Cosmetic Clarity

00:00:28

Streeter: I do have a skincare routine. It’s pretty simple. I do a double cleanse, so I use an oil-based and then a water-based cleanser, and then I just use a moisturizer for my face and sunscreen.

 

00:00:39

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Some personal care routines might be quite minimal.

 

00:00:43

Streeter: Deodorant and toothpaste.

 

00:00:44

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Do you use soap?

 

00:00:47

Streeter: I do, I do.

 

00:00:49

Dr. Kaylee Byers: While others like mine, to be honest, are more involved. From skincare to makeup to just your run-of-the-mill toothpaste, we use a lot of products on a daily basis.

 

00:01:01

Streeter: I probably use between seven to 10 beauty products. Deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, face cream.

 

00:01:10

Dr. Kaylee Byers: What about makeup?

 

00:01:11

Streeter: Oh, well that’s a lot more.

 

00:01:13

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And we are constantly being marketed too. Bombarded with ads for products that will make us look younger, glow brighter, shrink our pores, and rid us of our acne. At the same time, we’re told that all of those “ chemicals” in our skincare are going to hurt us with products vying for our hard-earned cash moneys by touting to be clean. So what’s the T?

 

They say that beauty is only skin deep, but today we are going deeper. The next time you are looking to purchase a new moisturizer and you’re scanning the ingredients list, what do you need to know? The truth is it’s not as simple as reviewing a cosmetic’s recipe. The science is more sophisticated than that. There’s one category of ingredient that’s been catching social media attention, even though it goes by a not-so-catchy name.

 

00:02:15

Interviewer: Do you have an idea of what an endocrine disruptor is? I don’t have even the slightest idea.

 

00:02:20

Streeter: I have and they’re all over the place. A lot of it is in plastics.

 

00:02:26

Streeter: Is it like something in your skin that protects it?

 

00:02:33

Dr. Samantha Yammine: We’re going to get into it.

 

00:02:39

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You are listening to Nice Genes! where today we are exfoliating the scientific surface of beauty products using genomics, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers your complexion connoisseur to make sure you are skin it, to win it. And actually now it lines anyway, whatever. I am going off on myself.

 

00:03:04

Dr. Samantha Yammine: I love it. You can’t help but pun.

 

00:03:08

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Joining me behind the mic today is the one and only Science Sam. She’s a wickedly intelligent neuroscientist and science communicator and opened up the entire show. Nice Genes! with me. Welcome back to the show, Sam.

 

00:03:23

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Oh, thank you for having me back. I’m really excited to be co-hosting again with you Kaylee, and especially for this one because, like you, I’m a major skincare girly, completely obsessed.

 

00:03:33

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And I’ve been waiting to ask you this question now for several weeks. And to start us all off, what does your skincare routine look like?

 

00:03:41

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Okay, so this is when I don’t get invited back because I have way too extensive a skincare routine. I get very into it. I’ve always been a skincare nerd and I cycle. So each day is a little bit different depending on what my skin needs and what I remember to do that night. But right now, lots of sunscreen, I double cleanse and then I’ll put some nice feel-good thing, whether it’s like a vitamin C, a retinol, or just an extra hydration day.

 

00:04:09

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You did a really good job of taking that into a short summary and I was thrilled to hear that we’ve got a similar deal.

 

00:04:16

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Right. Of course we do.

 

00:04:17

Dr. Kaylee Byers: We have so many options of products that we can buy and you and me were skincare nerds. So I assume you’ve also heard all the talk about “clean beauty” and chemicals in skincare, heavy quotations. They’re also… So, what do you think about those things?

 

00:04:36

Dr. Samantha Yammine: I almost always hate the word clean. It’s such a stigmatizing word in most contexts, especially when it comes to skincare. Right off the top, I want chemicals in my skincare. I want something that has been tested. I want the thing that has been optimized to get into my skin and do what it’s supposed to do. So I’m very pro-chemical, but in general, chemicals are everywhere. They’re literal building blocks of life. They’re in us, they’re around us. They are impossible to avoid. Water is a chemical, so I do hate to see them misrepresented as bad.

 

00:05:10

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, no, go off. We love it. I feel like that’s one of the big misconceptions all the time. Everything around you is chemicals. It doesn’t mean toxic or bad.

 

00:05:18

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Exactly. And we definitely should ask questions about cosmetic safety. We should know about toxicology, we should think about dermatology, the cosmetic chemistry, the occupational and environmental health, the regulatory science.

 

These are the questions that when you get into making and formulating skincare, there’s a lot of expertise from many different professionals across disciplines. I think the real issue is making sure that as consumers we get the information distilled down from all those people who are very into the nuance. Just enough information that we can make decisions to feel good about. We want to be able to identify red flags, absolutely.

 

And there have been some in the past where things were missed and then it changed. So I totally get the skepticism, but I really want us to continue to use these products that bring us joy and make us feel and look fabulous. So we got to get down to like what do we actually need to know about this? What’s a real flag and what is something that’s overhyped?

 

00:06:14

Dr. Isabelle Plante: I’m just going to turn off my blinds because I have the sun right there.

 

00:06:18

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Well, to shed some light on the situation, I want to introduce Dr. Plante.

 

00:06:23

Dr. Isabelle Plante: I am Isabelle Plante, a professor at the INRS, which means Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique. I am mainly working on mammary gland development and breast cancer. And one of my main research interests is as well to determine the effect of endocrine disruptors on breast pathology.

 

00:06:44

Dr. Samantha Yammine: So let’s get some info straight from the bottle. We asked Dr. Plante, “ What exactly are endocrine disruptors and how do they work?”

 

00:06:52

Dr. Isabelle Plante: Endocrine disruptors are a huge family of molecules. They are not really based on their functions, but they are mainly based on the adverse effect they have on humans. So the official definition are exogenous substances or mixture of substances that alter the function of the endocrine system and thus have adverse effect on health of organisms or its descendants.

 

00:07:18

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Those were some pretty intense sciency words. Let’s actually back up a step. The endocrine system in our body is a network of organs and glands that release hormones and these hormones do a lot more than we think from coordinating metabolism, our energy level and reproduction, growth and development, and our response to injury, stress, and mood.

 

Now, endocrine disruptors get in the way of how the system usually works. There’s no real definition for what the molecules have to look like. There are so many different molecules that can fall into this big family of endocrine disrupting chemicals based on the effect they have on organisms like us-

 

00:07:56

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And IRL.

 

00:07:57

Dr. Samantha Yammine: … You don’t have to look that far to find them. They can be found in lots of different everyday objects, foods, products that we can consume and interact with.

 

00:08:07

Dr. Isabelle Plante: Endocrine disruptor are basically everywhere like some pesticides or plasticizer, some flame retardants in everything that is related to cosmetics. Everything that is fragrance is a little bit mysterious in a way that everything that is composing the fragrance is under pattern. So we don’t know exactly what it is, but we know that some of them act as endocrine disruptors. I would say that parabens and phthalates are probably the main one. PFAS as well.

 

00:08:37

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Phthalates, parabens. These are big in the cosmetic world. We hear about them a lot. I know they have important uses as preservatives in makeup and shampoo for example, but it’s hard to tell what’s overblown and what’s a legitimate concern.

 

00:08:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So let’s take parabens for example. You may have cosmetics advertising themselves as being paraben-free, but there’s lots of different kinds of parabens and the parabens that are used in foods as food colorants for example. While they’re different from the ones that we use in cosmetics, there are four commonly used parabens in cosmetics: methylparaben, propylparaben, butylparaben, ethylparaben for all you chemistry nerds. Your product might have one or a combination to help preserve your product because spoiler microbial growth in your new moisturizer is not ideal.

 

00:09:31

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Now according to Health Canada, our safety regulator, three of these four; methylparaben, propylparaben, and butylparaben can be harmful to human health in some products such as by affecting the spleen and thyroid or having other negative developmental and reproductive impacts.

 

You may have also seen claims that parabens have been associated with breast cancer, but it’s important to know a question we must always ask, where was this research done? And in this case, a lot of it was done on cells in a dish and with animals, whereas studies in actual people, well they’re a lot more limited and they’ve been less conclusive. In fact, Health Canada says that most exposure to parabens is not at a level that’s high enough to be a real health risk. And this just tells us that we always got to be asking all these different questions. And the big one here is how are we actually exposed to them and is it in a way that’s dangerous?

 

00:10:21

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And like a good clay mask, it gets even muddier because if and how these chemical compounds get absorbed in your system also matters. We aren’t directly ingesting most of these products, like as in your nom, nom, nom, you’re not eating them.

 

00:10:37

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Oh, we’re not. I shouldn’t be eating my moisturizer.

 

00:10:40

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I mean sometimes I eat a little bit more ChapStick than I intend to-

 

00:10:43

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Just a little bit.

 

00:10:43

Dr. Kaylee Byers: … that’s true. But a lot of these things go on our skin and our skin acts as a protective barrier, which in turn is in a constant state of sloughing off dead skin cells. And then with those dead skin cells, it goes your product. But do some of these endocrine disruptors make their way into our bloodstream? Okay, let’s look at a product I apply every single day and sometimes multiple times a sunscreen. I love it.

 

00:11:16

Dr. Samantha Yammine: You love your sunscreen. I do too, but you especially need it desperately.

 

00:11:22

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I have four different sunscreens that I use regularly for different seasons, different reasons, and-

 

00:11:29

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Different moods.

 

00:11:29

Dr. Kaylee Byers: … I love it. There’s a lot of misinformation and fear about sunscreen use, which I mean not surprisingly peaks in the summer. A while ago there was a study by the Food and Drug Administration that found that some active ingredients in sunscreen make their way into the bloodstream. But if you look at the concentration levels, it’s a very tiny amount and there’s no precedent for that small amount to be dangerous. Even still, they’re following up on it with additional studies to really understand and assess what the risks are to ensure safety. Because for some of these endocrine disruptors, you really don’t need much for an effect to happen. So scientists and regulators need to weigh the risks from products and other risks from not using them like skin cancers.

 

00:12:17

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Burry that. I’m so curious about how much the dose matters. And another thing I really need to understand to assess how bad endocrine disruptors can be is honestly how long are they actually staying in our body and does that matter.

 

00:12:31

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, according to Dr. Plante, that all depends.

 

00:12:35

Dr. Isabelle Plante: It really depends because the endocrine disruptor is a really huge family of compounds. So depending of the compound, some are lasting a little bit longer, some are quickly excreted from the body. But that being said, we are exposed to a lot of those products every day. So the problem is, even though if they are being excreted really fast from our body, they might accumulate, but because we are exposed daily to those substances when you look at breast milk or fat tissue from human urine or blood, you can find a lot of those endocrine disruptors in the body.

 

They have what we call a non-monotonic dose response. We also call it the low-dose response, so at really low doses. So the doses that we can find in the environment and doses that are pretty close to the hormones level in our body, the cells are reacting differently to those endocrine disruptors. The answer is more like a signaling answer, an endocrine-related answer in the cells than a toxic answer. So basically what it does, is it’s changing the signaling in the cells and this change in signaling can have huge impact on the health of the organism.

 

00:13:50

Dr. Samantha Yammine: That word toxic gets thrown around a lot in the beauty community online, and that’s a whole other can of worms. But from here, what Dr. Plante is saying is that endocrine-disrupting chemicals aren’t toxic, but they mimic the hormones in our system. Usually, these are very fine balance in our bodies for when hormones are created, but when we’re adding extra in, for example, through our skincare or through whatever other exposures, that can throw off the balance and trigger a cell response where one isn’t really needed, which can sometimes be harmful. So what health risks are we talking about here?

 

00:14:28

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Plante’s area of expertise is in mammary gland development. So just to be super clear, that’s the part of the chest that produces milk. She describes the mammary gland like a little baby tree. And when we hit puberty, different hormones like estradiol and progesterone are doing their thing and that tree starts to grow, Branches shoot out and make leaves and fruit, which eventually may produce milk. With a constellation of hormones involved in this process, endocrine disruptors may be, now, disruptive.

 

00:15:03

Dr. Isabelle Plante: How this development is really complex, it’s really tightly orchestrated by a lot of hormones. So any changes in this small tightly orchestrated hormonal balance can have huge impact on its development. And same thing for the breast cancer.

 

When you think about it, a lot of breast cancer are hormonal dependent. So if you have a breast cancer that is hormonal dependent and you’re exposed to product that mimics your hormones, then you can increase the progression of breast cancer or you can increase the risk of having breast cancer. So organs that are really tightly dependent on hormone for their function and development are more sensitive to endocrine disruptors.

 

00:15:48

Dr. Samantha Yammine: All right, so endocrine disruptors may affect hormones involved in mammary gland development, which in some cases may be related to some cancers like breast cancer.

 

00:15:58

Dr. Kaylee Byers: But mammary gland development isn’t the only part of our development that scientists study. According to the Endocrine Society, exposure to endocrine disruptors can lead to a host of reproductive issues. For instance, endocrine disruptors like BPA in plastics and phthalates, which are also known as the everywhere chemical have been associated with reduced sperm and egg quality. They may also be associated with earlier puberty and can disrupt menstrual cycles. Additionally, conditions like endometriosis and undescended testicles have been connected to these compounds. So clearly, endocrine disruptors have the potential for reproductive impacts, but unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there.

 

00:16:40

Dr. Isabelle Plante: As the years pass, we discovered that actually a lot of diseases are related to endocrine disruptors. A lot of metabolic diseases, diabetes, even cardiovascular problem. We can see some neurological effect with the endocrine disruptive compounds. Obesity has been related to endocrine disruptors as well, and cancer. So basically everything that is regulated by hormones. When you think about the endocrine system, it’s a series of organs that are talking to each other using those small molecules. So when you dysregulate this communication, there’s a huge effect on the entire system.

 

00:17:19

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And speaking of the entire system, let’s talk about the genomics of it all. If our genome is the blueprint of our bodies, could endocrine disruptors also affect our DNA?

 

00:17:33

Dr. Isabelle Plante: That’s a really good question. Actually, when you think about the endocrine system, again, it’s a system like where there’s communication between the cells. So when we looked at the effect of endocrine disruptor, usually it’s more on the regulation of genes than on the DNA per se. What I mean is endocrine disruptor are not really known to cause mutation on DNA, but what they are doing rather is changing the regulation of genes. So it’s more a little bit like epigenomic. So not really changing the DNA per se, but more the regulation. I like to see epigenetic switches.

 

So basically if one cells need one particular genes for its function, the switch is going to be on, but if another cells don’t need it, the switch going to be off. So endocrine disruptor, by changing the signaling, they are turning on and off some switches that are not supposed to be turned on or off at this particular moment of the life of the animal. So this is mainly what is happening. It’s not necessarily impacting directly the DNA, but rather changing the regulation of the genes that are important for the function of the cells.

 

00:18:48

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And to understand these genomic effects, we’re mostly relying on studies in animals, and so more work is still needed to understand how endocrine disruptors might be affecting the regulation of genes in human DNA. But let’s say you decide to switch your products to reduce your exposure to endocrine disruptors. Well, we’re going to untangle why even this is fraught with nuance and can get political.

 

You’re listening to Nice Genes! a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m Dr. Kaylee Byers, your host.

 

00:19:29

Dr. Samantha Yammine: And I’m your co-host Today, Samantha Yammine, also known as Science Sam. We want to get more people to listen to the genomic stories that are shaping our world. So if you like Nice Genes! hit follow on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your shows. Spread the love for science by sharing the show with the fellow skincare bestie.

 

Because exposure to endocrine disruptors is a critical component to understanding the health risk, we got to ask who is most exposed to endocrine disruptors? Within the context of the ones you can find in beauty products, I’m thinking drag queens whose job involves them doing a full beat every day. I mean, I do that too, I guess I do drag every day or hairdressers and salon workers who apply shampoos and nail polishes to multiple clients in a day. Could exposure to endocrine disruptors also be an occupational risk?

 

00:20:21

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, that’s exactly the question that Dr. Plante is looking to answer.

 

00:20:25

Dr. Isabelle Plante: So one of the big study that we have right now is on people that are working in beauty services. So basically hairdresser, cosmetician. So a lot of people that are going to be using makeups and lotion and shampoo every day, but those who are working in those professions, they are exposed on a daily basis on all those compounds and probably at a level that is higher than in other professions. And the other thing is that they are exposed to many different substances.

 

So it’s not only paraben, it’s not only phthalate, it’s everything together. So the idea here is to see if those who are exposed to all those cosmetics every day are more prone to breast cancer or other reproductive issues than the population working in other professions.

 

00:21:22

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Plante’s study is broken into three parts. First, they’re recruiting people who work in the beauty industry, so hairdressers, nail technicians, all the people who help us look and feel good. Sam, I know you have someone amazing who does your nails because I see them on the Insta all the time. And in parallel, they’re surveying people who work in other work settings. Then they have their participants’ urine sampled and analyzed by chemists to try to characterize what’s called the exposome, which sounds like something out of a Marvel comic, which refers to the whole soup of endocrine disruptors taken together. That’s part one and two. Part three is seeing how these interact with other cells in our body.

 

00:22:06

Dr. Isabelle Plante: We’re going to take those urine samples and we’re going to put that on different cell systems, so on let’s say breast cells, on cells that are from the placenta or different types of models that we have in the lab and see if the extract that are coming from the people exposed to a lot of endocrine disruptor have different effect from the people that are not exposed to all those endocrine disruptors and see if we can correlate these effect to the profession.

 

So overall, that’s going to give us an idea of rather or not being exposed on a daily basis to increased level of cosmetic or whatever is found in cosmetic will lead to increased risk of pathologies of the reproductive system or breast cancer or other reproductive issues.

 

00:22:59

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Sounds pretty straightforward, yeah? But like all things, it’s not all straightforward.

 

00:23:04

Dr. Isabelle Plante: The problem is it’s really, really hard to correlate those effect to one specific compound. When you look at the way the effect of compounds are looked at usually you’re going to have compound A, but compound A can have additive effect to compound B or to compound C. So basically when you are exposed to this mixture of different compounds, the effect can be different. So A+ B+ C don’t make three anymore, but make six now because they have effect that are additive or synergic even more. So the idea here is really to take this as a mixture of compound and see the effect of this overall mixtures.

 

00:23:48

Dr. Samantha Yammine: This is all really interesting and also shows how many layers there are. So, first takeaway for me is when you see someone being so confident online, boldly claiming that, “This absolutely does this,” I’m like, “What an expert in this field is still trying to figure it out?” And they’re starting with something like urine to use that as a readout to see, “Okay, if it’s in our urine, does that mean it’s actually circulating in our blood or it’s actually getting to tissues, or is it just being excreted right away?” Even once they get that answer, there will be so many more questions and it just shows you need a full picture here of what stays in and leaves our bodies just as a starting point for what to consider when it comes to safety.

 

00:24:28

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. We treat this as such a simple issue and it’s not, and we need to study it in all its complexity. Something I think is really interesting about this study especially is this idea of the exposome. We need the studies that you test each endocrine disruptor individually, but the reality is that we are not exposed individually. We are exposed in combination, and we need to also understand what that combination means for us and our health.

 

00:24:55

Dr. Samantha Yammine: I find the occupational aspects super interesting and really important because it brings up a question of environmental justice. It’s not just our personal habits, but things like the space in which we work that can have a huge impact.

 

00:25:09

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And there’s also the socioeconomic factor too. So these products that market themselves as having fewer endocrine disruptors, the paraben-free or the phthalate-free products, they also tend to be more expensive. So I can go down and grab myself a basic deodorant from the drugstore for 10 bucks or an all-natural one from a local company, and that’s going to cost me $30. That’s a big difference.

 

00:25:34

Dr. Samantha Yammine: And I love to shop local, don’t get me wrong, but clean, organic, all-natural. Those often are way more expensive, and I wonder, “ What am I paying for here? Is it just marketing?” Because in a lot of cases, it is. These terms are not regulated. There’s nothing stopping a brand from just saying, “ Yeah, it’s clean,” whatever that means, without any real basis behind that. And like you said, there are some products that yeah, they’re paraben-free, but that might mean that parabens, which have been studied for a long time get replaced by an alternative preservative one we know way less about. So anytime you see that free from claim, to me it’s a red flag, and adding these alternatives is not necessarily better.

 

00:26:16

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And it’s this cycle of consumption that we get caught in. And am totally guilty of this too, so I don’t know. We’re always told that we need more, so we can look a certain way, feel a certain way, but the truth is that these beauty standards are completely designed to be unachievable.

 

00:26:33

Dr. Samantha Yammine: I love cosmetics and I love beauty, but in more ways than one, the space is incredibly complex. There’s beauty standards, capitalism, health concerns, misinformation, greenwashing, it’s a lot. So naturally this brings us to the role of regulation. Now I’m someone who doesn’t generally like to put labels on things. In this case, I do think better education and transparent labeling would be good. Empowering people with knowledge, not just about what’s in their product, but also on what constitutes risk. Because as we’ve seen in this episode, this is nuanced and people generally… It’s hard to assess risk, especially on the fly.

 

00:27:17

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah.

 

00:27:17

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Like being a consumer in this space-

 

00:27:19

Dr. Kaylee Byers: It’s tough.

 

00:27:20

Dr. Isabelle Plante: It’s really hard for the customer or for the general population to see exactly what is good for them and to understand what is good for them and what is not. And at the same time, you don’t want people to get scared about everything.

 

One of the things that you can remember or try to find is… The shorter list of product it is, the less likely it is to contain some endocrine disruptor in a way that if the list of ingredients short, it’s first more easy to look at those ingredients and see what they are and what are their effect, and the less likely there is to have different compounds that you don’t know about.

 

It’s not an easy question actually, but as we were saying, you don’t have to be scared about everything that is around you. One of the thing is, once you know what’s in your product, then you can make decision. If you like your lip gloss and whatever, or your mascara, just wear it. But you can make your own decision once you know at least. If you don’t know, it’s really hard to decide, but once you know what is good for you and what is worse for you, well then you can decide whatever you take the chance.

 

00:28:31

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Plante is right. It’s definitely not an easy question, and it really shouldn’t all fall on us to have to investigate every ingredient on every product we buy. Who has time for that? I do not.

 

00:28:43

Dr. Samantha Yammine: It’s exhausting.

 

00:28:43

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Exhausting. But arming yourself with the knowledge to make informed choices is important. So, Sam, thinking about all this together, has this changed how you think about skincare or how you might approach your own skincare routine moving forward?

 

00:29:03

Dr. Samantha Yammine: I definitely want to keep an eye on this topic and continue learning more. I learned so much just even preparing for this episode, Kaylee, but for now, I don’t feel like there’s anything major to change. I do love seeing what’s on an ingredients list, and for me, it’s out of curiosity, not fear. I love to know like, “ Oh, I wonder what that does. I wonder what that does.” And it just gives me more appreciation for formulators, and I really enjoy following cosmetic formulators on social media and learning a little bit more behind what can be a big scary name.

 

Often, it’s some really cool science that does awesome stuff and just continuing to stay informed without freaking out totally all the time. I think that’s just my general approach. Something I find really fascinating about this topic too, we focused on skincare a lot, but endocrine disruptors can be found in food, in plastics, in pesticides, household cleaning products, and our skincare as we talked about, and to make the best decisions across all of these products, having the most robust evidence is critical. So more science, please.

 

00:30:08

Dr. Isabelle Plante: Because endocrine disruptors are intersectoral in a way that they can involve chemists’ legislation, they involve health tissue on both humans and the ecosystem, but all those people are not necessarily working together. A few years ago, we have founded the ICEDA, which is the Intersectoral Center for Endocrine Disruptors Analysis that bring together all those people, so chemists, people that are working more on the social sciences legislation and so on to better understand the issue of endocrine disruptors.

 

00:30:48

Dr. Kaylee Byers: If you want to know more about the Intersectoral Center for Endocrine Disruptor Analysis, we’ll put the link in the show notes.

 

00:30:54

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Okay, where do we go from here?

 

00:30:57

Dr. Kaylee Byers: The truth is we can’t avoid all endocrine disruptors.

 

00:31:00

Dr. Samantha Yammine: And as much as we like things to fall into neat, simple categories of, “This is good, this is bad,” skincare science just isn’t that simple.

 

00:31:08

Dr. Kaylee Byers: A lot of this comes down to your own risk tolerance. For some people, this might mean avoiding products that have been identified as potential endocrine disruptors altogether and choosing products with fewer ingredients.

 

00:31:20

Dr. Samantha Yammine: And for others, they may consider the risk low enough to continue to use certain products or to use them less frequently. But knowing what endocrine disruptors are and knowing how they work and the many other factors we need to consider like exposure when determining health risks, all of that information can help us make decisions as consumers that we are comfortable with.

 

00:31:39

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And with that knowledge, it’s also important to know that as more evidence becomes available, recommendations and regulations might change. Uncertainty is often a part of the process-

 

00:31:50

Dr. Samantha Yammine: And that’s science.

 

00:32:02

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Our guests for today were Dr. Isabelle Plante, professor and researcher at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, and of course, the one and only Science Sam. You’ve been listening to Nice Genes! a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia. If you like this episode, go check out some of our previous ones wherever you listen from. Share us with your friends and leave us a review. You can also DM the show on Twitter by going to @GenomeBC, and if you’re with kiddos or a teacher looking to spice up your lessons, we have learned along activity sheets added to the show description of each episode.

 

00:32:47

Dr. Samantha Yammine: Timeless beauty is everlasting, but our antibiotics. Join us next time to uncover the threat of antibiotic resistance and learn if our medical arsenal is as enduring as we believe.

 

00:32:59

Dr. Nadine Ziemert: We know now that there’s much more out there and I think we are just at the tip of the iceberg.

 

00:33:10

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Thanks for listening and see you, rum. You later.