Beauty Tips For Body Care
I recently saw some comments saying that SCA hating baking soda was a bandwagon thing (because it causes rashes/redness/sensitivity for some people), and if using a baking soda scrub worked for you and didn't cause problems, then to go ahead and use it. I just wanted to clarify that this wrong. Baking soda is bad for your skin, regardless of whether you see symptoms of rashes/redness/sensitivity or not. Why baking soda is bad for you is covered really well in the sidebar post, but I feel like the pH part might not be in depth enough to drive the message home for some people. My point:The pH scale is really different from a normal number scale (and it's easy to forget that). The technical stuff:The pH scale works on a log 10 basis. This means if something has a pH of 1, it is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 2, which is 10 times fore acidic than a pH of 3.Your skin has a pH of 4.5-5.5. Baking soda has a pH of 9-11. To a lot of people, this instinctively reads as "baking soda is twice as basic as your skin". This is wrong. To calculate how much more acidic/basic something is, take the difference between the pH levels, and take 10 and raise it to that exponent. What that means:So assuming "average" skin has a pH of 5, and an "average" baking soda treatment has a pH of 10, then the baking soda treatment would be 105 times or 100,000 times more basic than your skin.When something is 100,000 times more basic than your skin, it is NOT a bandwagon issue; it is a health issue. (Even if it works well and does not give you redness/sensitivity!) For recipes that use baking soda diluted in water/coconut oil/shea butter, see end of post. Short summarized list highlighting difference in pH levels:IngredientpH levelAcidic/Basic on your skinTimesSkin4.5-5.5----Baking soda9-11Basic3 thousand times - 32 million timesLemon~2Acidic3 hundred - 3 thousand timesDistilled 5% white vinegar2.4Acidic125 times - 12 hundred timesDistilled water7Basic30 times - 300 timesTap water6.5 - 8.5Basic10 times - 10 thousand timesAHA/BHA (Always check, they vary)3.5-4Acidic3 times - 100 timesMineral oiln/aNeitherOils don't have pH because the 'H' in pH stands for Hydrogen protons. Oils don't have spare protons lying around! On homemade recipes using baking soda (or other risky ingredients):For anyone thinking "If I dilute baking soda in water/shea butter/coconut oil, the pH wouldn't be so bad... right?". That's actually 100 percent correct!...But to dilute it you would need to put 1 gram of baking soda in about 100 liters of water (at least) before it would be recommended for your face. This kind of precision would need micro-pipettes, pH indicators, and graduated cylinders to be useful at a practical level. Even if you did go through all the trouble, it would be nearly identical to only using water.You can also neutralize baking soda with some sort of acidic solution like lemon juice or vinegar, except you would need acid/base calculations or stoichiometry to figure out how much to use of each.As /u/kindofstephen pointed out, you shouldn't be scared of sodium bicarbonate/potassium hydroxide/sodium hydroxide in the list of product ingredients! Science teams in skincare companies DO have access to the tools I mentioned and CAN make all sorts of calculations to balance/adjust the pH. Just remember to research your products first. TL;DR Baking soda should go back to the kitchen to make you baked desserts and tenderized meats.Edit: format & if someone could tell me what flair to give this I would be really thankful
Girls Blog 2015
Submitted by aa2114
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