4 Tricks to Avoid Culprits in Skincare Products

The world is becoming increasingly obsessed with youthful appearance. Skincare has become a multi-billion dollar market that targets on beauty conscious customers especially the female population. Looking young is no longer limited to celebrities but it has become a university epidemic.

What makes you prefer certain skincare products to others? Is it brand name, advertising, or testimony from consumers?

If your answer is at least yes to one of the three options, how often do you check the ingredient list on the skincare products before purchasing?

If your answer is Never, you really need to be more careful next time when shopping beauty products. Most shoppers like to judge books by its covers, but buying skincare products is no joke because they go directly on your face. Furthermore, 40% of what you put on the skin eventually absorbed into your blood streams.

I’m a beauty and health conscious person, so skincare shopping is especially important to me. However, most products I tried failed to deliver the results they promised, making my hard earned money and expectations go down the drain. After being let down by Kiehl’s, a popular brand I trusted, I said to myself:” I’m done with all these bullish. I will educate myself in this subject matter.

I wish I knew the importance of reading ingredient labels 5 years ago.

First, research on Toxic Beauty ingredients that you definitely need to avoid.

There are some red glaring flags you need to be aware of when shopping your next skincare products. A useful article I found is called “10 Toxic Beauty Ingredients to Avoid”, which pinpoint some red glaring flags you definitely need to avoid when buying beauty products. Here I’d like to highlight two extreme harmful chemicals yet they are still commonly used in 90% of beauty products on the market.

(Clink on the photo to read full article)

The first one is Propylene Glycol. This chemical is known as a skin penetrator and irritant that could lead to skin dermatitis. The purpose of including this chemical in beauty products is to help other ingredient to penetrate deep into the skin. Sounds cool, right? Not really. Propylene Glycol is a by-product of petroleum, and it makes your surface skin looks pump and supple by extra moisture from your lower dermal. Over time, your lower dermal gets dried out and your surface skin reacts by being parch and dry. When you wash Propylene Glycol off your face, it can also dissolve the fat your skin needs to stay healthy. Do you notice young people in their late 20s start to lose facial volume? Propylene Glycol could be a big contributor to it beside excessive weight loss. The government especially warns people not to pour this chemical into the ground, but we smear it into our skin instead. Propylene Glycol means to be used in heavy duty cleaning product for floor, garage or vehicles, and the main reason it’s widely used in beauty products is due to its low cost. You might heartbreakingly find this chemical in your favorite skincare products. I did. I used to love Powerful- Strength Line-Reducing Concentrate from Keihl’s. When I reviewed its full ingredient list and spot this chemical, I ditched the product immediately. Instead of promoting collagen production based on the claim, this product is doing exactly the opposite. You might see short-term benefits, but not in the long run.

(Red: major no-no. Orange: by-products of silicon, scent )

The second chemical I like to talk about is Fragrance. A cosmetic company can add in any ingredient that creates scent by indicating the word Fragrance on the ingredient label, according to FDA. Little do we know, these scented ingredients have high potential to cause contact allergy. A big reason that cosmetic companies still use scent in their products is because 90% of the beauty product shoppers are women, who shop with their noses. A good question to ask yourself is: “Do you shop skincare to take care of your skin, or to make your face smell nice?" If you already know the answer to this question, then you know what to do next time. Be aware that Fragrance is Not just an indication of added scent. It is also a word that protects the proprietary of the cosmetic company. Some companies do not want their competitors to copy their secret ingredients, so they use this word to cover up their secrets. On the flipping side, this can be scarier than what can be imagined. Would you feel safe to use any product that contains ingredients that are not disclosed to you? What if these ingredients have a high chance to cause you cancer down the road?

I have a bounce video here to share: Toxic Cosmetics ~ Ingredients to Avoid (click on the title to watch it on YouTube) which gives you extended knowledge on this subject matter.

Second, read full ingredient label to spot the red flags.

I know it’s easier said than done. In reality, it’s quite a challenging task because it takes time to memorize the toxic ingredient list and to understand them to certain degree. There are a lot more harmful ingredients beyond what we’ve known.

Here are how certain websites come in handy. Cons DNA is the website that rates skincare ingredients from 1 to 9 (1: least harmful, 9: most harmful). Simply enter the product name and brand, and it will give you the result. This website contains data for most skincare products, but may not have the one you are looking for.

If you couldn’t find the data of your skincare product, Environmental Working Group (EWG) website will help you on that. It also provides rating for skincare ingredient, especially the rare ones. Say if you want to know how Hyaluronic acid is doing on the scale of 1 to 9, just enter “Hyaluronic acid, skin deep” into Google searching engine, and it will give you the result on EWG page.

Third, don’t be misled by brand names, product claims, seals people, and consumer’s feedbacks.

Brand names can be particularly misleading is because shoppers tend to think big brand names guarantee for good results because they are expensive. Well, not necessary. When you heard brand names such as Channel, Lancome, Shiseido, Dior, L’Oreal and Kiehl’s, what’s your first reaction? Trustworthiness? Do you notice that all of these brands product chemical based skincare products? Chemicals are pretty useless. What makes a skincare product effective is the percentage of active ingredients, not the chemicals in the products.

The most shocking brands out here should be Cetaphil and Nivea because they are highly recommended by dermatologists. If you look closer to the ingredient label, you will find 3 paraben by-products in its Gentle Skin Cleanser: Methylparaben, Propylparaben, and butylparaben. Paraben is a preservative that can lead to breast cancer. On top of that, Benzyl Alcohol is also found in used in some of the Cetaphil products. Benzyl Alcohol is also a preservative, and it dries out the skin over time so that you need to buy more moisturizer to keep your skin functional. As for Nivea, Propylene Glycol is found pretty much in all its facial cleansers and moisturizers. If something has “dermatologists tested” written on the label, it doesn’t mean it is toxin free. That’s why we should all give a second thought on “dermatologists tested” products.

(click on the photo to view product ingredients)

Information from salespeople is very misleading too, as 99% of them are not experts on skincare subjects. Beside, most of them are very much brainwashed by the companies they are working for. If you them opinion on certain products, they will tell you based on the “scripts” they’ve learned during the training. That’s why equip yourself with the knowledge is important.

Consumers’ feedbacks can be a bummer too. When volunteers are tested on new products before they hit the market, a big part of feedbacks is texture beside effectiveness. Therefore, companies try to improve on product texture by dumping chemicals such as silicon. Among the consumer feedbacks, most of them care about texture of the products. Also, positive feedbacks often lure desperate shoppers into buying products without putting too much thoughts in them. Keep in mind that most beauty product consumers are not educated on skincare ingredient subject matter. If you don’t want to avoid this dangerous trap, you need to suppress your urgency on trying any new product before doing enough research at first.

Fourth, learn about some natural ingredient that actually “work”

Knowing the good ingredients helps us to understand what work and to filter out the culprits. Some ingredients that promote collagen production and reduce wrinkle reduction include and not limited to: hyaluronic acid, citric acid, vitamin C, vitamin E, essential oils, fruit and plant extra, copper, and shea butter. Any products that have high concentration of these natural ingredients should be added in your skincare kit (remember to watch out for the top 10 toxins).

Some readers might say: “Well, if you analyze all the ingredients in skincare products, you will always find something bad.” Not necessarily. There are skincare companies out in the word that produce skincare without harmful chemicals.

They are usually hidden in the world and we just need to find them. Based in the U.S, OZ Naturals is an online skincare company that produces cold press skincare with 98- 99% natural clean ingredients. Meanwhile, located in Canmore Alberta, Canada, Rocky Mountain Soap Co. is a company that sells 100% natural skincare and hair products. Only few years ago, Rocky Mountain Soap Co. started to open more store locations in major cities across the country. These names are unfamiliar to most skincare shoppers is because they are never advertised. Remember, Good products never need to be advertised.

(Click on the photos to view company websites)

Why I'm so picky about the chemical contents in skincare products? It's because of the cumulative damage they can cause to your skin. Do you notice your skin changed after using certain skincare products over time? Does it appear to be dull and rough compared to it used to be? It's caused by the built up of harmful chemicals. Certain some chemicals in skincare can cause aging with prolong use. Skincare is supposed to fight signs of aging, not to excerbate them.

If you care about your health in the next 10, 20, 30 and 40 years, please start learning this subject matter today. It’s never too late for anything.

We’ve all been there before: trying out tons of products but nothing works. In the end, we become frustrated and lose hopes. It’s not that we can’t find cure for our skin issues, but the secret lies in the ingredient label: we just need to filter out toxic ingredients, pay attention of concentration of active ingredients, and have some knowledge of what works and what not.

Thanks for reading my articles. Hope it helps!