So, what’s wrong with applying a product to see if it works? Just because you apply a skincare product, even for a relatively long period, doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to tell if it’s helping or hurting your skin. This is true for many reasons.
First, there is an incredible risk to skin from using (or even “just trying”) a badly-formulated product. Just because someone likes a product they personally tested doesn’t mean it’s a good product, for them or for you. They may like the feel or the look of the product, but that doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not it is beneficial for skin or harmful for skin.
When it comes to skincare, and even to one’s diet, people often “like” what isn’t good for them in the short term and, even more important, over the long term. As for skincare, it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether a product is good or bad just from applying it. The product may be packaged in a jar, which weakens the beneficial ingredients; it may contain problematic ingredients and so cause damage when used over the long term; it may contain nothing useful at all for repairing more advanced skin concerns; or it may be a daytime moisturizer that doesn’t contain sunscreen.
Think about it this way: Just because someone swears by smoking for keeping their weight down doesn’t make smoking good for you. It’s important to realize that many skincare products have positive or negative results that can be ongoing and/or that can take years to manifest. The benefit of a healthy diet doesn’t always show up immediately and the same is true for a terrible diet; it can be years before you see the resulting damage. This also holds true for badly-formulated skincare products: The harm would be ongoing and you wouldn’t know because the damage is taking place in the lower layers of skin, beyond what you can see. It can also take years before you see the damage on the surface of skin. I don’t want any of us to wait years only to find out that what we were using on our skin all along was detrimental.
It also isn’t necessary to test drive a product to know its strengths or weaknesses because the research on most ingredients has already been carried out so the information is readily available, just as it is for food or medicine. You don’t need to eat processed foods to know how unhealthy they are for you or smoke cigarettes to find out years later that was a bad choice. A vast amount of research has already been done to determine what those results will be, and the same is true for skincare ingredients.
How skincare ingredients are combined and how they work in products is well known from research in the cosmetic, medical, and biological sciences. There’s also extensive, documented medical and scientific research about how different ingredients affect skin. Our information about ingredients is based on that research, which is why our recommendations can really help you find products that work for your skin type, your skin concerns and that you will enjoy using—because they really work! Now that’s a concept all of us can agree on, right?
Can You Read an Ingredient Label?
I wish I could teach everyone how to read an ingredient label because therein lies the basic, but fundamental, information for determining the effectiveness and functionality of almost any skincare product (makeup is an entirely different matter, which we get to in Chapter 15). The ingredient list is the key to understanding whether or not a product’s claims make any sense and whether it’s problematic or beneficial for your skin. But, deciphering the ingredient list is not easy, especially if you don’t have a background in cosmetic science or cosmetic formulation.
The first and foremost complicating factor is the sheer number of ingredients available that can be included in a formulation. There are literally thousands of ingredients and thousands upon thousands of potential mixtures of those ingredients. The current International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI) comprises four huge printed volumes and an online subscription costs thousands of dollars.
Even more confounding are the chemical names of the ingredients, at times far too technical to understand. How can the average consumer ever hope to comprehend what polymethylsilsesquioxane, palmitoyl hexapeptide-12, or cetyl ricinoleate are, let alone understand what they do? Even plant extracts have names that are unpronounceable, such as Gaultheria procumbens or Simmondsia chinensis. Vitamin C is one of the many great ingredients for skin, but even that has over a dozen different forms with overly-technical names on an ingredient label, and each one has its own benefit and usefulness in a formulation.
In addition to the difficulty of untangling an ingredient label and all the claims espousing an ingredient’s or product’s benefits, there are also all the horror stories about some ingredients you encounter on the Internet and from other sources. Almost without exception, the fear-mongering you’ve read about such ingredients as parabens, silicones, mineral oil, sulfates, and so on is just plain wrong. Sometimes the statements made about these types of ingredients (and many others) are taken out of context from research, leading to irrelevant and silly conclusions, or the statements are made up out of thin air, derived or extrapolated from unrelated sources, and/or have no scientific basis.
Any ingredient can be made to sound scary by manipulating the facts. For example, water’s chemical name is Dihydrogen monoxide, which has been confused repeatedly with the dangerous carbon monoxide because the two have similar-sounding names—not to mention that as innocuous as water seems, drinking too much water within a short period of time can cause serious health problems.
To highlight how this fear-mongering works, we’ll use mineral oil as an example. There are those who want to scare you into believing that mineral oil is bad for you, but research reveals just the opposite. Not only is mineral oil natural (it begins as petroleum from the earth), but also the research makes it crystal clear that it’s one of the gentlest and safest cosmetic ingredients out there, especially for wound healing and dry skin. In some ways, it’s safer than water!
Other examples of ingredients that have been subject to fear-mongering include silicones, which are a brilliant group of ingredients that have been used in hospital burn units around the world for decades; sulfates, which are not problematic and do not cause cancer; and parabens, which are some of the safest, most non-irritating preservatives ever used in cosmetics.
The authentic scientific and balanced information is out there, but it’s been a lifelong pursuit for us to filter through the research, not something a consumer can easily pick up or find the time to figure out; even many people within the cosmetics industry have difficulty in this area, and so fall prey to misleading or completely false information. Now it’s time for us to give you the facts about skincare and about how to take the best care of your skin.
Chapter 2
Skincare Facts Everyone Needs to Know
Why You Might Not Have Your Best Skin Yet
There are many reasons you may not have the skin you want: sun damage, genetics, skin disorders, aging, hormone loss, health issues, pollution, skincare products that contain irritating ingredients, and on and on. To one degree or another, all of these factors are responsible for free-radical damage, a complex and continual process of molecular deterioration that occurs both inside and outside the body, often accompanied and/or caused by inflammation.
In addition to the free-radical damage and inflammation occurring internally in your body causing aging and disease, the same sort of progressive deterioration is occurring on and within your skin. Over time, this ongoing process creates and re-creates inflammation, which slowly decreases skin’s ability to keep itself young, healthy, even-toned, firm, and breakout-free. Inflammation can also trigger excess oil production and keep skin from looking smooth. No matter how you look at it, inflammation is just bad news!
Although all the factors mentioned above play havoc with your body and skin due to the inflammation they trigger, what you
