Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Citizen Scientists Right Under Our Makeup Brushes

makeup, skincare, citizen science, national science foundation, NSF, museums, maria mortati
Last week, I was dinking around online looking for user-generated content on women's skin care products. Yes, I use them. I wanted to know what's working and what's b.s.
The biggest discovery wasn't that the cosmetics industry is based on hype, but rather, there is a whole universe of women (and v. few men) who are testing products, chemicals, solutions, sharing their findings, and iterating their approach based on the shared data.
I think that if a bit more organized, these folks could make a passionate, ready-made group for citizen science, and would be thrilled to find out a way to broaden ...and validate... their reach.
Plus I'd bet they'd love to get their hands on some real information that might give them real results.
Anyone from the NSF wanna bite?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

My sister-in-law is a big time blogger and one of her blogs is a try and tell about skin and hair products. As someone with self-proclaimed problem skin, she has devoted a lot of her free time to trying out products that are affordable and widely available. Without getting too into this topic, I think these kinds of blogs are highly underrated and deserve more attention for both the content and the effort that the tester puts into their 'experiments'. Now, if you apply the same kind of thinking to what visitors say about and in museums, you've got exactly what many are advocating for - placing a higher value on visitor contributed content!