Whimsical Learning: Why you should let scientists put pee on your feet.

Well ok that’s a little dramatic but like hear me out there’s this skin care wonder drug called Urea that you might know about because podiatrists recommend that shit all the time.

And for good reason. Scientists who want to sound like they’re avoiding telling you to put pee on your feet call it Carbamide but we’re going to come back to that in a little bit because the only thing I know about organic chemistry is that Carbon loves going to a kinky little biology party and bonding with anything it can.

Science is a bit of an art and way back when people used to believe in something called Vitalism. That is to say, chemistry was divided very neatly into two separate camps: inorganic compounds that can be synthesized and organic ones that cannot and can only come from living things.

And then this dude in 1828, Friedrich Wöhler, was like “Shit man let me cook up some salts to make ammonium cyanate,” and instead whatever he was cooking up turned into Urea. Sorry. “Carbamide.” Where are my manners.

Anyway, this dude should have been a poet because he writes his mentor and is all “I can no longer, so to speak, hold my chemical water and must tell you that I can make urea without needing a kidney, whether of man or dog; the ammonium salt of cyanic acid is urea.”

And for that bit of wordplay, our man goes down in history books as the first person genuinely excited to have accidentally made a tinkle in his lab.

But it gets better. Urea does some weird double duty depending on how much if you put on. You know how like… you invite a few friends over and it’s a cool hang out but then it turns out MORE of your friends show up and it turns into a completely different rager experience?

Urea is that. In low concentrations if you put the magic pee on your elbows or chapped nipples or whatever it’s a boss moisturizer that works great on your chapped hands and whatnot.

But then you add a bit higher of a concentration of it in the same place and at some point the switch flips and now it’s destroying keratin. Keratin is the tough, hard stuff under nails and also that forms on the bottom of your feet after years of not moisturizing and cleaning them properly. When the concentrations get close to 40% that stuff can be used for calluses, those annoying bumps on your arms, psoriasis, and more.

But don’t worry, there’s no big science kidney making the stuff that is great for your skin. Instead scientists ake it from scratch using a process that combines ammonia with carbon dioxide under serious heat and pressure. And the ammonia itself comes from yanking nitrogen straight out of the air and marrying it to hydrogen. So the urea in your most expensive, most beautifully packaged skincare is, if anything, less connected to bodily fluids than the urea your own sweat glands produce.

So get out there and take care of your skin by putting manufactured pee on it. Your feet especially will thank you.