The Jar, gasp.
Time and time again, you always hear beauty bloggers bash wide-mouth jars because they are “just extremely unsanitary.” So I’ll cut to the chase, I still fully support using wide-mouthed jars. If there’s a great product, this shouldn’t stop you from purchasing it and taking advantage of all of the benefits it has to offer. But why do people think that jars are basically the spawn of the devil? Let’s walk through the arguments and see why!
But first, why should you believe anything that I am saying? Well, before my doctoral studies, I was a microbiologist studying how the regulation of essential genes can sensitize bacteria to various antibiotics. My PhD is on the interaction of animals with their resident bacteria and how their respective physiologies are altered. I certainly will not claim to know everything in the world of bacteria (because literally no one does), but I know enough to justify various claims.
A plate with a lawn of bacteria (E. coli)
The biggest complaint people have is the hygiene: you add bacteria in each time you are touching the product within the jar. One of the first experiments we did in my undergraduate introductory biology lab was to take an LB-Agar plate (a Petri dish that has nutrients that sustain the growth of many types of bacteria and fungi) and leave it exposed to various spaces in your apartment for 10 minutes. After the 10-minute exposure, you close up the plate and let the incidental microbes grow up. A couple days later, you get some gnarly looking plates or some plates that have just one single colony (a cluster of cells that begin from just one bacterium or fungal cell). Side note: it was really fun to see how dirty your neighbor was. That well-groomed guy with the perfectly pressed shirts? Yeah, turns out his apartment is a pig sty swarming with microscopic bugs. Yikes.
But why am I telling you about this? Well, first of all, these media plates are designed to grow bacteria and fungi. They are the perfect breeding ground for them. Are your beauty products? It’s hard to say. Most of them have some type of preservative within them for this very reason. But also, they don’t provide the easiest source of energy for the microbes: simple sugars and simple amino acids. Microbes love to propagate as quickly as possible. Will they live on your new body butter? They’ll probably be there, but they won’t start actually actively creating more bacteria nearly as quickly as you think. It’ll be hard for them to get the requisite nutrients to get started.
Secondly, these plates were open for 10 minutes. That is a lot of time! As long as you open up your jar, get what you need, close it up, you will be in the clear. True, by the end of the jar, you will have cumulatively opened it for longer than 10 minutes… But you’ll also be done with the product! So it doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does because you’re just going to toss it in the trash (or if you’re smart about recycling for rewards, you’ll return it to store!).
Thirdly, in order for the bacteria to actually grow on any type of nutrients, it needs to make contact with the substrate that offers the food. In the lab, if you don’t successfully touch your bacterial cells to the plate, it won’t make the colony you need it to. Similarly, if you are not touching the product with bacteria, the bacteria will have no chance to make it into the product. This brings me to my technique when I actually retrieve the product from the jar: I dip, not scoop. What exactly do I mean by this? Well, I put just the tip of my finger onto the top of the product without submerging it. This gets the product stuck to your finger without contaminating the residual product. The residual product only touched the product that got onto your finger. In other words, no actual finger to product contamination because you are buffered by the product in between. Of course, I also clean my fingers beforehand as well to further prevent the spread of things.
Finally, do we really need to worry about having bacteria within our products? Maybe, maybe not. The jury is still out as to which bacteria are bad, neutral, or good for our immune systems. Until we get a better sense of that, it is hard for us to actually conclude anything. We also do not know which of these bacteria are floating around in our bedroom or bathroom, where we actually use these products. And are bacteria really all that bad? That depends on who you ask. I mean, there are companies that are focused on your microbiome and its importance for your skin (and gut health!). So do we really need to be that hypersensitive and defensive about bacteria? Probably not. But for those of you who have your doubts, I hope this soothes you a bit more!
Thanks for reading!
Spencer
And for those wondering, the jar I am currently using is from ATEM. It feels super luxe and it has a peptide inhibitor in it that acts almost like Botox (but not nearly as permanently). It’s been helping me with some fine lines on my face.