Lately I've been plagued by a question that's doubtlessly frivolous in these serious times: is mineral oil bad for skin? This gripping question arose because in the spirit of frugality and using what I have, I've been working my way through the half-used bottles of lotions and potions that have been sitting in my bathroom cabinet for, in some cases, years, and which I therefore bought before I became suspicious of certain common ingredients like parabens (used as preservatives), the safety of which have since been called into question. Mineral oil is another such ingredient - and it just so happens that I've recently been trying to use up a bottle of Johnson's baby oil (in other words, mineral oil + fragrance).
Like any curious person these days, I began searching the internet for information, and I found so many articles definitively claiming that mineral oil is carcinogenic, ultimately dries up your skin, makes you poisonous from the inside out, etc. that I thought, "oh no, I can't wait until I've finished using this bottle of toxicity so I can move on to less dangerous pursuits!"
But then, as I ate my oatmeal this morning (when I do my very best thinking - or perhaps it was because of the paprika I accidentally put into my coffee - yes, I really did) I couldn't help reflecting on the fact that women have been slathering their faces (in the form of cold cream) and their babies with mineral oil for, from what I can gather, most of 100 years, without any obviously averse effects. Of course that doesn't rule out its being insidiously bad for your health, but...really? So I went back to my computer and searched again, more closely, for facts and figures, and came up with so much contradictory mud-slinging that I finally resorted to trusty google scholar, where I found only one article in medical or scientific journals that might support the general claim that the cosmetic use of mineral oil could be bad for you. This was a 2009 study that found that genetically high-risk mice who were irradiated with UVB twice a week for twenty weeks, then slathered with lotions with petroleum-based ingredients five times a week for seventeen weeks, showed a greater incidence of developing tumors on their skin than the mice who were spared the lotions. But is that really applicable to an ordinary person using a mineral oil product to relieve dry skin (aside from the brown leather ladies of my childhood who would slather themselves in baby oil, roast all day in the sun, and then do it all over again)? And then there's also, for instance, a 1992 study that found that petroleum-based emollients actually reduced UVB damage. So... it seems to me that the people who declare that mineral oil is a carcinogen - a contention that pre-dates the 2009 study I cited - must be looking at studies from the 50s and 60s that describe high incidences of skin cancer in factory workers who were exposed to industrial grades of mineral oil that were used, for example, in drilling equipment... which is an extremely different substance from the oil that has been purified for cosmetic use (and it's rather funny that people began to claim that baby oil may be a potential carcinogen around 50 years after these studies were published).
So, as far as I can tell, if you aren't a genetically high-risk mouse who has been blasted with UVB radiation for twenty weeks, it's probably fine for your health to use personal care formulas that contain mineral oil. The real reason to avoid these products is if you feel that it's environmentally irresponsible to use a product derived from petroleum. I'm not sure what to think about this: on the one hand, mineral oil is a petroleum byproduct that will exist as long as we are using oil for gas, so it may as well be used for something... on the other, the process used to create and purify cosmetic-grade mineral oil might well be environmentally taxing - exploring that would take a lot more research than I have time to do today. However, I hope everyone remembers that PLASTICS and many high-tech fabrics are also derived from petroleum!! So if you want to avoid petroleum products, cutting out mineral oil is just the beginning.
As for me, I've received a sound reminder to never blindly believe unsubstantiated claims from popular magazines or websites. The amount of information out there is dizzying ... but I begin to think of that old joke: "did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?"
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