Free Critical Thinking About Drinkable Sunscreen

Psychology

Osmosis Skincare is promoting a drinkable product that it claims would serve to act as sunscreen owing to ‘standing waves’ set up by water molecules just below the skin. The product, ‘UV Neutralizer Harmonized Water’ and its supporting claims by Osmosis Skincare require critical thought to be refuted.
1. Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. The claim by Osmosis Skincare is extraordinary. If it were to be true, Osmosis’ product would stand a chance to win the Nobel Prize. However, Osmosis Skincare does not provide comprehensive proof for its product. The evidence put forward is merely a study that is not peer reviewed. Therefore, the claim falls short in the requirements of extraordinary evidence.
2. Falsifiability. Osmosis Skincare’s claim is not falsifiable. If its claim were to be true, there would be instances and occasions when the product would be purported to fail. Osmosis Skincare does not specify such occasions. It also covers up instances of failure of its product by specifying that the product would have varying protective times for different people. It does not mention any occasion when its product might fail.
3. Occam’s Razor. Logically speaking, it is unviable for standing waves of water to sustain themselves. If such waves were to indeed exist, the skin would only heat up as a result and the water would evaporate. Therefore, the claim of the product to exploit standing waves of water is implausible.
4. Replicability. Osmosis Skincare has touted an experiment conducted to prove the effectiveness of its product. However, the experiment has not been replicated elsewhere, nor has the experiment been published in a peer reviewed journal. No control group has been used in the experiment, and Osmosis Skincare has not established that the subjects of the experiment were randomly selected.
5. Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses. Osmosis Skincare has not ruled out any alternate hypotheses that might have resulted in a lack of sunburn amongst the participants of the experiment. For instance, the group selected may have had special genetic characteristics in common that led to absence of sunburns. It is also possible that the ultraviolet rays on the day of the experiment were at the lower end of the harmful spectrum. Such hypotheses need to be ruled out for the claim of Osmosis Skincare to be valid.
6. Correlation vs. Causation. The study carried out by Osmosis Skincare demonstrates, at best, that a set of participants did not suffer from sunburns for some time after ingesting the drinkable sunscreen. However, the aspect of causation is not established without doubt as there was no control group. It is likely that if there were a group of people who did not ingest the drinkable sunscreen and were told to sunbathe just like those who did ingest the potion, it might have emerged that both groups were equally unaffected by the sun on that particular day. At best, the drinkable sunscreen contents might correlate to lack of sunburn due to the experiment. In effect, the available proof that the drinkable sunscreen causes the skin to be safe from sunburns is insufficient.

Conclusion

Based on the reasons mentioned above, the claim of Osmosis Skincare for having developed a product that acts as an ingestible sunscreen should be deemed false.