(The following article appeared in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review.)
There’s a lovely jar of night cream that’s been sitting on my dresser for a month. According to the salesperson who spent a half-hour on the phone with me extolling its virtues, the cream will dig up the gunk that’s clogging my pores, soak up excess oil, and “teach” my cells to make less of it.
Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Too bad I’m too scared to use it.
The cream, which cost me $163 for half an ounce, is made by New York City-based Bionova. The company’s website makes much of its “nano tech platform,” and explanations of its products feature incomprehensible phrases such as “restoration of the malfunctioning biological information transfer.” But details in plain English of how any of this would actually work are sketchy. And the saleswoman’s explanation was similarly cryptic. The cream, she informed me, has various “nano complexes” in an exact ratio that is customized for my age, my gender, and my face’s precise degree of oiliness–information gleaned from a number of probing questions she asked me.
How, I asked, did I know these tiny particles weren’t going to creep under my skin and wreak havoc with my body?