The Importance of Clean Beauty: Understanding the Risks of Toxic Ingredients

 Simply, clean beauty relates to skincare and cosmetic products mindfully made that don’t contain toxic ingredients linked to harmful health effects. The popularity of clean beauty is increasingly growing as it’s the best way to protect a person’s health, skin, and the environment.

If you could decide exactly what goes on your skin, what would you include? Sugar, (pumpkin) spice, and everything nice would be at the top of our list, but unfortunately, product formulas just aren’t that sweet and simple.

When we think about what common ingredients are in popular skincare items, it’s frustrating how many damaging ingredients have become normalized in the industry. You can avoid cheap fillers, harsh ingredients, toxicity, and synthetics with our lovely list of pure, cruelty-free, and natural skin care alternatives.

But before we get to that naturally sweet side of skincare, we need to delve into the sour part — and that’s what the common top toxic ingredients are and how they affect our skin — and health.

Don’t seal your skin fate with sulfates. Sodium lauryl sulfates (aka SLS or SLES) are chemical latherers used in face cleansers, including body and hair washes, to create that bubbling or sudsing effect. They can be harsh and stripping on the skin, removing our natural protective oils and causing irritation.

Furthermore, SLES is a cosmetic surfactant that lingers in the environment and is a known carcinogen. Sulfates can irritate the skin, leaving it stripped and inflamed. It can trigger skin conditions like rosacea, eczema, and acne.

Parabens‘Ben’ there, don’t do that. And by ‘that’, we mean using products with parabens, which are artificial preservatives aimed to increase the shelf life of a product. According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), parabens are known to mimic and disrupt normal hormone behavior in our bodies. This can lead to inconsistent bodily functions, and reproductive issues, and it has also been linked to cancer.

It’s exactly why we stick with certain plant-based ingredients that can naturally stabilize a formula without the harmful side effects of artificial preservatives. Take our Mushroom Peptide Serum: Featuring skin-beneficial medicinal mushrooms and quinoa peptides, this anti-aging skin wonder formula makes skin more resilient and vibrant, and it increases firmness and elasticity.

Fragrances Something just doesn’t smell right here. Whether it’s labeled as “fragrance” or “parfum”, artificial fragrances can act as irritants on the skin, especially for those with sensitive skin. The word “fragrance” is just a decoy that many brands use to avoid writing the actual chemicals they use to add the scent.

It should make ‘scents’ then why we use essential oils, which drive the effectiveness of the product and give a pleasant, natural aroma. Take the natural and divine aroma of our cult-favorite Coffee Bean Eye Cream. This creamy, dreamy formula smells like a warm vanilla latte and is infused with rejuvenating and restorative vitamins, oils, and extracts. No artificial culprits here!

The flip side of this seemingly silky silicone is it dries out the skin, clogs pores, and can lead to breakouts. We love using dimethicone alternatives such as natural oils, rice starch, sea kelp, and seaweed collagen. We feature many of these natural ingredients in our silicone-free primers and foundations that provide a flawless matte finish while being healthy for your skin.

And, just because it’s natural ingredients, it doesn’t mean these formulations lack the potency to make a difference in your skin like conventional ingredients. The anti-aging standard or retinol is a great example. We curated a chemical-free, but a plant-based alternative to retinol in our Bakuchiol Oil Serum. This skin-softening, moisturizing facial oil is made with age-correcting bakuchiol, which is a gentle yet powerful botanical with the same benefits as retinol.