What's in your skin care?

What's in your skin care?

And, is it beneficial or detrimental?

All those long Latin or Greek names. Are they natural or not?

Do you need to be a cosmetic chemist to make sense of it all?

Take alcohol for instance

Bad for the liver and the skin, isn’t it?

Or is it?

If you’re as old as me, you might remember the luridly-fluorescent toners teenage girls bought in the 1980s. They stripped every last drop of oil from your skin, which then responded by overproducing oil, so you used more toner. (Great sales model, but not so fab for your face) 

And that cycle repeated, ad infinitum.

So, if you’re reading an ingredient label, and you see alcohol listed, don’t just assume that the product will be drying, as it’s not always the case.

Because, alcohol (as you might already know) comes in many different forms. And I don’t just mean tequila or vodka.

Some sorts of alcohol are great to have in your skin care

They’re usually called fatty alcohols and include ingredients like cetyl, cetearyl or stearyl alcohol, and guess what? they're derived from fats. (The name is a bit of a giveaway, there, isn’t it?)

They are also called esters, and Beeswax, for instance, contains about 50 percent monoester, while carnauba wax is roughly 85 percent ester. And both those ingredients are generally considered good for your skin, not drying.

Then there’s something you might recognise - Tocopherol. (The -ol ending shows it’s also an alcohol.) α-Tocopherol is also known as Vitamin E, which is generally considered beneficial for the skin, and not at all drying. In fact, fatty alcohols have an ability to lock moisture into the skin to form a protective barrier.

That sounds ok, doesn’t it?

The type of alcohol you want to avoid like the (current) plague, at least on your face, is SD40 (AKA isopropyl alcohol). This is great for sterilising surfaces and is often in cheap hand sanitisers, which is why your hands might feel mega dry, if you use the ones supplied in shop entrances, rather than carry your own.

Ingredients lists can be a bit of a minefield, so you may need some help decoding what’s good for your skin, what’s not and how you can look younger for longer.

Rather than turning to drink, at the thought of how complicated it is, why not get some help from a professional?

Message jane@theorganicbeautician.com to book yourself a consultation with an expert