Avocado Experiment

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Today I ran an experiment nobody asked for: boiling an unripe avocado to see if it would become edible. It tasted very bad, and while it might be edible, I wouldn’t recommend this.

I talked to ChatGPT a bit and decided to turn it into a face mask. I’ve never done this before. I was pretty surprised to hear that the skin can ‘absorb’ fatty acids and Vitamin E: if the skin can really absorb what sits on it (outside specialized medical contexts), wouldn’t doing e.g. mud runs be dangerous? But apparently the skin absorbs ‘small, fat-soluble molecules’ and not ‘big or water-soluble molecules’.

Apparently there’s an entire science of the delightfully named ‘percutaneous absorption’. From the avocado, Vitamin E/a few fatty acids make it past the ‘stratum corneum’ (outermost layer) into the epidermis, but very little (perhaps just a trace amount of oleic acid) makes it to the dermis, let alone the bloodstream.

The science of transdermal absorption (absorption all the way to the bloodstream) seems pretty interesting, too, and underlies e.g. nerve agents.