is no survival rate. If you make it to 3 years alive, you’d literally outlived everyone in your support group, or who was diagnosed around the time you were.

When my MIL started her journey, she got into a lot of private Facebook groups with MBC patients, with a few thousand members. This was a little over 2 years ago, and recently, she told me that she and only one other lady are still alive from that first year.

Think of all those cured patients that Komen advertises. You’d better believe that they didn’t do a follow up on the 30% that ended up dying within the following 10 years.

And here’s one more article, though old but just as appropriate, about misdiagnosis. The statistics are so off about breast cancer survival rates because of how MBC spreads. My mother in law had no lumps in her breast, but a sore arm that kept her up at night. Because of her crap insurance, an X-ray to see what the cause was was too expensive and she left it for over a year until she just stopped sleeping entirely. Eventually, after a lot of homeopathic remedies, manages, oils, and chiropractor appointments, her chiro Dr. ordered an X ray for her and offered to pay for it out of his own pocket.

She got the X ray, and that same afternoon, saw that cancer had eaten away at her humerus to the point that if she had fallen asleep, and rolled over, it would’ve broken. And after more tests, and weeks of scans, MRIs, etc that they are now painfully in debt from, they found that it was caused by breast cancer that spread from her breastbone to both sides of her pelvis and to her arm. And now, years later, she’s living with cancer. There isn’t a cure, and though she's now a cyborg with a metal humerus, we’re literally just waiting for it to spread somewhere else.

And in that spreading is where many people, over many decades, have come back after winning their fight against breast cancer, only to die from lung cancer, bone cancer, brain cancer (which is actually their breast cancer metastasized). The lack of research, and the misdiagnosis is truly disgusting.

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Choosing and Maintaining Bath Towels

Here's a little towel lesson,

So, like twenty/thirty years ago, a bunch of USA brand, union-made textile companies closed up their American plants and have since been hopping all over Asia chasing the best price. Meanwhile, American consumers have gotten used to fast fashion, where even Calvin Klein can be purchased at Herbergers for 90% off. It didn't bode well for the "linens" industry.

Sheets are doing alright right now; having quality bedding is "in" at the moment, and there were always enough people wanting nice bedding for a few companies to hang in there. 

But towels? Why do you need nice towels for the five minutes it takes to dry off your naked body once a day? 

So, towel companies fall in and out of favor, change names, are appropriated by brands like Martha Stewart Home, move locations to Sri Lanka (then Malaysia less than a year later) and are, essentially, extremely difficult to identify as Buy It For Life (BIFL).

So, look for white, 100% cotton towels big enough to completely wrap around yourself. Look for stitching at the hem ends that's clean, backstitched well and with no exposed or nearly exposed edges to rub free and fray. 

Edit: it should go without saying, but just in case, inspect the selvage edge of the towels for nicks, frays or tears, too. /Edit Do this and the basics for BIFL are nearly met!

To keep your towels BIFL, you have to take care of them. You don't have to wash your towels as often as you're washing your towels. You're dabbing clean water off a clean body. Washing them after every, or every other, or every third use is ridiculous. 

When you wash them, wash them as hot as your washer will go, without any fabric softener EVER, but maybe occasionally a vinegar rinse, with the tiniest bit of laundry detergent and if you can, set the washer to do an extra rinse. 

You may occasionally need to soak your towels in a high concentrate bleach solution, but only to get them white again. Bleach will eat away at your towels eventually. Oh! White towels because of the heat of the wash will start to fade any color you chose, and because it's easy to keep white.

Of course, you don't want them smelling musty, but that's a drying problem, not a washing one. As in, they should be completely dry within a few hours of getting wet. So get them dry in between showers. Each person having two to rotate, or tossing them outside or in the dryer for a few minutes. 

Something to ensure they're dry before it's next shower. There is so much fabric in a towel, any soap or softener remaining in it after washing will affect its absorbency, so don't overdo it. 

Dry them completely before folding and putting them away. Dryers are one of the worst things you can do to your textiles, so if you have the ability to sun dry them, that's preferable, even if the dryer gets them mostly dry and you Gerry-rig something on your apartment balcony for the last hour or so. 

If you can't sun dry them at all, go ahead and kill it in the machine. Better to have a clean towel that will get damaged a little faster than a dirty musty towel that lingers in your home for forever.

Oh, and if you're one of those cretins who use a bath towel to dry off your bath or shower, STOP IT! 

The bath and shower are not clean, unless you are as anal in your housekeeping as I am in my laundry. So, that means you're cleaning your towel after every bath (or you're super-grotty), wearing down its uses. Get a squeegee, for crying out loud! Or a couple of chamois or shop towels made to absorb scads of water and get washed frequently.

And if you dye your hair or do other unspeakable things with towels, get a few specifically for that purpose and in a different color to tell the difference. Obviously, these would not be BIFL, but I think you'd be surprised how long they'll last.

For life-messes: body fluids, juice, etc., you can keep old, retired towels for those uses. All my kitchen towels are my husband pre-me bath towels I cut in half and hemmed against fraying. Only the largest and grossest messes do we need a bath-towel-assist, and then I wash and bleach the crap outta it.

For super-fun laundry-time getting your whites their whitest, try a bluing solution. It's a rinse you add to your laundry that tints the water blue. Blue whites look whiter than yellow whites (which is why so many laundry detergents have a blue dye). 

So if you have iron in your water even with bleach, your whites are never WHITE, try a blue rinse and see how that does. CAUTION: too much will be obviously blue, so experiment first!

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