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If you corner any science person who’s relatively online and into skin care, the discussion will almost inevitably turn toward the Lab Muffin Beauty Science blog. That’s because for many people, its creator, Dr. Michelle Wong, has become the face and voice of beauty science. From deconstructing misinformation about beauty science to single-handedly convincing thousands of people that wearing sunscreen every day is the single best thing you can do to protect your skin, her influence as a science communicator is huge.
What Dr. Wong does is incredibly important. She has a PhD in chemistry and is a professional science communicator, working across major social platforms. She has cracked the code of how to talk to people about beauty. She corrects misinformation, uses her chemistry background to recommend products, breaks down studies, and discusses the effectiveness of specific ingredients—all while nailing the ins and outs of social media.
Focusing on Dr. Wong (who has over a million followers across her Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts, and that doesn’t include the many people who read her blog) brings up a simple question: Why is it so hard to find good, concrete information on the science behind beauty products?
“When things are more gendered towards women, people tend to think it’s more frivolous and take it less seriously,” Dr. Wong explains in an interview with WIRED. “Part of it is just the idea that women don’t care about science.”
But it’s not just that. The beauty industry has unique challenges when it comes to accessibility of scientific data. “The cosmetics industry has always been a walled garden,” Dr. Wong explains. “A lot of the research in beauty is never peer-reviewed. It’s all just internal industry data.”
That makes it a challenge for any science communicator trying to demystify beauty science, and it's part of the reason misinformation is so rampant. The problem results from the way cosmetics are regulated. If a manufacturer claims that a product has what’s called a structure/function effect, then it’s considered a drug. “Because of that, even if there is research showing that [a beauty ingredient] has structure and function effects, there's no marketing advantage to sharing it,” she explains. “There is a lot of really interesting research by big companies on how particular ingredients work. But a lot of it happens behind closed doors.”
How does one become a beauty science communicator? It was by chance for Dr. Wong, as she didn’t start with an interest in skin care. “I did a psychology course, and they were like, ‘If you’ve fainted on the street, if you’re more attractive, then you’re more likely to get emergency care,’” she says. That revelation is what led her to start digging into skin care. She started her blog while pursuing a PhD in medicinal chemistry, and she found that people were hungry for the kind of information she was providing. “Clearly there’s a big gap here where people want this information and no one is making it available,” she says.
This was all in the days before social media. Now Dr. Wong has gotten her method of communication down to a science (pun intended.) “Social media is what people do in their downtime,” she says. “It’s what helps people relax, and it’s sort of like that brainless mode.”
“The fact is, in their downtime, people are looking for information on skin care, on their beauty products,” Dr. Wong continues. “Maybe they've seen a TikTok where someone's going on about how toxic all their products are and how they need to throw them out. They're going to be searching for that information in their downtime, and so that already is a really good conduit to try to lead people into understanding their products at a deeper level.” Dr. Wong is well known for debunking myths about beauty product toxicity and speaking out against the “clean beauty” marketing label.
Communicating beauty science effectively is so important, and many scientists don’t quite appreciate or understand how difficult it is to fight misinformation online. “I think in science there has always been this sense that if you get the science correct, your job is done,” Dr. Wong explains. “But that's not going to help in this social media landscape where people are pushing misinformation and using every tool at their disposal, actually, for shock value.”
Indeed, the popular hunger for a better understanding of beauty products in some ways invites misinformation. Bad advice is rampant across social media and online forums. For many people, Dr. Wong is their go-to expert (whether they know her in person, online, or parasocially) to deconstruct these myths. “A lot of the time I'll get tagged in reels or people will send me reels with misinformation,” she says.
Even just a few years ago, Dr. Wong would have been alone in correcting this information. Now? “These days, half the time when I go to it, there's already someone correcting the reel in the credits. It’s so nice to see, compared to, I don't know, five years ago, when I felt very alone.”
The good news is that there are more and more science communicators across social media. Rather than see them as competition, Dr. Wong wants to help them succeed. It’s part of why she started Beauty Scicomm along with beauty scientist Jen Novakovich. Of course, communicating beauty science effectively is the goal, but they also want to build up other creators. “We want to create a bit of a community so we can help other science communicators on beauty get started and get established more easily,” she explains.
Really, the key to Dr. Wong’s success, and the reason so many people go to her with their beauty science questions, is that she’s asking smart questions and providing answers in a way that’s never condescending. Beauty science is hard, with a lot of structural barriers that make it difficult to discuss authoritatively. But Dr. Wong has overcome these challenges and built a successful business around science communication, all while inspiring a new generation to go to school and become beauty scientists themselves.
