To our readers,

BeautyMatter prides itself on sparking conversations and saying the quiet parts out loud—but when those conversations appear in our content, they need to be constructive and factually correct. Based on that belief, we have decided to pull the opinion story by Colleen Quinn, “The Next Frontier of Clean Beauty: Endocrine Safety and Ethical Science,” from our website.

Colleen is more than a freelance writer; she is a cosmetic chemist and clinical aromatherapist with decades of experience in formulation and conducting clinical trials. Colleen wrote her opinion piece to ignite conversations about “clean” beauty, a topic she knows is divisive in our industry. She didn’t intend to write an article that could stoke the chemophobia fire, yet as a publication, we cannot platform ideas that could do just that.

Good intentions aside, facts matter. Words matter. Perception matters. For example, a blanket statement like “parabens cause endocrine disruption” implies that all parabens are harmful, which is not true. The science shows that long-chain parabens are hazardous, which is why they are rarely used in formulations. Short-chain parabens are frequently used in formulations because they are highly effective and backed by several years of scientific evidence.

One of the reasons short-chain parabens are so effective is that a chemist only needs to use a minuscule amount, unlike other preservatives that often require a higher dose to be effective. Mainly due to the demonization of parabens over the last 10 years, formulators have been forced to use less-studied, more irritating preservatives, such as methylisothiazolinone (MIT), a known skin sensitizer.

The reason we are choosing to pull the article rather than archive it is that, in this day and age of viral misinformation, words from an article like this can be cherry-picked and weaponized to push nefarious agendas (read my “Big Sunscreen” story). Academic literature is plagued by “zombie papers,” documents that have been formally retracted yet are still cited, which is why we chose to remove the story completely.

We understand that “clean” beauty can be a polarizing topic, and we welcome those conversations.  But we cannot platform a story, opinion or not, that perpetuates misinformation.

Thank you,

Janna Mandell
Senior Editor, BeautyMatter