how did someone who gets so much
basic chemistry wrong discover such a breakthrough unique first
of their kind formulation? you might have seen matter of fact on your
social media lately they're a skincare brand their star product is a vitamin c serum and
they've been doing a lot of sponsorships with influencers particularly the
ones that come across as sciencey you might have been surprised to see me
in one of their influencer ads recently i was surprised too because no one asked me and
three months earlier i told their founder exactly why i didn't want to do a sponsorship
with them or endorse them in any way so today i'm interrupting our regular viewing
schedule to talk about how matter of fact annoyed me enough to pause
the endless list of content that i'm meant to be working on to
spend literal days making this video have you noticed that skincare
science has gotten really trendy? for us as skin care users it makes sense
we want to use products that actually work and u
nderstanding the science behind how products
work is a really good way of going about it you can find out what does and doesn't matter
so you can focus on which products actually make sense for your skin and your life
and learning science is just kind of fun i think skincare science really got trendy with
the ordinary suddenly we all had a reason to learn these complex ingredient names because
each product cost less than ten dollars and while that was cool i really liked that we all
found
each other and got to nerd out together it also meant a lot of brands saw this and
started thinking hmm how do we get in on this babe what are you doing? like and subscribe to help
me buy a lock for my room look using science to sell products isn't
anything new on one level it makes perfect sense if a brand has invested a lot of time and
money into making sure their product works well then explaining to people how it works
showing them all the testing they've done is a really great way to s
how people
why they should choose that product and if science is really trendy
then people are more interested in the details and the brand can show more
of the data that they normally wouldn't which is great for me i'm really nosy but science is hard you have to study and do lab
classes and learn stuff and read papers properly or if you don't want to do that then you
have to hire scientists and they take ages to do stuff plus you have
to pay them the whole time why did it take 300 years t
o get just one
number there i did that in like five seconds so what if we just and that's where sciencewashing comes in
sciencewashing is where you take the aesthetic of science and make things look scientific
without actually doing the science part things like talking about studies
that aren't interpreted correctly citing studies that aren't relevant and hoping no
one looks into them using scientific words to try to sound smart but using them incorrectly using
numbers and graphs that don'
t really make sense you get the science cred without actually
having to deal with the rest of the iceberg and it makes a lot of sense
from a profit perspective mathematical and here we come to matter
of fact who are one of the most sciencewashed brands i think i've ever seen matter of fact is a skincare brand that
claims to be moving the science of skin care forward with evidence-based breakthrough
technologies their star product is a vitamin c serum that they say is the most significant
a
dvancement in skin care in nearly two decades with unmatched stability potency and cosmetic
elegance this is a big deal because vitamin c is an incredible skincare ingredient but
it breaks down very quickly in products their founder is paul baek their launch email
describes him as a true multi-hyphenate with degrees from harvard and wharton (his degrees are
in psychology and business) and a successful k-pop career on his resume he also worked for two years
in venture capital which he doesn'
t mention much he was also mentored in cosmetic formulation
specifically emulsion technology he says he first got behind a bench in 2018 but in a
few short months he had already made this 20-year breakthrough in chemistry without
any proper chemistry training except his mom has a chemistry phd (that keeps coming up) he outsmarted all of the thousands of
qualified scientists in the cosmetics industry and his discovery wasn't even
in emulsions the thing he was mentored in foreshadowing amazin
g that explains why his press release says he has a rare yet brilliant
mind for both science and art i first noticed matter of fact when i saw the
hype around their launch in september 2021 their ads made some really bold
claims about their ascorbic acid serum it has unmatched stability in the vitamin c
space the ascorbic acid was fully stabilized since i am a massive vitamin
c nerd i was really curious here's their graph showing the
stability of their formula versus "the current gold stan
dard
with regard to stability" so the obvious question is what
product are they comparing it with? well it seems like it has to be the
skinceuticals c e ferulic it's the only vitamin c product anyone calls
the gold standard but it isn't the gold standard for stability it's the
gold standard for effectiveness on skin c e ferulic is water-based and water-based
vitamin c serums have a serious disadvantage when it comes to stability because water
makes ascorbic acid decompose faster matter of
fact actually mention this all the time so they're comparing their
waterless vitamin c serum to a water-based vitamin c serum which is a
different less stable category of product it's a bit like saying ronnie baker beat
the gold standard caeleb dressel so he's unmatched in the hundred metres and then you
realize ronnie baker is a sprinter and caeleb dressel is a swimmer caeleb and the water-based
formula are both fighting against extra water i'm pretty proud of that analogy so this is real
ly not good evidence
for showing that your product is more stable than every other product on the market so i mildly pestered them about what data
they had for their unmatched stability claim paul eventually replied to
my email six weeks later we had a two-hour meeting where
we talked about the brand and the studies they'd done and he confirmed that
the other serum in the graph is water-based he said they tested against three products
in total two water-based and one water-free i don't thi
nk you need to know that
much about science to know that if you test against just three products and
only one of them is in the same category as yours that doesn't tell you that your product
is the best out of all the thousands of products out there especially since you don't know how
long those other products have been sitting on the shelf breaking down and turning into
stuff that can make it break down faster and based on the science you wouldn't really
expect this to be the most stable
product for example there are silicone-based
vitamin c products like this one from the ordinary a lot of these use
a raw material called granactive aa20 which claims to be 90% stable for three
months at 40 degrees in an open container to me as a chemist it seems incredibly unlikely
that ascorbic acid dissolved in propanediol can compete with that propanediol is a humectant
moisturiser and that is really good at absorbing water so if you put this in an open container with
any amount of humi
dity it's going to absorb water from the air that means even if you start off
with pure propanediol with no water you're going to end up with propanediol and water and that
water from the air is going to make the ascorbic acid decompose a lot faster the propanediol
is basically moisturizing the ascorbic acid silicone is the opposite silicone can form a
waterproof layer around the ascorbic acid which protects it from water it's an occlusive and in
this case the silicone is sealing the water
out the fact that this serum has dissolved ascorbic
acid will also make it break down faster the ascorbic acid can move around a lot more when
it's dissolved which means a lot more will be available to react compared to when it's in solid
grains in a thick suspension so it doesn't really make a lot of sense to say this has "unmatched
stability in the vitamin c space" unless you have a lot of very convincing evidence to back you
up all of the science that we know about these ingredients so f
ar goes against that claim
so you're going to want to have very strong evidence to overturn that testing against just
one water free product just isn't going to cut it we also talked about the rest of their marketing i only just noticed this but the inside
of the box lid says facts matter which is interesting considering
well the rest of this video there is a lot of incorrect science in
their instagram posts that i think again just really seems to highlight that there's
some basic scientif
ic understanding and just really caring enough to factcheck missing for example there's this post about why vitamin
c serums turn brown as they oxidise they say it's because ascorbic acid turns into erythrulose and
they say erythrulose is reddish brown i explained how this wasn't correct in my instagram stories
erythrulose isn't reddish brown and there's no way this could be reddish brown this is
something we teach in high school chemistry for a molecule to be strongly coloured it
needs to
have something in its structure that can absorb specific colours of
light and this just doesn't have that about a week after this paul did a live
where he showed the manufacturer spec sheets saying that 75 to 80% erythrulose is
yellow to orange again i feel like this is pretty basic if i have a cup of water
that's not pure water and it's coloured it's not the colourless water making it
coloured it's something else in that glass and in an oxidized vitamin c serum you have maybe
five percent
erythrulose max it's nowhere near intense enough to be contributing to the colour
change like they said when they fixed the post i also love that they mentioned the confusion
like they weren't the ones who were confused there's also this three-step thing
paul's mentioned it in an interview as well but ascorbic acid decomposes
through way more than three steps plus it turns into tons of different
chemicals not just erythrulose i think this might be because he misinterpreted
one of my blog
posts back in 2017 a lot of people were asking me why vitamin c seems to stain your
fingers people were worried that it was pigment or something dangerous happening i found this diagram
in a paper showing ascorbic acid turning into a bunch of different things including erythrulose
which is a common fake tan ingredient this made a lot of sense because vitamin c stays look
and act a lot like fake tan so i figured it was probably the erythrulose or some other similar
chemical in the vitamin c
serum causing it so i did a blog post and i redrew just
those three steps from ascorbic acid to erythrulose to make it a bit clearer because this diagram is just too much for anyone who just
wants to know why their fingers are yellow dammit i linked the paper and i wrote
this little paragraph to clarify that erythrulose wasn't the only product
there are lots of different products and there are way more than three steps
involved but i think paul didn't understand it and he thought what i dre
w
was everything because it turned into this so in my meeting with paul he also said that he's
a big fan of my work he mentioned specific blog posts that he liked and even my reddit username
i made a joke that i should maybe invoice him for all this free advice and he said he wanted
to pay me to make sponsored posts and also discuss hiring me to work for matter of
fact he wanted me to help them design experiments to test their products and
check the claims in their marketing this last part
was pretty sus to me i've been
making science content for a long time i think i'm really good at communicating skincare science
but i'm not a regulatory expert i'm not a cosmetic claims expert beyond what i did in my diploma
and the regulatory certificate that i'm studying there are scientists who have been working
in the industry for decades whose job this is why would you hire a skin care science
influencer without the right expertise for this his reason was that regulatory and claims
p
eople weren't good at communicating and he wanted someone who could communicate well but
then you should hire multiple people scientists are specialised for a reason you can't hire a
biologist to do chemistry you can't hire a science communicator and expect them to deal with all
of this very industry specific stuff accurately and if you are genuinely dedicated to getting the
right information out there empowering people with science why would you only start hiring people
to check the scienc
e three months after launching this brand has 10 million in investor funding
they can afford to do all of these really big influencer sponsorships they should have
plenty of budget to pay a random chemist a couple hundred a month to just quickly check
their instagram posts before they go live the fact they don't have this this just seems
to me like really messed up priorities for a brand that claims they want to demystify
skin care science so this was a big red flag so i suggested i could h
elp them with
their science communication but not in a public-facing way he could pay me a rate that
was much lower than my sponsored post rate to just fact check their posts before they went up
and then maybe later down the line i could do public sponsored content once their content
was something i was more comfortable with but paul wasn't interested in that and that
seemed to me like a pretty big indication that what they really wanted was to use me
and my reputation to get them to look
good and scientific rather than caring about actually
being scientific and putting out accurate information they wanted the veneer of credibility
without doing any of the hard work to earn it so i said if you wanted to be a
scientific brand that i'd feel comfortable endorsing they should
fix three things firstly fix their stability claims because they didn't
have the data to make those claims secondly actually fact-check their posts properly
before posting so no more of this erythrulose ki
nd of thing if you genuinely want to educate people
but you're not sure about something then just don't post rather than misinforming people just
for the sake of engagement and gaining followers thirdly stop making drug claims in
their posts and their sponsored posts drug claims are when you say your
product changes the structure or function of skin rather than just
the appearance or treating a disease if your product is a cosmetic and not a drug
then you shouldn't be making these claims t
his includes reducing pigment reducing wrinkles
promoting collagen production treating melasma and it includes linking studies where your
active ingredient does these drug things i know it kind of seems like it should be fine
to just state facts but there are regulations around this because drugs go through really
rigorous testing to make sure they actually work small studies aren't enough to
back up these strong drug claims this is the sort of thing that
happens with illegal drug claims a
lot of skin care brands do make
some degree of drug claims but if you're a brand that claims to be scientific
and ethical and moving skin care forward then i think you should really be on top
of this and you especially shouldn't be making the stronger drug claims that the
vast majority of brands know not to make for sponsored posts where a brand has paid
an influencer to talk about their product influencers generally don't know the
difference between drug and cosmetic claims brands have t
o sign off on the final
draft of sponsored content before it goes live so i really think it's the brand's
responsibility to hire a regulatory consultant and check that all the claims
they're making are above board a lot of brands seem to think that if
the influencer makes the drug claims and sponsored content then it's not their fault but
no that is not a loophole it still counts as the brand's marketing claims just like with any
regular ad this is in the ftc guidelines and both the brand
and the influencer are at fault paul agreed that these would be good changes
to make i agreed to have another meeting in the future to discuss working with them
again and i go off on my merry way feeling okay i guess about giving free advice to
a brand for two hours but they did seem to want to do better and hopefully this would
improve the state of misinformation in skincare and then a couple months later i
go back and check what happened for point 1 all the unmatched
stability claims are
still up for point 2 which was not making really basic
easily checked mistakes they've now done a post where they used a reference because yes citing
things will make us look credible and sciencey but they don't seem to understand how
references work and it kind of looks like they've never seen a reference
before in their life either that or they really felt strongly about leslie
doing three people's worth of work and then after i posted a
story about this they tried to fix it but then tu
rned her into baumann leslie and then after i posted a story
about that they tried to fix it again and doubled up the title it
still looks like that by the way they also put the molecular structure of retinol
in a post because chemical structures are science but they chopped off half the retinol molecule
which makes it a completely different chemical they actually managed to get rid of the bit
that makes retinOL so i guess this is reti hot tip for brands if you're going to use chemical
str
uctures to science up your brand's marketing the bare minimum you should do is a
three second google for the structure and then instead of owning up to
the mistake they dug deeper and said you're right our design team made a stylistic
choice to zoom in on half of the molecule due to its long structure when we focus
grouped it with some of our audience members they didn't mind since the molecular
structure was unfamiliar to them i feel like this should go without
saying but you can't change
the way chemical structures work just
because you focus grouped it the structure is the molecule
this isn't retinol anymore it's like labeling this as africa
because your focus group said it was fine and on point three they've now gotten
influencers to make sponsored posts comparing their active ingredient to
hydroquinone which is a prescription drug so i wrote an email to paul on january 26 about
all of these issues and i still haven't gotten a reply even though they clearly saw it and
went through and fixed everything i mentioned well they tried to fix it anyway and then on march 13 i get tagged in a sponsored
post that an influencer made for matter of fact it says they advocate for women in
science like me for women's history month and of course to buy their
products for the women in your life on the face of it this is kind of like a nice
shout out from the influencer who didn't know all of this stuff going on behind the scenes although
it is a bit weird slash against a
dvertising codes to put someone in a sponsored post that
you're being paid for without asking them first but the way influencer sponsorships work is
that the influencer sends the final draft to the brand and then they sign off on it
before it goes live so matter of fact would have seen me in the draft post and approved
this after all of these interactions with them and still without replying to my email about poor
amputated reti after 40 days also without checking if they could legally use
someone in an ad without
their consent and even though this isn't an ad specifically for their products it is still an
ad lots of companies do ads where they talk about their values so you can feel good about them and
buy their products and i don't know why matter of fact thought i would be comfortable being used
to improve their public image after all of this obviously i complained about this
and they eventually took it down after about two days again without any
sort of communication wit
h me no apology i had to ask the influencer to contact
matter of fact also they blocked my comments from showing up in their post
which is amazing advocacy for me i think i guess the extremely obvious
question we're building up to here is how did someone who gets so much
basic chemistry wrong discover such a breakthrough unique first of their kind
formulation how did paul baek whose only chemistry background is essentially his mum
and his "rare and brilliant mind" outsmart all of the quali
fied chemists in the cosmetics
industry "crack the elusive code" and create "the most significant advancement in skincare
in nearly two decades" after just a few months? well if you look at matter of fact's
vitamin c patent which as of now is still pending it seems like he kind of didn't this is the breakthrough
that paul claims to have made PB: it just boiled down to: is there a way to
dissolve high concentrations of ascorbic acid in solvents that are not water that's sort of where i start
ed and through a lot of
experimentation found a way to do it PB: the eureka moment was thinking
about other ingredients that were not liquid at room temperature
potentially being co-solvents and using that framework allowed us
to sort of create this new technology so he's saying he's worked out how to get
more ascorbic acid to dissolve without water you can only get about 12% ascorbic acid to
dissolve in propanediol but if you add urea you can get over 20% to dissolve so
that's what the m
atter of fact serum does which sounds really neat but
someone else already discovered this 17 years ago and it isn't like matter of
fact aren't aware of this they reference them extensively
in their own patent application even without much science or chemistry
knowledge i think it's pretty obvious that this 2007 patent is about using urea
to help ascorbic acid dissolve in polyol apart from this which
someone else discovered first i can't really see what's so innovative
or breakthrough abo
ut this formula it has other antioxidants ferulic acid and
a plant extract but every other vitamin c serum on the market also has antioxidants the
2007 patent covers formulas with antioxidants maybe it's the fact this combination is stable but testing someone else's discovery
doesn't mean you discovered it it looks like Paul might have seen what he thought
was a potential loophole and tried to file a patent for that the two 2007 zhang patents listed
examples of polyol solvents that were cov
ered but one of the patents didn't list 1,3-propanediol
which is the solvent used in matter of fact matter of fact mention this specifically
several times in their claims i'm guessing zhang might have left
it out because it wasn't a common skincare ingredient back then or
maybe he just forgot because he did list it in his other patent and
it's covered under polyols anyway here are all the polyols that
zhang listed in his patent claim and here's matter of fact's 1,3-propanediol i'm not a pa
tent attorney so i don't know if
this patent will get past pending the rule is that patents need to be novel and not a trivial
or routine advancement on an existing patent if it's very similar to an older patent they
often decide that it's covered by the original if this is what he's claiming to have
discovered - what's essentially a typo and i would think it's covered
under the old patent anyway - legality aside this just doesn't
seem much like a eureka moment to me 1,2-propanediol 1,3-pr
opanediol and
1,3-butanediol are really similar chemicals as you can guess from their names
they're used interchangeably in skincare it really doesn't seem to me that this is "a truly
new technology" or that paul actually created it "biggest breakthrough in two decades"
seems like a pretty big stretch so at the end of all of this is matter
of fact's formula "fully stabilised" with "unmatched stability"? well i don't think so i was sent these bottles in
december they expire in august 2023 s
o i'm guessing they were made august 2021 and they've already started going a lot yellower
than when i first got them i talked to someone else who was sent the products around the same
time and theirs is actually even more yellow you can see how colourless they're
meant to be in their promo videos compared to these other products that i've had for
years well you can see the difference in colour and i think that's because maybe they didn't test
the product properly under real-life conditions
all the data they show for their stability
claims are with accelerated testing so they kept the product for
8 weeks at 40 degrees celsius to approximate what would happen
for 16 months at room temperature things react faster at higher temperatures so
we use accelerated testing to get an idea of whether something's likely to go wrong with
the product without having to wait as long but it's still an approximation things happen at room temperature that don't happen at
40 degrees and vice ver
sa all the time and this is particularly important for vitamin c
its degradation depends a lot on temperature so accelerated testing is a lot
more inaccurate than normal and you can't really say that these are equivalent but matter of fact don't seem to know or maybe
they don't care about this pretty important caveat they hardly ever mention it's approximate they
just keep saying it's been tested for 16 months and i think the packaging is another big
issue heat doesn't speed up how quickly
oxygen and water leak into your packaging
the same way it speeds up chemical reactions this is an airless pump but most airless pumps
aren't properly airtight in a standard airless pump which is what this looks like air can get
through the seams and through the pump dispenser and given how easily the pump top came off when
i opened the tube a few days ago i'm not really convinced this connection is tight enough to
keep propanediol free from water and oxygen and before anyone says i'm being
unfair because
i made it oxidise by opening it up i showed you the serum from this tube which i don't know how
to open and it's the same colour as the other tubes i have so these claims of 16-month 24-month
stability aren't really backed up by their testing again i don't blame influencers for this
these are things about vitamin c that i didn't know five years ago even with a
chemistry phd even though i was so deep in skincare science i know cosmetic
chemists with decades of experience who
don't know this stuff because
they haven't worked with vitamin c this is why expertise is specific there's just
way too much information to know everything at some point you have to trust what
experts say you have to trust that people presenting themselves as experts
are responsible and self-aware enough to say when they don't know something
to check with someone who knows more matter of fact and paul gave them this
info and signed off on their posts they're meant to know what they're doin
g here's
the guy who made the biggest discovery in two decades they're the brand moving the signs
of skin care forward and empowering consumers and this is really the root of what's wrong with
sciencewashing people and brands who pretend to be experts but continually put out misinformation
because they want to save time or money or look smart they make us so much harder for consumers
to work out who to trust and which products to use i love talking about skincare science
i love that so man
y more people care about it now i love that we have
a beauty science nerd community i love that i've met a lot of really inspiring
experts and science communicators through this but i can't deny that there was a lot less
misinformation and it was a lot easier to spot the misinformation before everyone
decided they needed to "science things up"
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