Why fancy creams aren't good for your skin

The beauty business is a multi-billion-dollar industry, founded on our perfectly reasonable desire to stay looking young and beautiful. But the side effects of many products can be far less glamorous. You could be putting on your face such unappetizing ingredients such as human urine and placental tissue, animal hormones and sheep fat plus a witch's brew of chemicals to make them look pleasant and smell good. Today, there are extremely many people that are allergic to the common ingredients in cosmetics and beauty products, even such everyday items as shampoo, soap, after-shave and antiperspirant. Even tiny amounts of their ingredients might cause eczema and acne, asthma and dermatitis. Hypo-allergenic products usually leave out around sixty of the ingredients most likely to aggravate allergies; however, they can still cause allergic reactions. Cosmetics make you toxic - they get stuck in your fat cells.

Creams and lotions are packed full with chemical preservatives, synthetic perfumes and colorants - all of which can cause sensitivity and toxicity. Even the active ingredients that are supposed to take care of skin "problems" can themselves cause damage. Many products stop the skin doing what it wants to do naturally. For example, if you strip the skin of all its natural oil, you panic the skin and make it produce even more oil. If you drive acne further into the body, it will cause permanent problems. People who say they have sensitive skin actually have sick skin - sick of the things that are being put on it. The skin simply can't get rid of complicated fragrances or fat-soluble preservatives and so it stores them up for a while and then gets dry or develops a rash.

Do you know that the skin absorb anything that is being put on it?

What we often forget is that the skin absorb everything we put on it; within a very short amount of time that substance will be circulating through the blood stream to every cell in the body. In the case of beauty products, the substance could be bovine-tissue extracts, liquid plastics, paraffin and even acids that, outside of the beauty industry, are used for etching metal. The World Health Organization (WHO) found that many of the colorants used in lipstick, rouge and eye shadow are unsafe. They also found 884 chemicals that were available for use by the cosmetic industry were on a federal toxic-substance list. For example, formaldehyde, used in skin products as a preservative and disinfectant, is a suspected carcinogen (directly involved with causing cancer). Coal tar, listed as FD&C or D&C colors, is a common ingredient in cosmetics, hair dyes and dandruff shampoos. It is also a known carcinogen and has been linked to frequent allergic reactions including asthma attacks, headaches, nausea, fatigue, nervousness and lack of concentration. We could go on and on.
Watch out, too, for "natural" products. Something can be labelled "natural" if it is, for example, just two percent natural and ninety-eight percent petroleum and chemicals. Even products high in natural ingredients needs preservatives. Some use natural preservatives (such as grapefruit-seed extract, tea-tree oil and other essentials oils) but they usually still need at least one of the synthetic preservatives for the product to "keep". Of course, not all chemicals are dangerous - but do you really want then on your skin?

Learn more about how you can stop spending a fortune and make your skin look better & younger by reading our blog tomorrow.