Summer

Knowing if cosmetics are expired is a trick that I recently learned. I used to think that the date on the product is the time span of which the product was made and when I should stop using it. Sometimes it would be two years. My sister then taught me something I never really noticed. On all cosmetics there’s a sign resembling an open pot with a number written on it. That number is usually in months and it signifies how long the product would last after you opened it for the first time. The symbol is called the period-after-opening symbol or PAO symbol.

I learned that very few people actually know about it. This is a problem that no one cares about, but I think it’s important. For example, many people in supermarkets want to smell the shampoo, so they start opening up different bottles in order to get a whiff. That automatically means that the product would expire after let’s say a year even though it says that should last 4 years without being opened. That means whoever buys that bottle of shampoo wouldn’t know that it has been already opened and that’s unfair for the customer. I used to be guilty of doing that, but I stopped doing that the second I found out. I think everyone should, unless you’re actually willing to buy all the bottles you opened.