When it comes to beauty products, how many of us know the chemistry beyond those beauty products?
Most of us only know about the packaging, pretty bottles and fragrances of beauty products.
Did you know that every single beauty product is made up of many different complex chemicals? Look at the ingredients list! So technically, you are just applying lots of chemicals, both good and bad, to your precious skin daily.
Here’s a few simple things that you might want to take note the next time you get your beauty products:
1) Lead in lipsticks
Some lipsticks contain lead, which might cause brain damage and also damage to our nervous system when ingested or absorbed. You won’t be able to see lead listed in the ingredients of your lipstick, as it is actually a contaminant in the other ingredients used to produce lipstick. Most lipsticks contain lead or other toxic heavy metals such as chromium, cadmium, manganese and aluminium. Yes, even popular brands! I won’t name any brands here but feel free to Google, there are lots of information on the brands that contain lead. Of course, lead is present only in a small concentration in our lipsticks, so one or two application will probably not affect us at all. However, prolonged day-to-day application might have some serious long term complications. Avoid lipsticks whenever you can, and try not to eat your lipstick ya?
2) Oxidising foundation
Remember the times when your foundation turned a shade darker after wearing it for a few hours? That is because of your foundation oxidising, which is actually a chemical reaction! This happens when certain ingredients in the foundation reacts with your facial oil or when the ingredients react with oxygen in the air. Different foundations work differently on every one of us, so to be safe, please get a sample and try it before deciding to purchase it. Otherwise, you may try using a primer and setting powder to prevent the foundation to be in direct contact with your facial oil or the air.
3) Alcohol in toners
Toners are very widely used, as they are believed to “double cleanse” our skin as well as to close our pores. However, one of the ingredients found in most toners is alcohol, which might not be necessarily good for your skin. Alcohol is very drying for our skin, to the point that it actually destroys our skin’s natural barrier. Going on, here is another problem. Alcohol is actually a general name for a group of chemicals, which means it might not be listed “alcohol” in the list of ingredients for your toner. Just to name a few – ethanol, glycerol and even menthol. There is a long long list of different types of alcohol on Wikipedia which you might want to check out. A rough guide will be to look out for ingredients that end with “-ol”.
Hope you find the three points above useful although they sound a little scientific! ☺