Oil of Olay contains aborted fetuses.

[pkbites]

A friend of my wife really believes this. A search was unsuccessful.
I'd like some evidence that it's an urban legand.

[Duckster]

Reverse the logic.

Read the ingredients yourself:

"Water, Cetyl Palmitate, Glycerin, Mineral Oil, Cetyl Alcohol, Glycerin Hydroxysterate, Stearic Acid, Steareath-100, Dimethicone, Octyldodecyl Myristate, Potassium Hyroxide, Dmdm Hydantoin, Idodopropynyl Butylcarbamate, Tetrasodium, Edta, Acrylates/C10-20 Alkyl Acrylate Crosspolymer, Carbomer."

[Princhester]

Oh sure, Duckster: like they're really going to admit it :)

[Valgard]

Thanks Duckster, I was trying to find that online.

On its face the story is irrational and implausible. I checked snopes (nothing), googled for various combinations of "Oil of Olay" and "dead/aborted/fetus/es" and got absolutely zilch. If P&G is putting ground up dead kids in their moisturizer they've managed to keep it amazingly quiet.

Oh, and your wife's friend may want to narrow down the product a bit, the Oil Of Olay division of P&G lists about a jillion different items on their website (none of which contain the word "Dead Fetus" but they tend more towards "Facial Moisturizing Cream").

Ask for some evidence to support the story. Facts can be checked and I'd say it's up to the person spreading the rumor to back it up. Proving a negative on the other hand is a wee bit difficult.

[Toaster]

What's so bad about rubbing your face with masses of biological cells? I rub a lot more dead animals into my face at any time, all those poor bacteria...

Maybe find how much is sold daily/yearly and find out how many supposed aborted fetuses of whatever species she thinks is in each bottle, and determine how many aborted fetuses would be necessary then to collect every day or something.

Or find out how she came to the conclusion and determine that it is inaccurate on purpose, like Weekly World News.

[elfbabe]

Okay, let's think rationally about this here: where would Oil of Olay GET aborted fetuses? Considering the amount of product they sell, they'd need a lot of fetus, even if they only used a little bit of fetus in the mixture. Regardless of what may be thought about people who work at abortion clinics, I'm sure that the vast majority of them would be horrified by the idea of aborted fetuses going into beauty products. So they'd need to find some way to get a lot of aborted fetuses using only a very few unscrupulous people who could be counted on, for some reason, to never, EVER betray them.

Next, how would Oil of Olay incorporate said fetuses into their products? Assuming the unscrupulous clinic workers don't also do the processing that takes it from fetus to cosmetic ingredient, which wouldn't be too likely -- they'd be working in very different conditions, so uniformity of product would be difficult to assure -- Oil of Olay would need to hire some workers to do that processing for them. They'd need to be workers that wouldn't ask any questions or make any comments about the weird stuff they were processing.

Finally, why would anybody WANT to put aborted fetuses in Oil of Olay? From a purely financial standpoint, the benefits from secret fetus ingredients making Oil of Olay somehow "better" would need to drastically outweigh the costs of procuring said fetuses, (people don't say quiet about this sort of thing for nothing, you know) AND the near-certainty of the company going out of business entirely if it were ever found out. It just doesn't make any SENSE.

[manhattan]

Some skin care products do use human placental extract as an ingredient, including Nu Skin, Shiseido and Mila (http://www.supplycurve.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.exe/online-store/scstore/mila/facts.html?E+scstore). To my knowledge, all of them allege to get their material from non-abortion sources. Can't say myself whether they're telling the truth, or whether the stuff works. But there you go. Right category, wrong product, maybe wrong source.

[Duckster]

Originally posted by Princhester
Oh sure, Duckster: like they're really going to admit it :)

<hijack=slight>
Does David Jones still sell sorbolene cream? It beats oil of ulay/olay any day.
</hijack>

[pkbites]

It all started when my wife burned herself cooking dinner (some grease splatered and hit her) and she put some OOO on it to sooth the pain. Days later her friend said to me she was shocked that I'd allow OOO in my house seeing as it promotes abortion by using the fetuses from them. I laughed in her face (rude, yes, but it just sounds so stupid). She insists that she heard this on television, but doesn't remember where (she's a religous fanatic, so probably some reliable source like the 700 Club News:rolleyes: )
She brought it up again tonight. She's a nice woman, but man, she has some goofy beliefs. I just would love to have something to burst her bubble on this nonsense.

[Duckster]

Originally posted by pkbites
She insists that she heard this on television, but doesn't remember where (she's a religous fanatic, so probably some reliable source like the 700 Club News:rolleyes: )

Well, didn't Pat Robertson suggest the U.S. State Department headquarters ought to be blown up with a nuclear device?

[Nanoda]

Bleh. I thought that whole placenta/foreskin/whatever technology was going to create artificial skin for burn victims. I think I'll prefer being wrinkly.

[Moo the Magic Cow]

I don't think this is the kind of debate you can win with logic and reason. Try out some utter nonsense. Cite the Weekly World News.

[Princhester]

I agree with Moo. Use the DocCathode technique. Just say you read that the OOO/baby fetus allegation was a false rumour being spread by in order to portray the Christian West as heartless child killing fiends.

Let [i]her prove otherwise.

[thatDDperson]

Go to About.com and find the Urban Legends forum.

If anybody has heard, they have.

They'll help you debunk it to the point that she'll run screaming into the night.

Which would be cool.

[Larry Mudd]

It sounds like a variant of a less-specific urban legend that was fairly flush in the mid-eighties:

DON'T BUY ANY SKIN-CARE PRODUCTS THAT CONTAIN COLLAGEN!
COLLAGEN IS HARVESTED FROM ABORTED BABIES!

I was surprised to see that Snopes has no mention of that one-- it was ridiculously common.

Here's a fairly recent example in the wild (http://northernlife.senet.com.au/4may2000.htm):101 USES FOR A DEAD (OR ALIVE) BABY by Olga Fairfax, P.H D, U.S.A.

When I saw the first ad on TV advertising collagen-enriched cosmetics 1 was speechless. Collagen is the gelatinous substance found in connective tissue, bone, and cartilage. [...] Since there are 1.5 million abortions every year, there is an abundant source of fetuses for commercial use. There is a triple profit to be had. The first is from the abortion (estimated at a half billion dollars a year by Fortune magazine,) the second profit comes from the sale of aborted babies' bodies. The third profit is from unsuspecting customers buying cosmetics. Babies' bodies are sold by the bag, $25 a batch, or by the pound.

[Nanoda]

How much is a "bag", and what's a "batch"? I don't wanna get ripped off here...

[Wyatt]

Now, suddenly, I'm thinking of the movie "Fight Club" with Their secret ingredient for skin creams...

[Wendell Wagner]

Duckster writes:

> Well, didn't Pat Robertson suggest the U.S. State Department
> headquarters ought to be blown up with a nuclear device?

And what a complete waste that would have been. Why didn't he suggest chopping up State Department employees and putting them into skin cream? Foggy Bottom Cream - It cleanses and softens your skin, and it rids the world of subversive bureaucrats.

[NutWrench]

I remember Proctor and Gamble having to deal with accusations that their old company logo (moon and stars) was satanic.

http://spaceport666.tripod.com/666business.html

[Ponster]

I worked for P&G for 2 years as lead tester for their Facial Moisturizing Cream (UK version). My job was to make sure that the test products conformed to the proper safty laws and that we had permission to put in whatever we wanted to try out (shark oil was always a favourite).

I'm 100% sure that we didn't use any aborted fetuses in any of the P&G products tested in our labs or on the general public (everything is tested in Newcastle for the Brits online).

The actual idea that we were doing this and getting away with it seems almost funny :)

[Revtim]

No doubt if this one spreads they'll have to put a disclaimer on the web site like P&G had to do. It's too bad people believe this crap.

[lieu]

No no no no...

It's Oil of Oleg that's made from aborted foetuses!





(to use a misspelling that seems strangely pervasive here).

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Simple: tell her that they actually harvest the collagen from the captured aliens in Area 54, a much cheaper source of collagen than aborted babies.

Daniel

[voguevixen]

tsk, tsk you guys.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_333.html

[Dogface]

MOOOOOOO!
OINK!

Yes, it is on-topic. Want collagen?

MOOOOOOO!
OINK!

That's where collagen comes from these days.
Add some fruit flavor, and you've got Jello!

[Chefguy]

Mmmmm....fetal facecream.....

[Smeghead]

Come on. Everyone knows that dead babies go to make baby oil.

[alice_in_wonderland]

Well of course they use aborted fetuses.

Aborted fetuses being about 100X easier to obtain than say, plant or animal collagen.

:rolleyes:

[LateComer]

I remember a friend trying to spread this to me in the 80's, that shampoo among other things was made from aborted fetuses. He was quite a nutty "Christian." He printed this information from a bulletin board on his Commodore 64. I think that this is part of a larger "Abortion Industry coerces women into aborting babies to fuel their larger money interest" myth. I also got the feeling that it was also part of the "Jewish" conspiracy myth.

[heresiarch]

Originally posted by Dogface
MOOOOOOO! OINK!

That's where collagen comes from these days.
Add some fruit flavor, and you've got Jello! There's always room for boiled-hooves-and-artificial-flavoring! :D

[Cervaise]

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ground up dead baby on your face.

pkbites: I don't think you should argue with this woman. She's never going to get off the Stupid Bus and live in Saneworld. Instead, whenever she mentions one of these loony ideas, just pat her hand, smile gently, and say, "Okay, yes, sure." Then pretend she never mentioned it.

[gcarroll]

Originally posted by pkbites
... She insists that she heard this on television, but doesn't remember where (she's a religous fanatic, so probably some reliable source like the 700 Club News:rolleyes: )
She brought it up again tonight. She's a nice woman, but man, she has some goofy beliefs. I just would love to have something to burst her bubble on this nonsense.

Point out she should be VERY sure of her facts before saying something damaging about someone. "False Witness" is not a laughing matter. Ask how she would feel if someone gossiped around that she fertilized her garden with dead babies because they were pretty sure they heard it somewhere...