microbeads!
That’s really a shower thought…
I thought they were using natural materials like ground coffee. Did some of them actually use plastic beads?
I didn’t realize America has banned them. Good. I just figured they were a fad.
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.
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.
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.
There’s still shampoo with silicone as an ingedient, so your hair feels silky smooth. Because it wraps every single hair in invisible 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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 mini wikileaks that acted as a repository for internal emails would be so much fun. Something like https://www.climatefiles.com/collection-index/
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.”