*300
I feel *so* pedantic making this comment — please forgive me — but also:
CeraVe may have degraded in quality when they were purchased by L’Oréal and potentially changed the source of the fatty alcohols in their formulation. Fatty alcohols that have been sourced from coconut are more likely to cause skin irritation than those that have been sourced from palm. Plus, retinoids can actually push these fatty alcohols deeper into the pores for the ultimate backfire effect. My source is u/WearingCoats on Reddit, who runs a dermatology practice and does product con...
*10
Yeah, glycolic acid is an exfoliant. The retinoid family also promotes cell turnover, but in a different way. You'd be over-exfoliating by using both of them at the same time.
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*40
Snail mucin is one of those products that has less evidence behind it, besides its efficacy as a humectant, compared to the claims you'll often see in marketing. Here's a 1-minute video about it.
It's true that just because a research paper was published, it doesn’t mean that the results are that reliable — if you dig into the studies that are cited in ads, you'll often find out they had a very small number of participants, or they only did in vitro testing, or they graded their product based on the participants' feelings, or something like that.
I’d a...
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*61
This is my first time posting to LessWrong! Thanks for asking such an exciting question!
One of my favourite resources is Chemist Confessions. They have a great book that I would recommend as a primer. They often review studies on their podcast and blog, but I'd probably check out the book first.
Stating the obvious, but is it possible for you to see a dermatologist? They might not be trained extensively on the cosmetics side of things, but they'll be able to get you started with a solid routine.
Also, can we please have more threads like this? I think this i...
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1
"when Janus says: 'If you prompt Opus 4.5 in prefill/raw completion mode'" = "prompting Opus-4.5-RL to be a 'raw text completer' rather than answering in its usual Claude persona"
Yes, that's what prefill/raw completion mode means! Well, sort of. This deserves more of an explanation, because I don’t think it’s common knowledge at all, and there’s nuance to be had!
I reproduced some of Richard's extracted text in a quick 20 second experiment. I did this by prompting Opus 4.5 to be a "raw text completer," like in Eye You's screenshot, but in a slig... (read more)