That was one reason I asked, although I was also talking about plasticiser breakdown etc as well. It's just a concern of mine that we relied (well, restorers relied) for a long time on acne cream only to discover the destructive properties a LOT too late to fix them. I am not persuaded that anything chemical we put on ponies or any exposure to UV is necessarily harmless in the long run and right now, with G1 being 30+ years old, we should be more looking at protecting the integrity of the plastic. We need one or two of our sciencey people to do some full scale experiments I guess...?
@Safflower, the reason there's confusion is also probably because ponypeople insist on using jargon to describe flaws. Often people just use the jargon term without any further detail. I've been here 20 years and I still don't understand half of the terms people use in the correct context. If I can't, albeit I don't restore, expecting newer collectors to come in and automatically know them is a tall order. Then information gets confused between different people reporting different things and it ends up like this.
I wish people would stop using jargon :/