zlacker

The paper cites endocrine disruption, but that seems like the least of your worries.

Dyes have electron delocalization. That's why they're optically active. Those bonds will gladly participate in chemical reactions within your body. (One of the cited chemicals was a biphenyl, and looked particularly nasty.)

Chemical straightener is even worse. They're intended to break disulfide bonds, which are of critical importance in biochemical structure.

This stuff could percolate to your DNA and introduce deleterious changes.

replies(2): >>except+X >>dredmo+rv

>>echelo+(OP)
"Dyes have electron delocalization. That's why they're optically active."

What do you mean by that?

replies(1): >>mchem+g9

>>except+X
A flawed model to understand this would be to picture a hexagon with nodes on the vertices. Then, consider a hexagon with one main node in the centre.

When electrons are tightly bound into nodes in and between the vertices, they are energetically ‘stable’. They, therefore, do not like change.

When electrons are shared equally between all nodes and are mobile, they could be considered to be ‘more active’. As the electrons are not tightly bound, it is ‘all to play for’ and some change in state may be accommodated.

The optical activity described occurs because the equally shared, ‘central node’ electrons are ‘free-er’ and have the flexibility to accept unusual states. This is because in the multi-node model, the electrons may be considered tightly bound to each node and so any the effect of any change in the state of a given electron is highly concentrated and local.

In the shared electron central node model the electrons are ‘more mobile’ and so any change in state has a distributed and shared effect across all electrons, rather than only those in a given node of the multi modal model.

To emit light, an electron must absorb enough energy to reach ‘the next level’. In the multi nodal model, the next level is extremely far away and may require so much energy that the molecule will disintegrate rather than emit light.

In the equally shared central node model, the next level is ‘accessible’ in that, whilst unstable, the mobile bulk of electrons in the molecule can accommodate the change and radiate the excess away.

The exact colour of light is determined by the energy required to reach the next level, in most cases. This is a consequence of the delocalisation of electrons in dyes, which may be considered as following the shared central node model. A further consequence is increased reactivity.

This explanation should be considered poor and ignores a lot of nuance and theory (whilst relying on a hazy memory). Likewise, it neglects to explain intriguing phenomena such as the anion-pi interaction. In any case, I hope it is not ‘too wrong’ and helps!

>>echelo+(OP)
OT: hijacking to reply to a past comment: <>>36147435 >

You might find my work based on the HN front page of interest: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/110437783957361794>. Note that this is a subset of total HN activity, though a significant subset.

There's also Whaly.io's retrospectives based on the HN API:

<https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>

<https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...>

replies(1): >>echelo+541

>>dredmo+rv
This is a fantastic way to respond to an old comment.

Really interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing this!

I must be too active on HN when my username is showing up in these lists.

replies(1): >>dredmo+w91

>>echelo+541
One makes do as one must. Desire paths and all that jazz.

I've been having fun going through the data, and yes, there are some interesting bits that turn up. Quite a few unexpected. Validating the "flamewar detector" wasn't on my bingo card, but I've largely done that.

I'm also ... far too well represented in the data....

replies(1): >>echelo+gg1

>>dredmo+w91
> Validating the "flamewar detector" wasn't on my bingo card, but I've largely done that.

> there are some interesting bits that turn up.