Personal care products influence the chemistry of the air swirling around us.
Lotion and perfume disrupt chemical reactions that occur between ozone and skin oils, researchers report May 21 in Science Advances. More work is needed to understand how these reactions might benefit or affect human health, they say.
In 2022, atmospheric chemist Nora Zannoni and colleagues discovered that ozone in the air reacts with skin oils to create the “human oxidation field,” a cloud of chemicals called hydroxyl radicals. These molecules react with many other compounds, including pollutants and organic materials in the air, says Zannoni, of Italy’s National Research Council in Bologna.
.email-conversion