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needs.”
    This is an organization at the edges of reason, but it is operating in countless schools. When I wrote about Brain Gym in my U.K. newspaper column in 2005, saying that “exercise breaks good, pseudoscientific nonsense laughable,” while many teachers erupted with delight, many were outraged and “disgusted” by what they decided was an attack on exercises that they experienced as helpful. One—an assistant head teacher no less—demanded: “From what I can gather you have visited no classrooms, interviewed no teachers nor questioned any children, let alone had a conversation with any of a number of specialists in this field?” Do I need to visit a classroom to find out if there is water in processed food? No. If I meet a “specialist” who tells me that a child can massage both carotid arteries through the rib cage (without scissors), what will I say to him? If I meet a teacher who thinks that touching your fingers together will connect the electrical circuit of the body, where do we go from there?
    I’d like to imagine that teachers might have the common sense to spot this nonsense and stop it in its tracks. Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of e-mails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers:
    I’d like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that “Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.” What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out of my arsehole instead?
“Anton,” 2006
     
    Thank you, Anton.

The Progenium XY Complex
     
    I have great respect for the manufacturers of cosmetics. They are at the other end of the spectrum from the detox industry: this is a tightly regulated industry, with big money to be made from nonsense, and so we find large, well-organized teams from international biotech firms generating elegant, distracting, suggestive, but utterly defensible pseudoscience. After the childishness of Brain Gym, we can now raise our game.
    Before we start, it’s important to understand how cosmetics—specifically moisturizing creams—actually work, because there should be no mystery here. First, you want your expensive cream to hydrate your skin. They all do that, and Vaseline does the job very well; in fact, much of the important early cosmetics research was about preserving the moisturizing properties of Vaseline, while avoiding its greasiness, and this technical mountain was scaled several decades ago. A thirteen-ounce tub at about five dollars from your local drugstore will do the job excellently.
    If you really want to, you can replicate this by making your own moisturizer at home; you’re aiming for a mix of water and oil, but one that’s “emulsified,” which is to say, nicely mixed up. When I was involved in hippie street theater—and I’m being entirely serious here—we made moisturizer from equal parts of olive oil, coconut oil, honey, and rose water (tap water is fine too). Beeswax is better than honey as an emulsifier, and you can modify the cream’s consistency for yourself: more beeswax will make it firmer, more oil will make it softer, and more water makes it sort of fluffier but increases the risk of the ingredients separating out. Get all your ingredients lightly heated, but separately, stir the oil into the wax, beating all the time, and then stir in the water. Stick it in a jar, and keep for three months in the fridge.
    The creams in your local pharmacy seem to go way beyond this. They are filled with magic ingredients: Regenium XY technology, Nutrileum complex, RoC Retinol Correxion, VitaNiacin, Covabeads, ATP Stimuline, and Tenseur Peptidique Végétal. Surely you could never replicate that in your kitchen, or with creams that cost as much by the gallon as these ones cost for a squirt of the tiny tube? What are these magic ingredients? And what do they do?
    There are basically three