If you’re no stranger to the kind of breakouts that make you want to put a paper bag over your head and cry, well, chin up—but step away from the benzoyl peroxide. Because they are formulated to penetrate deep into the skin, traditional acne products are extremely harsh and can contain some of the more…
If you’re no stranger to the kind of breakouts that make you want to put a paper bag over your head and cry, well, chin up—but step away from the benzoyl peroxide. Because they are formulated to penetrate deep into the skin, traditional acne products are extremely harsh and can contain some of the more unhealthy chemicals used in personal care products. BP is the most popular over-the-counter spot remedy in the United States, but that doesn’t mean we should be using it. Studies have shown it to be free-radical-generating (that’s bad—free radicals age the skin), and it has caused tumors in mice—to say nothing of its skin-peeling harshness.
But take heart. Here are 10 completely nontoxic ways to clean up your skin from the outside in, and the inside out.
The comedy world lost two of its great lights decades apart. John Candy in 1994, and Catherine O’Hara on January 30, 2026. But O’Hara left something behind from that first loss: a nine-minute eulogy that remains one of the most moving tributes one friend has ever paid another.
She opened the beautiful eulogy by summarizing all of the ways he “enriched” other people’s worlds, including so many small acts of kindness.
“I know you all have a story,” she says in the clip. “You asked him for his autograph, and he stopped to ask you about you. You auditioned for Second City, and John watched you smiling, laughing. And though you didn’t get the job, you did get to walk away thinking, ‘What do they know? John Candy thinks I’m funny.’ You walked behind John to communion. You carried his bags up to his hotel room, and he said, ‘Hey, that’s too heavy. Let me get that for you.’ And then he tipped you. Or was that a day’s pay?…you caught a John Candy scene on TV one night, right when you needed to laugh more than anything in the world.”
Meeting John Candy
O’Hara also shares her own story of meeting Candy in 1974, when he was director of the Second City touring company.
“When I joined him in the main cast, he drove us all the way to Chicago to play their Second City stage,” O’Hara recalls. “And I had a crush on him, of course, but he was deeply in love with [his wife, Rosemary]. So I got to be his friend, and I closed the Chicago bars with him, just to be with him. We did SCTV together. When we all tried to come up with opening credits that would somehow tell the audience exactly what we were trying with the show to say about TV, it was John who said, ‘Why don’t we just throw a bunch of TVs off a building?’”
The whole eulogy is filled with lovely details, as O’Hara reflects on Candy’s graciousness, his collaborative spirit, and the overall sparkle of his comedy.
“His movies are a safe haven for those of us who get overwhelmed by the sadness and troubles of this world,” she says. “As if he knew he’d be leaving us soon, John left us a library of fun to remember him by.”
And she ends with a moving note to illustrate their closeness: “God bless, dear John, our patron saint of laughter. God bless and keep his soul. I will miss him. But I hope and pray to leave this world too some day and to have a place near God—as near as any other soul, with the exception of John Candy.”
The Candy legacy
After the eulogy video resurfaced on Reddit, dozens of fans shared their emotions.
“I was eight years old when he passed, and to this day no celebrity death has ever hit me harder,” one user wrote. “How could such a bright light be gone so early? She’s right, his films are a safe haven for the soft-hearted. RIP.” Another added, “John Candy died over 30 years ago, but it still stings like it was yesterday. He left such an incredible and rare cultural mark.”
Candy was also the subject of the 2025 Amazon Prime documentary John Candy: I Like Me, directed by Colin Hanks and produced by Ryan Reynolds, in which O’Hara herself appears alongside other friends and collaborators. Conan O’Brien has talked frequently about how much he loved the SCTV star; he once talked to Howard Stern about his impactful meeting with Candy back in 1984, when O’Brien was a 21-year-old student at Harvard University (and president of the Harvard Lampoon).
“We ended up hanging out,” O’Brien recalled, “and what I remember most clearly is that he was everything I wanted him to be. He was John Candy.”
This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.
Studies have found small amounts of toxic heavy metals and other potentially harmful substances in some menstrual pads and tampons. – Photo credit: zoranm/E+ via Getty Images
Unfortunately, studies have shown that many personal care products, including shampoo, lotion, nail polish and menstrual products, contain hazardous chemicals. Items used in or near the vagina are of particular concern because they are in contact with vaginal mucous membranes – the moist tissue lining the inside of the vagina that secretes mucus. These tissues can absorb some chemicals very efficiently.
People use menstrual products 24 hours a day for multiple days monthly, over the course of many years. Tampons, which are used internally, are surrounded by the permeable vaginal mucous membrane for up to eight hours at a time.
I am an environmental epidemiologist, and I study chemical exposure, its sources and its health effects. As a person who menstruates, I also must make my own decisions around menstrual products and manage the challenge of finding accurate information about women’s health risks, which receive less research attentionand funding than men’s health.
In 2024, I co-authored the first paper that detected metals in tampons, including toxic metals like lead and arsenic. My colleagues and I also wrote a review paper that surveyed the scientific literature and found about two dozen studies measuring chemicals in menstrual products.
The various chemicals that these studies detected were typically at concentrations low enough to make their health impact unclear. However, they included chemicals known to disrupt the endocrine system, which makes and controls hormones that are essential for bodies to function.
How contaminants get into menstrual products
The first modern tampon in the U.S. was patented in 1931. Nearly a century later, tampons still are made primarily from cotton, rayon or a blend of the two.
Research suggests that these chemicals are present in a large proportion of menstrual products – we found lead present in all 30 tampons we tested. What we don’t yet know is if these chemicals can get into people’s bodies in a high enough concentration to cause health effects in either the reproductive system or elsewhere in the body.
Limited federal regulations
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates tampons, menstrual cups and scented menstrual pads as Class II medical devices, which carry moderate to medium risk. Unscented menstrual pads are Class I medical devices, which are considered low-risk. These categories are based on the risk the device may present to a consumer who uses it in the intended way.
FDA guidance for Class II devices offers only a few general guidelines with respect to chemicals. For menstrual tampons and pads, it recommends – but does not require – that products should not contain two specific dioxin products or “any pesticide and herbicide residues.” Dioxins are a chemical by-product of the bleaching process to whiten cotton, and they are associated with cancer and endocrine disruption. Using non-chlorine bleaching methods can reduce dioxin formation.
The most stringent regulation of tampons in the U.S. occurred after an illness called toxic shock syndrome became a public concern in the 1970s and 1980s. Menstrual toxic shock syndrome occurs when the bacteria Staphlococcus aureus grows in the vagina on inserted menstrual products and releases a toxin called TSST-1. This substance can be absorbed through the vaginal mucosa and cause a variety of symptoms, including fever, high blood pressure, shock and even death.
During this epidemic, in which at least 52 cases were recorded and seven people died over a period of eight months, tampons were associated with the syndrome – especially a highly absorbent tampon called Rely, which was pulled from the market.
In response, the FDA created a task force that recommended standardizing the tampon absorbencies and advised consumers to use the lowest absorbency for their flow. This is why tampons in the U.S. now come in a range of absorbencies, from light through regular to super and ultra, so that users can choose the level they need while minimizing risk of toxic shock.
Living in a ‘soup of chemicals’
Just because a chemical is present in a menstrual product doesn’t mean it can get into the body. However, chemicals like lead and arsenic are known threats to human health. So it’s important to study whether harmful chemicals present in menstrual products could contribute to health problems.
Nonetheless, science has shown that chemical exposure from at least one menstrual product – vaginal douches – does affect health. Vaginal douching is the process of washing or cleaning the inside of the vagina with water or other fluids.
Scientists are working now to determine what concentrations of metals and other chemicals can leach out of tampons and other menstrual products. One 2025 study estimated that volatile organic compounds, a group of chemicals that vaporize quickly, can be absorbed through the vaginal mucosa. Volatile organic compounds may be added to menstrual products as part of fragrances, adhesives or other product components.
My team and I are now shifting our focus to the relationship between menstrual product use, various chemicals, and menstrual pain and bleeding severity. We want to see whether some chemicals will be elevated in menstrual blood, whether these chemical levels are higher in people who use tampons, and whether the chemicals are associated with greater menstrual pain and bleeding.
California also enacted a law in October 2025 that requires manufacturers of disposable tampons and pads to measure concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, lead and zinc in their products, and to share those measurements with the state, which can publish them. More information like this will help support informed choices for millions of consumers who rely on menstrual products every month.
Understanding one another can be hard. There is a big difference between someone snapping at you out of contempt, and calling you out for a mistake because they believe in you and know you can do better. One of these cases calls for anger, but the other for humility or even embarrassment. Or maybe they are only snapping because they’re “hangry” – they might just need a Snickers bar.
And that’s just with people we know. What about strangers, people across the political divide, or even those with very different backgrounds and cultures than your own?
My field, philosophy, offers a tried-and-true answer to what we need to do in order to understand people and texts from very different backgrounds and cultural assumptions than our own. We need to be charitable.
Charity in this sense isn’t a matter of giving money to those who need it more. Instead, it’s seeing others in a favorable light – of seeing the best in them. In my work, I think of this as seeing other people as protagonists: characters who “do their best” with the predicament in which they find themselves. Interpreting someone charitably doesn’t require agreeing with them. But it does require doing our best to find merit in their point of view.
Of course, people and ideas don’t have unlimited merit. We can err by failing to see the merit of someone’s point of view – or we can err by finding merit that isn’t really there.
But the idea of charity is that it’s worse to make the first kind of error because it prevents us from getting along and learning from one another. By seeing the best in someone else and in their ideas, we can learn productively from engaging with them. Protagonists are people we can learn from and cooperate with.
Taking them seriously
It doesn’t take a genius to observe that we are all better at seeing the best in the people we agree with – and worse with those across the political divide. Political discussions on social media are often dominated by competing attributions of more and more insidious motives to people on the other side. We see them not as protagonists, but as antagonists.
By seeing the worst in someone else’s ideas, we let ourselves off easy. We dismiss them when instead we need to be taking them seriously.
So why, if charity requires seeing the best in others, are we so often tempted to see the worst in them?
A better understanding of charity provides the answer. Seeing the best and the worst in others are not opposite ways of interpreting someone, but simply two sides of the same coin. Here’s why:
Part of charity is sifting out the signal from the noise. – Photo credit: Maskot/Getty Images
Interpretation trade-offs
Interpreting someone isn’t all about figuring out their motives. Sometimes it’s about sorting out what is signal and what is noise. If I snap at you, you could spend a lot of time fixating over whether to be angry or embarrassed. But sometimes the right move is just to pass me a Snickers bar and move on. Our moods and actions are influenced by hunger, hormones, alcohol and lack of sleep, just to name a few. Overinterpreting a snap after I missed breakfast treats as signal what is really just noise.
Overlooking a thing or two when I am hangry can be the best way to see the best in me. When you interpret my snap as merely the result of missing a meal, you don’t really see it as coming from me, the protagonist; but as the result of my predicament. You will judge me, not by whether I am hangry, but by how I overcome that. Your interpretation sees me in a more positive light, by taking away some of my agency.
By “agency,” I mean the extent to which someone gets credit for what they do. You have greater agency over something that you do on purpose, and less if was a foreseen but accepted side effect of your plan. You have less agency if it was an accident, but more if the accident was negligent; less agency if you just snapped because you’re hangry, but more if you know you get hangry and chose to skip lunch anyway.
A perfect agent wouldn’t be affected by hormones and hunger. They would simply make rational choices that advance their goals. But humans aren’t like that. We are imperfectly embodied agents, at best. So interpreting one another well sometimes requires seeing the good in one another, at the cost of agency. In other words, it has to balance agency against the good, as I have argued in my recent work.
But you can’t find the best in someone by just ignoring more and more until all the bad things are trimmed away and only something good is left. Your interpretation has to fit with the facts of what they do and say.
And sometimes the trade-offs between agency and the good go the other way – we interpret each other in ways that attribute more agency but less good. If passing me a Snickers bar seems to calm me down, you might try it again the next time I snap. But one day you realize that you have started carrying extra Snickers bars everywhere you go in case you run into me, and a different interpretation presents itself: Maybe instead of being a decent but mood-challenged friend, I have just been using you for your candy bars.
This creates tipping points for charitable interpretation. When we cross the tipping point, you switch from seeing someone as an imperfectly embodied protagonist to seeing them as an antagonist.
Charity without a cost
All of this is a way of arguing that it is sometimes right to see the worst in others. Sometimes other people really are the worst, and understanding them requires understanding their agency, not what is good about them. Protagonists and antagonists are just two sides of the same coin: The very same interpretive process can lead us in either direction.
Unfortunately, this means there is no simple test for when you are doing well enough at seeing the best in others. In particular, there is no test that we can agree about across our political differences. Interpreting someone charitably requires looking hard enough for good in them, but part of what we disagree with one another about is precisely what is good. So we are bound to disagree with one another about who is being sufficiently charitable.
But as a personal aspiration, a little more charity can go a long way. We can be generous not just with money, but in how we interpret others. But unlike giving money away, we don’t lose anything when we try harder to see the best in someone else.
