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 put on your skin can have the same effect, and often plays a significant role in what is going wrong. Skincare products can cause irritation, which in turn produces inflammation, resulting in problems—problems that you’ll try to fix with skincare products and cosmetic corrective procedures. [1]
Understanding what your skin needs for your skin type and skin concerns is vital, but it’s equally important to know what your skin doesn’t need. That’s critical because the very skincare products you are using may, in fact, be exacerbating the problems you’re trying to fix.
Given our cumulative years of looking at skincare formulations, it still shocks us that many of the products people buy to treat a specific skin condition actually make it worse. For example, products you’ve purchased claiming to control oily skin often contain ingredients that make the skin even more oily. Products claiming to be oil-free often contain ingredients that nonetheless make the skin feel greasy. Products claiming they won’t cause breakouts may contain pore-clogging, emollient ingredients that don’t sound like they would be a problem because we don’t recognize the names on the ingredient label. Countless skincare products contain irritating ingredients that further damage your skin with each use. Those are the sorts of things we address in this chapter.
Irritation Is Your Skin’s Worst Enemy
We cannot stress this enough: Irritation and inflammation are bad for skin—really, really bad! Daily assaults from unprotected sun exposure, splashing the face with hot water, and applying skincare products that contain irritating ingredients have a harsh and inflammatory effect. These types of attacks reduce the skin’s ability to heal, break down the skin’s chief support substances (collagen and elastin), weaken skin’s outer protective layer, and can cause many other complications. [2,3]
For those with oily skin, it’s especially important to know that irritation triggers the nerve endings in the pore that, in turn, trigger the production of androgens, hormones that increase oil production and make pores bigger! [3,4] That is not good for any skin type!
It turns out that much of what we know about skin aging, wrinkles, brown spots, skin healing, and acne has evolved from our increased understanding of skin’s inflammatory reaction to sun exposure (UV radiation), pollution, cigarette smoke, and even irritation from skincare products. These all trigger an inflammatory process that leads to cumulative damage within skin, resulting in the deterioration of collagen and elastin, depletion of disease-fighting cells, and out-of-control free-radical damage. [5,6,7]
Skin’s Silent Killer
It would probably be easier for those who smoke cigarettes to stop smoking if the damage it was causing on the inside showed itself instantly on the outside. Regrettably, that isn’t the case; as we now know, it can take years for the damage to show up. Interestingly, the same can be said for skin damage.
People often assume their skincare products aren’t hurting their skin because they don’t feel or see any negative reactions. BUT, although we may not see or feel anything, the damage is taking place beneath the surface of the skin, from things we apply to it or do to it; eventually (perhaps years from now), it will show up on the surface, and it won’t be pretty. [2]
You can get a clearer idea of how this hidden, underlying damage from irritating skincare routines or from specific products takes place by imagining what happens to the skin in reaction to unprotected sun exposure. The sun is a major cause of free-radical damage and inflammation. These effects cause brown spots, wrinkling, skin cancer, and other degenerative issues. Yet, other than the (hopefully) rare occasion when you get sunburned, you don’t feel or even see the damage done to your skin from the sun, until—you guessed it—years later. Even more shocking is that the most damaging rays of the sun can penetrate windows—now that really is a silent killer! [8,9]
Fragrance: