Why Ingredients Matter?
Now that you have a better understanding of your skin’s first three lines of barrier defense I’m going to try to explain as simply as possible why we avoid certain ingredients from a Corneotherapeutic approach to skinCARE.
The bottom line on ingredients is that you want, not just biodegradable ingredients, but those that are biodegradable in your skin, those that are recognized by your skin or biomimetic and serve your skin cells.
I don’t like to encourage the chemophobia (chemical shaming) that a lot of brands in the marketplace like to tout - everything is made up of chemicals and it’s the dose that makes the poison. There are no bad or good chemicals but there is a difference between ingredients that have a bio-available function in the skin and those that don’t so please keep that in mind as I go through the ingredients that I recommend avoiding or minimizing in your skincare.
I want to make sure that your skin’s diet is as clean as yours is. By understanding what makes a product skin junk food - the product equivalent of a sweet, salty, fatty, and artificially colored confection or… a donut! By identifying the donuts in your skin’s diet, you can then make better choices and save those donuts for the occasional treat ;)
It’s not that specific ingredients are bad, it’s that they’re either not biodegradable in the skin or that they damage the fragile ecosystem from prolonged use - remember, just like one donut won’t ruin your diet, one shitty product won't ruin your skin but eating a donut with every meal might derail your diet and prolonged regular usage of products that don’t serve your skin will eventually start causing you issues. I hear it ALL the time from my clients… “my skin loved BRAND until it didn’t and all hell broke loose” and it was that daily chipping away of your skin’s defenses that did the damage and I’m going to tell you now, what took you months to create will take you months to undo. There is no quick fix when we are restructuring your skin but with dedication and consistency, we can get your skin back on track.
OK Lovely! Let’s dive into some of the ingredients to minimize and reduce in your skinCARE diet…
Fragrances
We all know this one and I totally get the appeal of using a yummy smelling cream but your beautiful skin cells simply don’t need to smell good! Fragrances, whether natural or synthetic, are one of the top sensitizers to skin. They can also cause photosensitivity meaning that your skin will be extra sensitive to light; which can cause inflammation in the skin which, by the way, triggers melanin to be released… hello hyperpigmentation! The fragrance is added to products for the purpose of either masking the natural scent of the formulation, or for aesthetic/marketing purposes - it’s a watermelon sleep mask so you better smell that watermelon!
What to look out for:
Parfum
Linalool
Limonene
Benzyl alcohol - technically aromatic alcohol, this ingredient functions as alcohol, fragrance, and also a fragrance fixative so if it’s on the list, there’s a likelihood of fragrance.
Geraniol
Colours & Dyes
This doesn’t apply to the natural color of certain ingredients when used as the whole ingredient such as Blue Tansy but as added for the product to look a certain way, think blue, green, pink, or peach products. They’re purely in there for aesthetic purposes and have no function for the skin cell at all. Colours used in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics are classified by type with a letter code (F, D, or C), which indicates the use for which it is approved. These letters will precede the number and description of the colour.
What to look out for:
Helindone Pink (D&C Red #30)
Indigotine (FD&C Blue #2)
Fast Green FCF (FD&C Green #3)
Mineral Oil, Petrolatum, & Silicones
These ingredients are occlusives - meaning that they form a film on the surface of the skin to vastly reduce or eliminate water loss (Trans Epidermal Water Loss - TEWL). They are often used or recommended for people with an impaired barrier because an impaired barrier is leaky and sufferers from a high TEWL. Unfortunately, this is very much a “band-aid” approach and doesn’t actually address the deficiencies in the skin that led to an impaired barrier. These substances are also not biodegradable in the skin so they’re not serving your skin cells in any way.
Occlusives of this type create an unnatural barrier and weaning your skin off of them can take several weeks to several months as we work to get your cell’s natural metabolic activity back on track. This often means that your skin will have to feel dry and uncomfortable before it starts to feel better as your TEWL will be elevated until the natural barrier function returns to normal. Kind of how when you take a break from exercising, it will take you longer to get back to your previous level of fitness. Once we improve your natural barrier function with skin-identical ingredients - biomimetic ingredients, your skin will be able to regulate its own barrier naturally and your TEWL should fall within a normal range thus reducing inflammation and redness and in turn pigmentation issues.
What to look out for:
Dimethicone
Mineral Oil
Petrolatum
Paraffinum
Cyclomethicone
Cyclohexasiloxane
Cetearyl methicone
Cyclopentasiloxane
Surfactants & Emulsifiers
Surfactants and emulsifiers are both what we call surface-acting agents - they bind oil and water together. Your skin requires both oil and water to function optimally and formulas that contain both or are designed to clean - using water to wash oils and debris off of something requires one or both of these and some formulas contain multiples of these ingredients.
These guys are some of the biggest culprits when it comes to a barrier compromised skin. Let me break them down for you.
Surfactants are the cleaning agents in skincare (and home care!) products. They attach dirt/grime/grease to water allowing them to be washed away. When you have an abundance of surfactant molecules they form clumps called micelles - so now you know that micellar water actually contains more of these agents than the average cleanser and it’s also why they are so damn bad for your skin. Anionic surfactants will create a large amount of foam and nonionic surfactants will create less foam
Emulsifiers are the ingredients that bind water and oil so you’ll see them in some creamy cleansers, some serums, and most commonly in your face creams and lotions.
Most surfactants and emulsifiers are not biodegradable in the skin and that’s the problem. These clever molecules continue their clever work in your skin leading to the washout effect - They bind to your natural oils and lipids and then are washed out of your skin when you bathe. This leads to dry skin and increased TEWL.
This also means that there are surfactants and emulsifiers that fall into that biomimetic category (remember, those are the ingredients that biodegrade in your skin). The products that we carry at Violet Hour Skin only contain biomimetic ingredients that don’t cause damage to your skin. Yes, they’re more expensive than products from the drugstore but quite often they compare to or are more affordable than department stores or Sephora brands making them the smarter choice for your skin on a daily and sometimes twice daily basis.
What to look out for:
Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS)
Ammonium lauryl sulfate (ALS)
Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES)
Preservatives
Now, before we get into this beast, I want to be very clear… Preservatives are essential to your products staying safe for use during their lifetime - yeast, mold, and bacteria can all infiltrate your products. Oxygen and light can also be responsible for your product becoming ineffective.
So, when I say preservatives, I really mean making sure that your products have the least amount in the formula in order to do their job. Preservatives can be sensitizing in the skin, especially skin with its first line of defense, the acid mantle, compromised, high levels of preservative ingredients in a product can also, over time, cause a compromised barrier. This is why it’s important to know what to look for to ensure your products can have the least amount of preservatives in the formula to protect against yeast, mold, bacteria, and oxidation.
The preservative deck of your product doesn't just include the ingredients that preserve the product but also the packaging used to house the formulation, manufacturing process, and the use period. When these aspects are optimized, you're onto a good thing.
Packaging: Something in an open tub or jar will need to have a higher percentage of preservative ingredients in the formulation because of how you use the product. It’s got fingers in it and is wide open to oxygen so any active ingredients have a greater chance of oxidizing and the ability for bacteria to be introduced is very high. Jars and tubs are icky - avoid!
Tubes are pretty good but the resin polymer-type tubes are quite permeable to air so ingredients are still quite likely to oxidize but they do prevent light damage and minimize bacterial access.
Glass bottles are great but you want them to also prevent light damage so amber, coated/opaque, or violet glass are going to be the better options than clear.
The manufacturing process: Is your product made in an aseptic or “clean lab” (this means that the technicians are wearing extensive PPE and have passed through 2 or more entry points for sanitation and application of said PPE, a relatively expensive option) or a manufacturing plant where PPE is in use but the additional steps to remove the risk of all bacterial contamination are not in place.
The final deciding factor is how fragile the active ingredients may be, they may require preserving just to get them to last long enough for you to use them, you can usually find one of these handy symbols printed on your product label.
Indicating how long you have after opening your product before it is no longer considered safe to use. I know you’ve seen it before and now I know that you know what it means!
So again, preservatives are a very important part of a formula and one that needs to be selected based on many different factors. Cosmetics Chemists are super knowledgeable in chemicals and how much are needed in formulations - I couldn’t begin to know what to use and how much and how it will interact with other ingredients without extensive training.
What is sometimes missed is how these chemicals may interact within the skin. It’s pretty nuanced. What I do know is that Chemists are constrained by many factors when formulating and the 2 big ones are access - what the company they’re working for will provide for them to use (contacts, agreements, etc with raw material companies) and cost. So while they may know that a certain preservative is better, they may not have the option to use it in that product's formula.
The bottom line is that preservative ingredients can be sensitizing in the skin, especially skin with its first line of defense, the acid mantle, compromised and over time they can cause a compromised skin yet they are necessary for most formulations, especially those containing water.
What to Check For:
Look at the packaging, does it prevent the product from coming into contact with the environment? Does it protect it from light?
Find out about the manufacturing process, does it allow for less preservative ingredients?
Make sure that you’re storing the product well… cool, dry, and dark is ideal.
Make sure that you use the product within the use-by date or within the timeframe indicated after opening.
So you can see that while formula is made of its parts, it’s also much more than that. You want to make sure that the products you use are serving your skin at all times. While an ingredient is not explicitly harmful in a toxic way, it may be slowly damaging your skin’s barrier, leaving it vulnerable to increased TEWL, bacteria, environmental damage, and the cascade of events that follow. It’s important to not only focus on the “active” ingredients on the label but to consider how they are getting to where they need to go and if, once they get there, there is enough of them left to have the desired effect. That sounds like a whole other blog post!
Next month we’re going to learn how to be basic bitches by taking our rituals back to basics, like a reset or an elimination diet for the skin if you will.