We wish skincare were as easy as finding the consummate skincare ingredient that can do it all, but it’s not … not even close. Skin, the largest organ of the body, has a vast range of substances and is the site of multiple hormonal and molecular interactions that keep it young, radiant, smooth, healthy, breakout-free, and even-toned. As you might suspect, countless things can go wrong when these systems become damaged or start slowing down.
When skin’s natural restoring system of antioxidants and skin-repairing ingredients are abundant and working correctly, your skin has a far better chance of healing and staying younger, longer. But when sun damage, age, hormonal changes, environmental damage, and other factors cause those substances to break down and those systems to slow down or change, you must provide your skin with what it needs to repair itself and prevent further problems. That repair can never be solved with any one ingredient or any one product.
Just like your body requires you to eat a complex assortment of beneficial foods to keep you healthy, your skin requires a similarly complex array of ingredients. In addition, different skin types require different products to meet different needs, such as oily, dry, or combination skin, skin that is affected by rosacea, sun damage, brown spots, red marks, acne, wrinkles, and so on. One ingredient may help some of these concerns, but certainly not all of them.
The good news is that there are hundreds of great good-for-your-skin ingredients. On the other hand, there also are dozens of ingredients (both synthetic and natural) that are a serious problem for skin. Whenever you read that some vitamin, plant oil or plant extract is the “best” ingredient for skin, ignore it. Think about it like this, green tea may be healthy for you to drink, but if you drink only green tea you soon will become unhealthy and even risk your life. Think of your skin the same way; it needs a range of substances naturally found in skin to keep “feeding it” day in and day out to be as healthy as possible. Unfortunately, that makes skincare complicated, but we have information and answers for you to help simplify it to the extent possible.
What About Natural Ingredients?
Natural or naturally derived and organic ingredients are a polarizing topic. Some people enjoy the idea of using only skincare products that contain natural or organic ingredients, but there’s no benefit to using natural ingredients if those ingredients are going to damage your skin. (Natural does not always mean better—after all, cyanide, lead and snake venom are all perfectly natural substances!) The question we always ask when evaluating any ingredient is: what potential benefit does it have for skin versus its potential to do harm? If it has the potential to irritate or damage skin, how strong is that potential, and is there an alternative ingredient that provides the same benefit without such concerns?
You will be shocked to learn how many natural ingredients can be a problem for skin, and actually damage it. Not all natural skincare ingredients are beneficial. Many companies touting their natural ingredients are not telling the truth when they suggest that synthetic ingredients are inherently bad for skin because, in fact, many are actually brilliant for skin.
In short, there are good and bad natural or naturally-derived ingredients and good and bad synthetic ingredients. That’s why we continually pore through the research literature, to help you find the products that contain more of what’s proven to help skin and avoid those loaded with irritating, harmful ingredients or over-glorified ingredients that can’t perform as you’ve been told.
To make it easier for you to understand what you’ll see on ingredient lists, we include in this book a portion of our Cosmetic Ingredient Dictionary, which you’ll find in Chapter 16. It highlights some of the more typical (and controversial) ingredients you’ll find in skincare products. This resource explains what an ingredient is and does based on published research, not on hype or fanciful storytelling.
Don’t Try This on Yourself
We’re often asked why someone shouldn’t just try a product to see if they like it or just rely on someone else’s experience with a product to determine if it would work for their needs. We can’t think of a bigger mistake for your skin than to rely solely on personal assessment, whether yours or someone else’s, to determine the benefit and/or quality of a product. Even here at Paula’s Choice Skincare we don’t personally test all our own formulas to determine efficacy. It’s not that you shouldn’t use a product you like, but you should make your selection only from the best-formulated products, those that are right for your skin type and that have the best ingredients research has shown to provide incredible results. How a product feels on your skin alone doesn’t give you the vital information you need about the quality of any formula.
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