Hydroxyl ions are a significant kind of negative ion in the atmosphere and they’re known to be good because they react with and clean out pollutants like methane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144358/detergent-li...
HA ⇌ H+ + A-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_membrane
Another, that you might be interested in, but it's more confusing
https://www.fuelcellstore.com/introduction-ion-exchange-memb...
Each ion of salt participates in a different reaction
TIL that Hydroxyl ions bind to methane and thereby clean the air?
Air ioniser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_ioniser :
> A 2018 review found that negative air ions are highly effective in removing particulate matter from air. [6]
But the Ozone. Ozone sanitizes and freshens, but is bad for the lungs at high concentrations.
Ozone concentrations as low as 70ppb are hazardous when you're exposed to it for several hours [1]. Estimates for Ozone's olfactory threshold aren't trustworthy, since you go nose-blind to it pretty quickly [2], but it seems like it's probably around 20-40ppb before olfactory fatigue sets in [3,4].
My takeaway is that Ozone generators for rooms/basements/etc are definitely a bad idea. The best-cited olfactory thresholds are all in the same order of magnitude as that 8-hour hazard threshold, and with nose-blindness being a significant factor, you just don't want to mess around with that.
Inside a fridge, though? As long as you don't actually smell any ozone when you open the fridge, and you don't just shove your head in the fridge for hours on end, I'd think you're probably fine.
[1]: https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/SH.html [2]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-H... [3]: https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/full/10.5555/19602703... [4]: https://spartanwatertreatment.com/ozone-safety/
Buddy of mine did research in Milan on common sunscreen ingredients. In a lab, those chemicals didn't tend to cross the dermis.
But put that person in the sun and you find detectable quantities of those chemicals in serum within minutes. Turns out the flushing (i.e. rushing of blood to the skin, in particular, to the surface of the dermis) increases permeability. Nobody really tested those chemicals for intravenous use.
So in a very real sense, you ingest in all but digestion the ingredients in your lotions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/20579...
edit: I am fully aware that not washing leads to less oil build up over time, but I have tried and doctors have tried and that boat has sailed.
I wonder that over time your scalp produces enough of some chemical to give you a headache, and so you need to rinse it away before that happens? Especially since you mention that any wet wash helps, so the chemicals in the shampoo aren't actually relevant for it. Interesting issue though, don't envy you.
Also sex is a different thing from dating.
Also, the smell of sweat of someone attractive turns me on really hard.
> Babe I love it how you naturally smell
> That's great but I just bought a new generic cherry shampoo
some of us live in hot climates where a cold shower genuinely feels amazing and cools the body down.
some of us enjoy showering daily, because the bed sheets get less dirty that way, which means less laundry to do, and reduces my stress.
some of us are married to a lady and want a happy home life (lol).
a sample size of 1 (you) does not mean it’s true for everyone. Just saying. :)
I'm wondering if you have its informed consent.
Related: This article shows an interesting study but it’s hard for me to interpret what does this translate to? I think we should minimize very complex and synthetic products to our bodies. Although sometimes it’s necessary when we harm our body (e.g. long sun bathing sessions)
>Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue
Turning on JS and doing the captchas just results in more captchas, forever, with no end. I have emailed science.org about this in the past but they only fixed it on the blogs, not the main site.
I guess maybe my CGNAT IP is reasonably well trusted and that's the difference?
(No problems with accessing this site without JS. You just need to make your client look like one of the officially-sanctioned browsers.)
This week I wanted to download some old HN front pages on the command lines and only got "403 sorry"
although I do not get that now
Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are basically crushed rocks that absorb UV and are used in sunscreens.
“If we buy a sofa from major furniture company, it’s tested for harmful emissions before being put on sale. However, when we sit on the sofa, we naturally transform some of these emissions because of the oxidation field we generate,” said lead author Jonathan Williams, who heads the study of organic reactive species at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. “This can create many additional compounds in our breathing zone whose properties are not well known or studied. Interestingly, body lotion and perfume both seem to dampen down this effect.”
Which, if you're worried about the effects of unstudied compounds, lotion will help protect you against.
The science is definitely still out, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think that inhibiting this reaction might be beneficial.
“a fragrance-free body lotion containing linoleic acid (Neutral, Unilever body lotion for sensitive skin; 0% colorants and 0% perfume)”
Sounds like they blame the phenoxyethanol? Which serves a preservative kind of role?
They might not be perfect, of course, and they're always improving
https://taenk.dk/system/files/2022-01/Whats-that-smell-repor...
https://health.osu.edu/health/general-health/how-fragrances-...
We saw a clear correlation between richer consumers and a preference for subtler scents or even no scent.
This even applied across countries: third-world consumers liked aggressive floral scents, but in Northern Europe and North America, the scents are way less concentrated and tend to be more toward subtle alpine or linen.
All this was 15-20 years ago; today I notice that no soap in my house smells like anything at all.
Helan vetiver and rum, don't know if it's available in usa. Has a rum note as well as moss, I've definitely heard people around me saying it smells like forest, to me it's more of a mossy scent
Erbolario Periplo, but it's more Mediterranean bushes
Dsquared original wood
Maybe lalique encre Noire or encre Noire sport
I'd suggest to try them before buying them
It turns out a few of the customers douse their dollars with their personal scents to remind everyone who's spending money with them, and I suppose to see where it might be circulating.
It could also be because we’re using more products. If my face moisturizer and sunscreen had different scents, that would be unfortunate. It would limit my options to those that went together.
I don’t normally want my face to smell like anything (again, cologne) but if I did I would choose only one product that’s scented. Probably beard oil.
Same here, and all ja e store branded products certified allergy friendly.
Two different Krogers in the same Houston metroplex, one will have only scented slop while the other has no fewer than 3 unscented options front and center.
You can tell just by walking through the neighborhoods what kind of inventory the grocery stores are pushing. The Febreeze infused Tide is like a chemical weapon when put through a clothes dryer. You can smell that stuff for miles.
That itself is a big change that took a while.
But really, I wouldn't worry about the result of this study _at all_ in daily life. It's quite surprising to me that this would be the top HN article at the time of this comment.
All that aside, it’s an interesting thing to think about but it’s not a basis for any kind of personal health recommendation and the authors state that. I have relevant expertise and this is a very complicated area that people routinely want to be boiled down into black and white simple advice. What this article seems to say is that lotion can affect the oxidation chemistry nearby it, but it’s not yet known if that is an effect with consequences that are on the whole negative or positive.
I would criticize the authors for their use of the word disrupt, because of the negative connotation carried by that word when talking about human biological systems. They use a softer, more neutral word, perturb, to express the same idea later in the article, which I think better expresses the idea without an emotional tinge to it.
Personal health recommendation: You'd be better off rubbing down with olive oil or sunflower oil than with that concoction, most likely. The ancient Greeks got some things right.
What evidence can you point to that supports this "most likely" assertion that isn't purely naturalistic fallacy?
> The ancient Greeks got some things right.
The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?
Reducing this to the naturalistic fallacy is inappropriate.
Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic. When we are working with incomplete knowledge (e.g. lack of studies on phenoxyethanol), naturalism is a useful probabilistic heuristic because we are /generally/ adapted to what was in our ancestral environment. It's also a useful heuristic to defer to things we have a significant amount of understanding of (olive oil) than things we have little understanding of (a concoction invented in the 2010s).
When we say "natural", by the way, we are approximately referring to what humans adapted to by natural selection. Eating large amounts of cyanide isn't "natural" just because it's in nature; that's semantic confusion.
No one objects to saying a zoo animal should be eating its "natural" diet, and that its enclosure should represent its "natural" habitat, because this is a generally true useful heuristic. Maybe the apes are going to be healthier if you put them in a VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx and feed them protein shakes -- where's the research? -- but I'm not going to put that on equal footing until the research is out. Until then, I'll go with naturalism.
There are artificial things that are very good for us, such as vaccines. But we know this because we have sufficient research. When we don't have sufficient research, heuristics like naturalism are going to give you better results on average.
>The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?
He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.
> Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic.
They are using a purely appeal-to-nature-and-antiquity-without-any-other-justification heuristic. If your objection is that I should have said "appeal to nature and antiquity without any other justification" because you think "naturalistic fallacy" means something else (which it might), then ok let's go with that, but otherwise it's very appropriate.
"Most" likely is a decision about the balance of merit.
Show something beyond "people did it without chemical analysis" that doing one is actually better than doing the other, especially in the way being discussed by the article. Show that rubbing olive oil on your body won't likewise disrupt your oxidation field. Show that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in olive oil aren't individually disruptive to skin chemistry despite suspected or known links to cancers, cardiovascular disease, and poor fetal development.
> He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.
Picking which things were right and which ones were wrong requires analysis of the merits. They did none of that.
ps. Do we have a reason to call them "he"? I didn't see anything in their profile or comment history.
In fact, in the ancient world the main use for vegetable oils was for massage and for perfumes, and not as food.
In the ancient literary sources, there are very few, if any, mentions of vegetable oil used as food, but countless mentions of massage with oil.
Already in the first version of the Gilgamesh Epic, almost 4 millennia ago (the Old Babylonian version), there were 4 pleasures listed as the benefits of being a civilized man as opposed to a savage: making love with a professional woman, eating bread, drinking beer and being massaged with oil (these were used to lure Enkidu into going to a city).
While in later times olive oil was the main oil used for massage, in the Gilgamesh Epic it seems that the oil that was used was sesame oil.
2000 years after Gilgamesh, e.g. in Pliny the Elder, similar accounts were given, i.e. that the main benefit from grapes is drinking wine while the main benefit from olives is being massaged with olive oil, both for pleasure and for a healthy skin.
While massage with olive oil or other vegetable oils was ubiquitous and daily for those who could afford it, for me it is a bit of a mystery how they cleaned themselves after that, in the absence of soap, because I have never seen any mention about this.
Water (bath), wash cloth or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigil
Fragrances made of what if not volatile chemicals? Did they disrupt the human oxidation field? Did the oil?
Anyway, drinking and bathing in mercury was also widespread practice for millenia from ancient greece to the 20th century. And now we know why so many people died prematurely from mercury poisoning.
Trepanation, bloodletting, smearing animal feces on the skin, all common practices of the ancient world practiced for thousands of years that we now know are generally bad ideas.
If one appeals to age-old widespread practice, that's fallacy. There needs to be more than "people did this for a long time" before we make claims about whether that thing is actually better than modern alternatives. People have a long history of doing stupid things for very long times until something new comes along.
The massage oils and the perfumes used by the ancients were not alcohol-based, but they contained only vegetable oil and oily extracts from aromatic plants.
From what is described in TFA, the oils and perfumes used in the ancient world would have had a much weaker disruption effect than modern products, if any, because they would have captured less of the hydroxyl radicals, while also generating some radicals themselves, possibly offseting the effects due to the captured radicals.
The various undesirable ancient practices listed by you have existed, but they cannot be considered as widespread or recommended by medical authorities, when compared with massage with oil.
Massage with oil was something as frequent as washing for anyone who would not be considered as poor. Massage with oil was praised as important for a healthy skin by the ancient physicians, e.g. from the Hippocratic tradition, for whom the majority of their advices about hygiene, healthy nutrition and exercises remains as valid today as they were 2500 years ago.
Phenoxyethanol is a phenol ether, not an alcohol. Olive oil contains a collection of phenolic acids, which are considered to be more toxic than phenol ethers, not less. We intentionally replace the acid hydrogen with an alkyl group specifically to lower toxicity. We do this because we actually study things like toxicity now, which the ancient Greeks did not.
> but they contained only ... oily extracts from aromatic plants.
Phenoxyethanol is an oily substance also sometimes found in aromatic plants! Green tea and chicory both contain it! People across the planet have been consuming chicory and green tea for thousands of years! (Oh no!)
The effects of ritual bathing (soap, scrubbing with washcloths, etc.) on the skin may also be "poorly understood". Many people also wear regularly-washed clothing.
When I look at the laundry-list of chemicals in personal-care products (soaps, shampoos) (and in foods ... sometimes, wow!) I often wonder how much effort goes into testing all of this gunk.
A lot of effort
> A lot of effort
Into testing the long-term biochemical and environmental consequences? lol no absolutely not. Source: I work in this field.
Globally, PCP usage is widespread
Skimmed the article at first, and this made me chuckle. I wonder if that was deliberate.
Which would be of no value.
There is no mechanism - no pathway - for ingested or applied "antioxidant" delivery into the cell where we believe we see oxidation or damage due to free radicals, etc.
... and even if there were it would probably have a terrible impact because it appears that the oxidation and free-radicals are an essential cell signaling mechanism which triggers apoptosis.
Which is a fancy way of saying: cells use these tools to kill themselves when they are performing badly. You would not want to interrupt this process.[1]
I am not a researcher, but I have a simple evolutionary theory that soap was invented in the last few thousand years and became a mass-market product after the beginning of industrialization.
If we survived and evolved without the use of something in the last few million years, then why is that thing needed?
flint•1d ago