ABSTRACT
When phenol is dumped into river water, it is very toxic to aquatic fauna and lethal at a concentration of 1 ppm. The genuine toxicity of phenol and the almost apocalyptic descriptions of its side-effects, which can even lead to death by cardiovascular collapse, severely limited its cosmetic use until the second half of the 1990s, especially in Europe. English-language publications, for their part, state that, even so, a phenol peel is ‘one of the most frequently used techniques in the treatment of photoaging’.1
