The Sciencewashing of Everyday Life
There’s a double helix in my local Sephora. It’s roughly the size and shape of a soda can, and it is accompanied by a placard referencing patents and peptides, as if in a science fair. It’s trying to sell me a hair mask.
Online, the company responsible for this display describes itself as a “biology-first haircare brand, powered by biotech.” It practices “biomimetic hairscience,” and, thanks to “a decade of complex research into the bioscience of hair,” has patented a peptide that repairs hair “at a molecular level across multiple types of bonds including polypeptide chains and disulfide bonds.” I have no idea what any of this means. The mask costs $75.
In 2026, it is possible to cover your body in science. You can put on probiotic leggings and a patented bra, and then you can apply lipstick containing hyaluronic acids “with differentiated molecular weights” and slather your face in a “triple-lipid peptide cream” developed by self-identified “skintellectuals.” You can also eat your science, by way of “clinically-studied key herbs, adaptogens, and minerals—at amounts informed by research.” If you get thirsty, you can have water that has been chemically manipulated with extra hydrogen atoms, just in case two aren’t enough for you. Even decades-old products have been newly recast as miracles of modern chemistry: After years of selling itself purely impressionistically, via close-up shots of hot athletes dripping sweat and swilling neon liquid, Gatorade has recently begun touting itself as “Lab Tested.” As the wellness movement collides with the supercharged demands of selling products in a crowded market, science-speak seems to have invaded every crevice of the fashion, beauty, and food industries.
[Read: Eat your vegetables like an adult]
Many of the claims these products make are perfectly legitimate, if a bit goofy; others are transparently nonsense. And dubious, science-flecked marketing claims have existed about as long as marketing has. But they used to be comparatively unsophisticated, and quite literal: Cheerios contain a certain amount of fiber, and fiber is good for you, thus Cheerios are good for you and you should buy them. A skin-care product is superior to its competitors because it has more vitamin C, and vitamin C is good for your skin. These ads were informed but plainspoken, employing the simple logic of cause and effect, inputs and outputs, using words most people recognized. They talked, basically, like a family-medicine doctor.
Today’s ads, by contrast, talk like the Ph.D. kind of doctor, using polysyllabic words and alluding to things viewable only under a microscope. They seem designed not to illuminate but to obfuscate, to impart the veneer of science at such a high level that people will never really ask how, or if, it works. Almost no one is looking up a peer-reviewed study, or spelunking through the patent database, to make sure the claims on their package of goo are accurate. “People like buying products that are, quote, research backed,” Neil Lewis Jr., a behavioral scientist at Cornell, told me. “But most people, they’re not equipped to actually evaluate those claims. They don’t have the time or expertise, often, and so they sort of just look for some heuristic cue, and that’s good enough.” What science-washed products promise—more than what they actually promise on the package—is that someone else did the work for you.
For years, the trend in consumption was beautiful but useless trash. Now, Stephen Zagor, who teaches courses in food business at NYU and Columbia, told me, “science is the new it thing.” For companies, nodding to state-of-the-art technology and papering a corporate website in clip art of molecules is an indication that their product is the best, empirically. And for consumers, drinking a soda that went to grad school is a signal too—of savviness and responsibility. It’s cultural capital: If others “see us eating a food item that has been surrounded by scientific discussions, people think automatically we know what we’re talking about, when we don’t have a clue either,” Zagor said. “Science makes ignorance feel smart.”
[Read: The Trump administration’s most paralyzing blow to science]
Many companies do actually employ professionals—cosmetic chemists, food scientists. But science in the private interest doesn’t necessarily work like science in the public interest. It tends to operate on a different timescale, and to use different yardsticks. The scientists who work for corporations need to be sure that their products provide enough short-term benefit to keep people buying, while abiding by consumer regulations. They are employed to ask questions the market wants answered, ideally as quickly as possible.
The irony here, of course, is that this is happening at a time when institutional science, the kind that doesn’t come with next-day shipping, is under considerable threat. The federal government has embarked on a concerted, and largely successful, effort to undermine, discredit, and defund serious scientific research at any opportunity. Influencers and pundits have sought to cast scientists themselves as elitists and liars, in an effort that appears to be working: Nearly one in four Americans has little or no confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest. Thousands of scientific minds have, by brute force or something subtler, left the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and academia. Their absence leaves a vacuum. Some of these people worked on projects that couldn’t be sold; others worked to regulate the ones that could. Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly pessimistic, I worry that we are approaching a world in which scientists are employed not by independent institutions but only by companies—a world in which science itself is marketing copy, and little more.