Interview with Valerie George - A review of the Toxic Beauty Documentary

This episode featured a conversation with Valerie George, cosmetic chemist and co-host of my other favourite beauty podcast, The Beauty Brains. A highly requested topic, we talked about the recent Toxic Beauty documentary. Did they get the facts right? Long story short, unfortunately, the answer was no. Before you tell me I’m wrong, please listen to the episode, it’s about 30 minutes and I think we did a pretty thorough review. Cherry-picking data and ignoring the body of evidence, citing poorly designed and retracted science, and having a clear bias for natural ingredients, which we too should be demanding scientific rigour, doesn’t paint the full picture, which was our biggest critique of the film. I would like to see my industry do better and I would also like to see regulations improve, although this might not have the same impact a lot of consumers feel improvements would have as they would affect smaller businesses a lot more than the larger ones who have sufficient scientific teams and resources… but either way, to do this, we need to start with facts.