Unearthed beauty geekery...
...forgotten treasures that sparked ideas about insect repellent, ancient bad sun behaviour, and the role of fragrance in skincare. Plus my latest rant about beauty, sustainability and PR...
The Skin So Soft Myth / Legend
We’re about to have a load of work done on our house so I was having a big clearout at the weekend. While sorting through a load of beauty products, I unearthed two bottles of Avon Skin So Soft Dry Oil which I’d bought five years ago before a trip to Scotland, suckered in by the promise that they would ward off the biting midges. I’m sure you’ve heard the story? It’s been doing the rounds for years. This skin moisturising product that was never initially designed as an insect repellent but apparently had some magic powers when it came to stopping bugs from biting. There was even a story that it was used by the US military for this purpose.
It reminded me that back then I decided to research further into it. Not least because I am actual catnip for mosquitos (mosquitonip?). If someone is going to be bitten, it will be me. (Although increasingly I’m wondering if everyone gets bitten and it just bothers me more.) As a result, I would frequently use industrial strength DEET, desperately trying to ignore the fact that it melted watch straps and took the finish off leather, so quite what it was doing to my skin, I dared not think. No matter, the bugs stayed away.
However, as I was pregnant at the time of this trip, I wanted to countenance something slightly less toxic. (In the true sense of the word, not the chemophobic, “clean” beauty sense.) Although, it turned out that this is a classic example of internalised chemophobia (is that a thing? Like internalised misogyny, where it’s so ingrained that you don’t realise you’ve been conditioned by it until you start to unpick it?) Because when I actually looked into whether it was safe to use DEET while pregnant, not only is it safe, it’s actively recommended if you’re travelling to somewhere with Malaria, Zika or the like — obviously don’t just take my word for it, you can read official guidance from the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, but the important bit is that “DEET up to 50% […] is safe in pregnant and breastfeeding women (and in infants and children over the age of 2 months)”
Anyway, I had already started my deep dive into Skin So Soft by this point, keen to work out whether the story about US troops was true, and here’s what I discovered…
The earliest reference in newspapers I could find was in a travel story from the Evening Standard from 1991 talking about sand flies in the Bahamas which contained the line “Some locals swear the most effective defence is a half-and-half concoction of water and an Avon bath oil called Skin So Soft.” I also came across a 2017 news story from The Scotsman saying that the UK’s Royal Marines who were based on the West coast of Scotland had started using it in 2005.
“It’s not official kit but nothing works better and the Marines are buying it themselves because the midges are so bad up there,” Neil Smith, a Royal Navy spokesman at HMS Clyde, near Helensburgh, apparently said.
But then, I stumbled across this — it’s a paper from the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association that dates back to 1991, and it details the results of an experiment carried out in Honduras that tested two U.S. military issue DEET repellent formulations (75% DEET liquid and 33% DEET lotion) against Avon Skin-So-Soft to see how effective they were against midges. The test subjects “were U.S. military personnel deployed to Honduras for training.”
Imagine my excitement! Proper concrete clinical trial evidence of how good this stuff was… except…. “The liquid and lotion formulations of DEET and Avon Skin-So-Soft provided 97.9%, 95.9% and 71.4% protection, respectively, compared with the untreated control.” Meaning that DEET, even at 33% was almost 25% more effective than Skin So Soft. Although it was more than 70% better than using nothing.
What I thought was really interesting was why the Avon stuff worked at all. Apparently it “provided protection by trapping the midges in the oily film and not by repelling the insects” in the way that DEET does. I’m still not entirely clear on whether the US army really uses this stuff, or whether they just got roped in to a clinical trial that showed that it was... just OK.
Midges are one thing, but when it comes to mosquitos, I’d probably stick with the DEET. Because that paper led me to another paper in the same journal that looked at how effective Skin So Soft was against mosquitos when compared to your usual mosquito repellents. “25% DEET provided greater than 8 hours protection, a controlled-release formulation containing 35% DEET provided greater than 10 hours protection, and the Avon product provided 0.64 hours protection [that’s less than 40 minutes protection] from bites.”
So yeah, one that I’ll be keeping in the shower to slather on wet skin as a foolproof and lazy moisturiser, but probably not what I’d choose as an insect repellent.
Fragrant stuff
One of the other products I found during my clearout was an old bottle of Hawaiian Tropic SPF 20 oil. I can’t tell you how old but suffice to say when I looked it up on the website to see if it still existed, they showed it had been repackaged and the one I have doesn’t even look like their “old” version.
I wouldn’t use it as sun protection now. Because although I am VERY gung ho with most things about use by dates / PAO recommendations (Period After Opening — that little picture of an open jar that says 6M or 12M on beauty products and is an indicator that the product is safe and stable for a minimum of six months or 12 months after opening) and generally have a rule of thumb that if it doesn’t smell funny or look funny, it’s probably fine, with sun protection, I do try to be reasonably good.
However I would totally use it as a body oil. (I think this might have been something I was first inspired to do by CAT MARNELL when I used to read her stuff on XOJane.com. She used to rave about using sun cream as body lotion all year round because it was super-moisturising and smelled so good. I mean sure, there are a load of people who are going to tell you that you shouldn’t do that because chemicals and toxic load, but they’re probably the ones getting Zika and Malaria because they’re not using proper insect repellent in the jungle.)
But I digress, yes the oil is moisturising, but the smell, the SMELL. I just love the smell. It takes me back to beaches and pools and hot days and even hotter nights, and that gorgeous smell that is hot skin and sun tan lotion and all that stuff. (Bobbi Brown’s Beach is the closest I’ve come to a synthetic incarnation of it.) And I KNOW, I KNOW, I’m not supposed to glamourise or fetishise sun tanning. (I’m currently writing a report for the UK Government on UV safety FFS) I wouldn’t do it now, but the fact that the smell can transport me to younger and more irresponsible times is a constant source of joy for me.
It’s one of the reasons I keep a plastic pot of what is basically scented Vaseline on my desk. I bought it almost 30 years ago from a supermarket in Les Deux Alpes. I was 18 and working there in the year before I went to university. As the snow melted, the sun blazed down, and there was less skiing to be done. So Paul, the chef of the hotel where I worked, and I, would slather ourselves in this SPF 0 emollient that we called “cow fat” — in homage to both the texture of the product and the design on the label — and baste on the terrace. Like I say, I was 18, it was the 1990s, I knew NOTHING about UV damage, melanoma, and the like. I wouldn’t do it now, but the smell, THE SMELL. I have no idea how it’s not gone rancid (it’s literally mineral oil, coconut, tahitian gardenia, shea butter and fragrance) but it hasn’t and one sniff and there I am, back on that terrace, probably smoking a Silk Cut Ultra and gossiping about who pulled who the night before in Smokey Joe’s.
I am obsessed with smell. Not in the way that Alice du Parcq is, I can’t tell you nearly as much about noses and notes, but I am fascinated by the relationship between the brain and smell. One of my favourite academics is a guy called Professor Tim Jacobs - he’s an emeritus professor at Cardiff University and he studies the psychophysiology of smell — basically the impact that fragrance has on our minds and bodies. And, once you start thinking about it, you can’t help but try to work out what’s behind the fragrances that you find in beauty products.
I’ve talked before how while some people — hi, Nadine Baggott — don’t think facial skincare should contain fragrance, I — possibly because I don’t tend to react to much when it comes to fragrance — don’t have an issue with it. Yes, when people have an allergy to a cosmetic product, it’s frequently because of the fragrance, And yet the number of people who have a fragrance allergy is estimated to be between 1.7% and 4.1%. So despite all the noise about fragrance-free, for the vast majority of people there’s simply no issue with it.
Of course you don’t have to have an allergy to the stuff to object to fragrance in skincare, it’s entirely possible you simply don’t like it, or don’t want multiple scents vying for olfactory attention. But to suggest that fragrance doesn’t have a place in cosmetics is to overlook some very important roles it can play.
When I was speaking to Liberty Angris, the cosmetic scientist from Grown Alchemist, the other day about their new body care products, we talked about the role of fragrance within the products, which are heavy on acids — lactic, glycolic, salicylic.
“Acids can smell a bit vinegary,” she told me. “We wanted a scent that was going to work with it, rather than fight it.” The result is a blend of bergamot, lemon and lemongrass — fresh and uplifting. And, that helps as well. As well as using fragrance to mask the unpleasant smell of raw ingredients, the smell of a product is also used to improve the experience, encourage people to use it — and signal something about who the product is for and what it’s meant to do.
AGES ago, I interviewed Dr Sian Morris who, at the time, was a principal scientist at Olay.
“A woman in her 40s may have more sophisticated tastes than a teen,” she told me. “A luxury night cream may have a sophisticated floral note while an invigorating day lotion may be more citrusy.”
In many ways that seems obvious — have you smelled the Sol de Janeiro scents that are all the rage with teens? Lashings of sugar and fruit that seem like a headache in a bottle to the rest of us. (Just me?) While a zesty lemon scent indicates it’s a product that’s going to pep us up, while lavender contains a compound that has sedative properties and is more suitable for a night product.
But what I find really fascinating is how sometimes the message that a fragrance sends is interpreted differently depending on where you are in the world. Because yes, there are some fragrances that we respond to because we’re evolutionarily conditioned to. Vanilla is one of them. One study found it was universally ranked as a pleasant and appealing scent, regardless of whether you’re a hunter-gatherer from a tropical rainforest in Malaysia or an urban dweller from North America. The theory is that because vanillin is found in breast milk, all humans associate it with comfort, safety and sustenance.
Other smells aren’t quite so universal. There’s a huge cultural element to what we think “clean” for example smells like — apparently while Americans think it’s pine, in Asia it’s lime. Anyway, to wilfully misquote The Fast Show, “Fragrance, brilliant!”
And finally…
Calling out PR mailers for being environmental abominations is the sort of thing I used to do a lot on Instagram and I sort of stopped doing it because it pretty much stopped happening. But then as I was writing this week’s newsletter, I got sent this:
I’ve blurred the brand as I don’t want to name and shame a specific PR or brand, because I don’t know whose idea it was (and I’ve already emailed the PR to flag my concerns). But while this is a particularly egregious example, it’s far from the only one.
And I realise that bitching about a PR mailer could sound like the very height of entitlement but I feel like it needs to be talked about. Because I get it, I do, you want coverage for your brand and one of the main ways you get that these days is on image-driven social media. And maybe the people who create this type of content that you want are so busy / lazy that you need to do the work for them. Not only do you need to grab their attention with something that looks different, you also need to give them a plastic drawer so they can ASMR tap their fingernails on it, or cosplay being a princess opening it. And maybe their audiences don’t care about the amount of packaging and plastic and wastage that brands send out…
But I think when they know about it, consumers broadly do care about these things. (I mean tell me, do you?) And this reflects SO badly on the brand. In this instance, this was a brand I actually rated and was interested to know more about (despite the fact that it apparently calls itself a “clean” brand 🙄 But also can we explore the massive irony in a brand that apparently cares about ingredients — hence “clean” — implicitly suggesting they don’t give a shit about resources and plastic? 🙄🙄)
I can’t tell if this is a brand problem or a content creator problem. But I think it is a problem that tells us a lot about the beauty industry at the moment. It seems to be about what stuff looks like rather than what it does, or how it does it. The press release that accompanied the products above? Less than 100 words on an A5 card that gave me information that was so topline it was virtually orbiting the moon. (But at least it was on a separate card. Don’t get Emma Gunavardhana started on 3D boxes that contain the salient information about a product “Where am I meant to store that? What’s wrong with a nice piece of A4?”)
Speaking to a PR for hair tools a few months ago I was asking about what moves the dial on TikTok shop for them “People showing the product and befores and afters of their hair,” she told me. “That’s it? So nothing about the technology that distinguishes you from competitors?” “Nope.” Where is the curiosity? Where is the desire to know more? I know, I know, it’s here, if you’re reading this I’m preaching to the converted. And I thank you for being here and making me feel like there is an appetite for beauty coverage that interrogates rather than just shows something looking pretty.
As ever, let me know your thoughts on any of the above in the comments below.
Until next time…
Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.
Oh, this reminded me about my love of Avon SSS and how I got sucked into the repellent myth . I even settled with the original scent, not the one I actually wanted because ONLY THE ORIGINAL has the repellent properties. Sigh. Still, will repurchase for a fuss-free body oil. Another great post, as usual, thank you Claire!
Always such a good read. Glad my video rant made the cut too!