In the United States, the 1920s were a time of significant change. Prohibition banned alcohol. The 19th Amendment was passed, giving women, well, some women, the right to vote. And at the end of the decade, the country was facing its worst economic downturn in history. But throughout this time, flappers and movie stars were on the rise. And with all that glitz and glam in the spotlight, it's not surprising that the 1920s into the 1930s were a time when the cosmetics industry also took off. But it wasn't long before a series of tragedies would rock that industry, thanks to a lack of regulation. In 1933, a woman died because of a product called Lashlure, a coal tar-based eyelash and eyebrow dye that was marketed as new and improved. It also blinded more than a dozen women. Lashlor contained a toxic compound called paraphenylenediamine. The silver lining was that this tragedy played a key role in the passage of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which gave the FDA regulatory oversight, in the case of cosmetics, prohibiting adulterated or misbranded products from entering the market. Lashlor was ultimately removed from shelves, but it still serves as a precautionary tale. It's an example of the power of marketing in beauty. Did anyone using Lashlore think it would blind them? No, of course not. They just wanted striking dark eyelashes from this new and improved formula. Although nearly a century later, our cosmetics are much more tightly regulated, we're seeing a modern version of the same problem. Because the power of cosmetics marketing persists. And depending on who's behind the curtain, we can be goaded in one direction or the other based on what feels like science but isn't. Welcome to Tiny Matters. I'm Sam Jones and I'm joined by my co-host, Deboki Chakravarti. And today we're going to be talking about the ongoing trend of companies claiming to have the safest, greenest, cleanest beauty products on the market. I feel like I've been getting ads for this all over the place, especially since having a baby. There is quite a bit of fear mongering involved, and I think it feels even worse because you're already in this more emotional and anxious state. But Debugia, I want to know, what is your experience being marketed clean beauty products? I mean, I have an Instagram. I follow beauty accounts. So I feel like you just you see it, you know it. It's going to come at you. And I feel like especially like having bought makeup, I guess, for a while now, it's like I remember a time when Sephora wasn't heavily marketing this stuff. And then you're like, huh. Right. Oh, this is this is the thing now. Yeah, this is new. Yeah, ish. But also it feels new just because I don't want to admit how long I've been buying makeup for. It's a little bit different from the like roll on bright blue glitter stuff that we were putting on our faces as preteens. Yeah, yeah. So generally speaking, beauty products that are considered clean, using air quotes here, they don't use ingredients that are suspected of being harmful to people or the environment. The idea being if you just stay away from a laundry list of ingredients, you can avoid various cancers or hormone disruption or allergic reactions. It's a nice idea in theory, but things are almost never that simple. Nope. Clean beauty is, as we said, relatively new, but it's growing fast. According to a market analysis report we'll link to, in 2025, the global clean beauty market was estimated at more than $10 billion. dollars. And it's expected to reach over 35 billion dollars by 2033. That's a lot of money. That is a lot of money. And in an industry that's, what's the word, complex, murky, problematic, all of the above. A bit of a facade, you might say. Yes. And so we reached out to someone who could help put a couple clean beauty claims into context and talk about how these cleaner products might be causing more harm, and how some of the propaganda we've been marketed has ties to the anti-vax pipeline. Michelle Wong is a chemist and science communicator whose focus is cosmetic chemistry. Back in high school, because I have immigrant Asian parents, I was not allowed to wear makeup because that was a distraction from studies. And so when I got to uni, that was when I was suddenly allowed to play with all this stuff. And I didn't know what I was doing. It was at the start of her PhD that Michelle really started getting into beauty. She told us she finally had money from part-time jobs to actually buy different products and try them out. I started looking up stuff online. I got confused. I started Googling. I started looking on Google Scholar. I was also in a bunch of Facebook groups talking about beauty products, and I was, you know, the science person. So lots of people started asking me questions as well. As Michelle delved further into the cosmetics world as both a consumer and chemist, she began to see something she never expected, a connection between beauty product ads and online conversations about the anti-vaccine movement. I was looking into science communication. I was reading blogs like Science Based Medicine. And I was seeing a lot of parallels between what I was seeing in beauty and what I was seeing with these anti-vax narratives. There are a ton of parallels between them. So there were things like the infographics look the same, like, you know, this ingredient in your vaccine or in your makeup is really scary. You should be scared of these names. If the name is too long, then it doesn't belong on your body. Right. It's like if you can't pronounce it, then it's bad for you. And that makes absolutely no sense because some of the most basic benign substances have very complex names. Yeah, exactly. It's all just really chemophobia. Chemophobia, meaning an irrational fear of chemicals. And Michelle was most often seeing this parallel with clean beauty products that had labels saying none of substance A or additives B and C. Calling out ingredients on the label in a way that would lead a consumer to think, oh, that must be dangerous. I need to avoid it. Anything can be dangerous or safe, depending on how much you have. If you have a small enough amount, it will be safe. If you have a high enough amount, it will be dangerous. Even water. You can get water poisoning. So that's like fundamentally what's wrong. There's lots of other like issues layered on top as well. So things like a lot of the time they will see an animal study or a cell study where they used a lot of stuff. Like they put on tons and tons of a particular ingredient. And unsurprisingly, at some point, the animals start having problems. The cells start dying. And obviously you have to then compare like, are we getting this much? are we hitting the point where the dose becomes a poison? And generally what happens is it's kind of reverse causation, I guess. A lot of people think, oh, we've been using these chemicals and then suddenly we put it on a rat and we've discovered it's terrible. It's actually more the other way around. The reason we're doing these studies on animals, on cells, is to try to pick up problems. And then once we see where the line is, then we can know what the safe amount is. And this was actually news to me, But there's a default uncertainty factor of 100 applied, meaning the safe amount of an active ingredient is typically designated to be 100 times lower than what was shown to be safe in an animal model. So there is a big safety buffer there. But then it's really easy to just take this data out of context, which is what a lot of clean beauty apps, a lot of clean beauty websites do. They'll just list all these studies where they found problems and then they go, well, this was tested on breast cancer cells. Therefore, if we have any of this, we will get breast cancer. You should avoid it." And this vague hand wavy approach to what's safe and what's not is worse than you'd expect because it can lead to behaviors that are ultimately incredibly dangerous. And so I sort of saw clean beauty as like a pipeline towards anti because women are looking at beauty products in their teens maybe earlier And then it not until they maybe 30 when they about to decide whether or not to inject their tiny baby with the same chemicals they've been too scared to put on their armpits. Michelle was already witnessing so many doctors and science communicators working hard to debunk anti-vax misinformation. So she had a thought. What if she tried to reach people earlier, long before they became anti-vax? She was going to be proactive, providing real information and transparency and addressing misinformation before someone would come across it, building that resistance to going down a dangerous anti-science path. This is an approach called pre-bunking. And this was back in 2011 when I started my blog, end of 2011. And lots of people were very skeptical about this. This was back in the old SciComm days when it was, you know, only talk about your research, post on Twitter, don't go on other social. Actually, even going on Twitter was kind of controversial back then. It was like, you know, you don't need to go on social media. It's frivolous. You know, just talk about the science and people will come. And we know now. That doesn't work. We're very convinced now. Yeah. I mean, back then there was research saying it didn't work. But now I think we've got so much evidence. It's not that effective. Okay, so let's quickly run through a pre-bunking example. Sam, you gave Michelle a kind of a silly one to run with. It was a little silly. So the idea, the premise, the prompt, we'll say, was like, let's say there's this idea out there that socks give you diabetes, which, of course, they do not. Oh, that's a good one. If you want to debunk it, that's really hard. So instead of teaching people about why socks don't cause diabetes, maybe people should learn more about socks and diabetes. Maybe if we can anticipate why they might think this, maybe it's chemicals in socks. We know that people are scared of scary-sounding chemicals. So maybe if we look up what is in a sock, I don't know, nylon, whatever long names, and start teaching people. Long names doesn't mean scary. Just because something is synthetic doesn't mean it's bad for you. There are lots of natural things that are bad for you. So kind of giving people the tools to work out misinformation for themselves. Another big one is digital literacy. So teaching people how to do this research. You know, if it comes from a dodgy account where they're trying to sell you, I don't know, an alternative to socks, then maybe question that. Maybe there's a conflict of interest. Maybe look for a source that doesn't have that same bias and see what they say. Yeah, really went down that sock path. I appreciate you just like ad-libbing with my weird suggestion. I really enjoyed that. I'm also hoping no one comes away from this being like, what if socks do give me diabetes? But no, I think Michelle showed us exactly how you avoid that. Right. And more on that in just a moment. Pale Blue Pod is an astronomy podcast for people who are overwhelmed by the universe, but want to be its friend. Astrophysicist Dr. Boya McTeer and her best friend, ConStar, demystify space one topic at a time with open eyes, open arms, and open mouths from so much laughing and jaw dropping. By the end of each episode, the cosmos will feel a little less, ah, too scary, and a little more, oh, so cool. New episodes every Monday. So subscribe to Pale Blue Pod in your podcast app now. That's Pale Blue Pod from the Multitude Podcast Collective. All right, back to the show. Okay, so returning back to makeup, let's talk about a couple of the messages you might be seeing. One of the things I see used a lot is paraben-free. Oh, yeah. I see this one pop up all the time. You see it listed on a lot of skin and hair care and also lots of makeup. How things are marketed and what sorts of narratives are stuck in consumers' brains. Because if you see a product that says paraben-free, even if you don't know what a paraben is, you are going to assume that that means parabens must be bad in some way. People must want to avoid them if you've got it on the front of a product. And I think a lot of the time, companies don't think longer term like that. They just go, well, our market research, our little focus group has told us they prefer paraben-free products. We ask them, do you prefer paraben-free products, yes or no? And most of them went with yes. So we are going to put it on the bottle. Yet they just don't really look at the big picture. They're usually looking at short-term sales goals and stuff like that. So first, what are parabens? They're preservatives. And because cosmetic products are often water-based, you need preservatives to prevent bacteria and mold growth. So it's kind of like if you leave food out. It will go moldy if you don't have something to stop it from going moldy, and that's what the preservatives do. They control the microbes to a level where it's not a problem, they can't proliferate. So parabens were the most common preservatives for a really long time. But then there were some studies that found that they have very low estrogenic activity. when you put enough into cell assays, they had an effect. And then in 2004, they were found in breast cancer tumors. So in the study, they measured the levels of parabens in breast cancer tissue. And then they, again, this is like a study that just got really blown up out of proportion in the media. But if you look at the study, they didn't test how much was in non-cancerous tissue. Oh, this is this is so stressful to hear talked about. This is like experimental design 101. You have to have a control. Yes. And like in this case, we can see exactly why. They found parabens in breast cancer tissue. But are there also parabens in non-cancerous breast tissue? Great question. And I did a little digging. And based on more recent studies, yes, there are. But the issues with this 2004 study don't stop there. Of course not. They also found parabens in the blank samples, like the samples that had zero tissue. And sometimes in these blank samples, which were just liquids that they were using in the experiments, the parabens were at higher concentrations than in the breast cancer. So this really points towards some sort of contamination issue. Maybe it was in the dishwashing liquid that they used to clean the lab equipment. Maybe it was in some of their solvents because parabens are really, really common. So it's not even like correlation isn't causation. There's not even a correlation. Today, both in vivo and epidemiological studies linking paraben exposure to endocrine disruption and breast cancer are still really limited and not conclusive. But, you know, you might be thinking, well, maybe there is a tiny chance parabens are an issue. And so why not just avoid them? I mean, what is the alternative now? Is it just a different antimicrobial or you could then be turning to something that maybe isn't used as much, isn't studied as much. And that could actually leave sort of the door open to that potentially being more problematic because it hasn't been studied. Exactly. This is called regrettable substitution. And I think this is happening with things like PFAS as well. But yeah, because you need the parabens. Like, I mean, if we're really cynical, commercial products, the cheapest thing is water. So if they're putting anything in there that isn't water, it has a purpose. And so preservatives, they're necessary because if you have contaminated products and you put them on your skin, especially if you're immunocompromised or if it's a baby, then things happen. Bad things have happened. Things like babies have died from contaminated products. So you need preservatives. And so they're going to use other preservatives and they are less studied because parabens are so well studied. Michelle told us the biggest issue at this point with these replacements is allergic reactions. There are two replacements in particular that she calls out, called MI and MCI. They can cause allergic contact dermatitis, which can look like itchy, red, and even swollen skin, as well as blisters. Oof. And when they started going into products, which was at the same time as parabens were getting phased out, there were tons of allergies. Even now, it's one of the biggest allergens. If you look at studies on them like a lot of journal articles have titles like saying you know the epidemic of MI allergy so yeah I allergic to them which is probably why I a little bit pissed about this whole paraben thing But tons of people are allergic to them I think it was like I don't know, a good like full number percentage, like whole number percentages of people are allergic to them. This is going down though, because there are more regulations coming in about, you know, you can't have them in leave-on products, you can only have them in wash-off products. Because the dose makes the poison, if you have something on your skin for longer, it's more likely to get in. But yeah, like this is classic example of regrettable substitution. Sometimes maybe we shouldn't take the devil we know out of things until we work out what the devil we're replacing them with is. I kind of like that. Same. Okay, so the second marketing ploy I wanted to chat with Michelle about was fragrance. A lot of the discourse that I see about fragrance is either fragrance is bad, stuff needs to be fragrance-free to be clean, or I see that certain fragrances are being touted for all these positive things. It's just really confusing. On cosmetic products, they can use the word fragrance as an umbrella term for lots of different ingredients because fragrances are like a closely guarded trade secret because fragrance is so influential in how people perceive products. It's very subjective. it like the right fragrance can make you feel like a product cleans better or moisturizes your skin better. This is really true. You know, like, unfortunately. Smell is such a strong association that we place with different parts of the world. It totally is. And, you know, for example, a lemony cleaning product to me would scream very clean. Like if the scent was like sulfur, If the scent was mulch, like I might not feel that way, even if all of the active ingredients were exactly the same. And so a lot of people, because of this sort of like, you know, trade secret stuff, people think there's something shady that's being hidden. And that's just not the case. In fact, about 80 percent of the volume of fragrance made globally comes from companies who are part of IFRA or IFRA, which is the International Fragrance Association. And they have a whole bunch of regulations around how much you can put into products. So how much of a specific ingredient you can have in a product before it becomes, quote unquote, unsafe, which is still well below dangerous. I think it's one of those things where this comes up a lot, actually, where secrecy in the industry, either because it's a trade secret or because they think people who use beauty products, generally women, aren't interested in the nitty gritty science. They just want to be sold a fantasy. This has actually led to a lot of problems in the industry that they now have to solve. And they're on this constant, I guess, treadmill of trying to deal with ingredients being maligned and they have to reformulate. And it's very expensive, but they could have dealt with it with science communication, really. So, for example, cosmetic companies could be more transparent about their products, sharing what's in them and the testing they've done to show they're safe. hiding things doesn't work because it makes you seem sus and people need to trust the person they're listening to before they'll believe them. Sometimes it's well-intentioned. Sometimes it's like, you know, you don't need to worry about this. Why would we confuse them with all this technical information? But in reality, like these days, it's so different from maybe 20 years ago where most people were just, you know, consuming whatever was on TV, what they can fit in a But now we have the internet, like the space is not a problem. The problem is being able to intercept bad information, intercept oversimplified narratives. And in line with that theme of transparency, Michelle has been working on an app with developers and her friend Jen Novakovich, who founded science communication platform The EcoWell. The app's called Formula IQ. Basically, it is a scanning app where you scan a product and it gives you information about the product. And there are lots of apps like this already. They're generally clean beauty apps where they score based on the ingredient list itself. They don't look at things like Dose or anything like that. And we're trying to make a science-based version of this. And for a long time, I thought this was ridiculous. It's not doable. It cannot be done. But the more I look at it, the more I realize, I mean, it's the problem I've been trying to solve for my entire SciComm career. how can I make the science as palatable, as easy to digest, as appealing as the unscientific version? We've tried to find a happy medium between, you know, helping people work out which products to buy versus, you know, what is actually scientifically defensible. I think we've maybe worked it out. But essentially the idea is, you know, these people are using these apps. They are going to use these apps regardless. I have asked people, why do you use this app when you've been following me and you know clean beauty is BS? And they say, well, I just want to know something. I just want to understand more about this product other than what's on the packaging, which is definitely largely influenced by marketing and not by science. Michelle imagines a future where, let's say someone went cosmetics shopping with their friend who was using one of the clean beauty scanner apps. They could just scan along with them, providing in the moment debunking. The app's currently in alpha testing, but coming soon. It's amazing to have tools, but sometimes it feels like we're up against a constant tsunami of misinformation. Yeah. I mean, not just in cosmetic chemistry, but also throughout the sciences. Michelle stresses that individuals can still make a difference. I think we really underestimate the importance of the messenger. A lot of the time, if you have a pre-established relationship with someone, it is so much easier to convince them than a stranger on the internet convincing them. I mean, this is part of the danger of social media, because if you watch a content creator for long enough, you feel like you know them, you develop a parasocial relationship, you get much more convinced. And that's how a lot of people end up internalizing misinformation and making bad decisions for themselves. But that also means that there's so much power for individuals and influencing your own network. So I think, yeah, like talk to people. If you care about misinformation, talk to your relatives, talk to your mum who's been on Facebook way too much, talk to your friends who have been listening to too many, I don't know, weird podcasts, just having conversations with people. Because at the end of the day, what we're finding more and more with science communication research is it is about people. It's about how we interact as humans, how we relate to each other as humans. It's actually not that much about the science. It's more about these connections. And so, yeah, I think empathy is really underrated when it comes to trying to promote science, trying to promote people making more rational decisions. All right, Tabuki, let's tiny show and tell. Let's do it. Do you want me to go first? Yeah. Okay, awesome. I'm going to talk to you about dinosaurs today. One dinosaur in particular named Scotty. I already love Scotty. I don't know anything about Scotty. Just tell me. Okay. So before we get to Scotty, a lot of what we know about dinosaurs comes from fossilized bones, teeth, and soft tissues like muscles and ligaments. And I believe on other episodes, we've talked about how researchers have even found skin and scales and feathers. Right. But also something I didn't know about is that another type of soft tissue that sometimes is preserved inside dinosaur bones are blood vessels. Did you know that? No. I don't know how I missed this. I wasn't sure where you were going to go because I was like, obviously, there's the poop. But like, oh, yeah, I didn't feel like that. I didn't feel like where we were going because you were talking about tissue. Oh, that's even more cool. Yeah, I know. It's it's wild. Okay, so researchers have identified preserved blood vessels in a T-Rex fossil. The fossil's name is Scotty. Scotty was discovered in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1991 and is currently housed in the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada. Scotty, I don't know how I didn't know about Scotty, but Scotty's the largest T-Rex ever discovered. Oh, wow. And also one of the most complete T-Rexes ever discovered. Cool. Okay so Scotty lived around 66 million years ago And sadly this dino life was not easy Many of his or her they don know Bones show signs of injury maybe from combat with another dinosaur maybe due to disease But there was one rib in particular that had a large fracture that it only partially healed And that is where scientists saw these fossilized blood vessels So when our bones are damaged, our bodies will increase blood supply, blood vessel activity in that affected area to help the bone heal. That makes sense. So that is why they think, right, that they were able to see this dense network of iron-rich structures, so these like fossilized blood vessels. And they were able to see this. So right, like first I was reading the press release, like they were thinking, could we do a CT scan? Could we do? No, like you just can't. Yeah. You got to do something a little crazy. And that thing is called synchrotron light. So this is a form of radiation. It's very powerful. And it's produced by accelerating charged particles to almost the speed of light. I think what I saw listed was like 99% the speed of light, which was interesting. And I don't really know how to conceptualize that. Yeah, yeah. It's fast. It's fast. And then they use magnets to change their direction. So essentially, like this is a way it's kind of like a super hardcore fast X-ray. Yeah. I didn't think about it. But that's how they were able to actually detect these structures. And I just thought that's like, how wild is it that you have a fossil that's 66 million years old where you're able to not just say, hey, you know, we're seeing things about these bones that would indicate that there was an injury. But also we're also seeing that in the healing process, there was this blood vessel formation and you have more of it in that area. And that's probably what made it so you could detect it. Right. Like you have this influx. influx. Yeah. So I guess we're still still learning some things about Scotty. Yeah. 66 million years later. And I guess like 35 ish years after Scotty's discovery. Yeah. That's so cool. I mean, it makes sense. I just for some reason in my head, it's like you get a fossil and then it's just there in the museum. And I like always have to remind myself like, no, people still work with this stuff. Like, right. Obviously. Yeah. It's not just like shown and that's it. Right. Yeah. You think of fossils being these very static things because, I mean, first off, they've actually just sat in the ground for literal millions of years, depending on which fossil it is. Yeah. But even then, even the sitting in the ground is not as static as we think of it. Totally. Yeah. And I'm using we very broadly. I feel like there are geologists and paleontologists out there who's like, we do not think of it as static at all. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, let's just speak for dozens of fields right now. Yeah, so Scotty. Scotty, I'm excited to know what more we learn from you. I'm excited to, when I see Scotty's name in a press release moving forward, like I will read that press release from here on out. I gotta. Well, thank you for letting me know about Scotty. Of course. I've got a very different tiny show and tell us. That's the beauty of this. On brand. And I'm going to talk about hospitals and brushing your teeth, which like we've talked about teeth before. I feel like you've done more of our teeth. I went on this weird teeth kick. Like I feel like we had a tooth episode of Tiny Matters. And then I was finding all this stuff related to flossing and heart disease. And I just I went down the tooth rabbit hole. Yeah. But I haven't been there in a while. So thank you for bringing it back. Well, I'm here to I'm here to bring you back. OK. So scientists have found that for patients in a hospital, you can reduce your chance of getting pneumonia by brushing your teeth. Guys. Wow. Always brush your teeth. And to be clear, like a big part of the reason for this study is that it is hard to take care of your teeth in the hospital. You might have ended up there in circumstances where like, you know, you just you didn't have your toothbrush on hand. Like you might be physically just in a situation where it is hard to take care of your teeth. Like there's a lot going on. It's like the least of your concerns sometimes if you're in a hospital. But also a major concern in hospitals is pneumonia. So patients on ventilators often get pneumonia, but that's related to the equipment itself because it might mess with their respiratory system. But also non-ventilator patients often end up with pneumonia if they've stayed in the hospital for more than 48 hours. And the reasons behind that are not entirely clear. But one theory that people have had is that the oral microbiome is actually changing in hospital. Like you're breathing in like these droplets from the air that might have bacteria in them. And so maybe that's affecting your oral microbiome and that's translating into effects on your respiratory health. And so scientists and doctors in Australia did what is, I think, the largest trial on this. So they did a year long randomized control trial with 8,870 patients in three Australian hospitals. And there were three groups. And so for the first three months, the group had like no intervention. But after three months, one group was given a toothbrush and toothpaste that said on one side, brushing teeth helps prevent pneumonia. And on the other side, it said brush away pneumonia. The brush also had a special handle to help people who weren't able to move as well. And they were also given a QR code with link to educational materials about this potential link between brushing your teeth and pneumonia. So basically a lot of education and also supplies for helping with brushing your teeth. And then the second and third groups basically got brushes after six months and then nine months for that third group. So these are people who are in the hospital for like very prolonged stays. Yeah. Another part of the study was also that they provided oral care training for nurses and would encourage them to remind patients to brush and floss. And so before the intervention period, only 15.9 percent of patients were brushing their teeth once a day. And during the interventions, they found that 61.5 percent were brushing their teeth at least once a day. They also found, which I thought this was cool, because I feel like, you know, you can make all these educational materials, but you don't know if people are using them. But they did find that patients and nurses were accessing the materials that they had on the QR code frequently during those interventions. That's great. And at the same time, they saw a drop in non-ventilator associated hospital acquired pneumonia. So they went from one case per 100 admissions in the control group to 0.41 in the intervention group. So that's really awesome. And that's like a really straightforward intervention to do. So yeah, I thought that was really that was like a really interesting study design. And also I just really like that this really simple thing might help patients out a lot with reducing their chances of getting pneumonia. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think we talked about this last episode or the one before where I think I talked a little bit about how like my interest. Right. Like I did my graduate work in biomedical science. Like I'm just kind of drawn to that world. Right. But that the technology or quote unquote advances or like progress that I get most excited about is the stuff that is really simple. Yeah. Right. Like really simple, really accessible. I think new technology, like new ways of doing things like so cool, right? Like there's so much to say about that. But I think the stuff that is simple, cheap, easy, that's that's what gets me psyched because it's like we can actually do something about this right now. Yeah, I agree. Totally. I mean, coming from the bioengineering side, I feel like I was like my education was like all around like the idea of like technologies that are going to like improve the world. And I think that's cool, but like technologies are only going to be as good as the world they go into. And sometimes like what we really need is a world that can do those simple things. And then we figure out where the technology fits in later if we need it. Totally. Agreed. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Tiny Matters, a podcast brought to you by the American Chemical Society and produced by Multitude. This week's script was written by Sam, who is also our exec producer, and edited by Michael David and by me, Deboki Chakravarti. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. Our audio engineer is Misha Statton. The Tiny Matters theme is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts and Leisure team. Thanks so much to Michelle Wong for joining us. You can follow Michelle at LabMuffinBeautyscience on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where she makes longer videos. She also has a Substack newsletter that rounds up all the stuff she's doing and comes out each month. We left links to all of these in the episode's description. And we'll see you next time.
