When you shop for a new skin cream, moisturizer or lip color, what aspects influence you before buying it?
Is it the way it smells, the way it feels on your skin (whether it’s greasy or heavy)?
Or is it the packaging it comes in such as the elongated bottle and pretty colored jar?
All of the above characteristics can influence how we feel about a product and ultimately move us to making a purchase.
Am I right?
Many times, we r moved into action because a product makes us feel good. Like a perfume which makes us feel sexy, an eye shadow that adds sparkle to our eyes.
Maybe it enhances the parts we love about ourselves like our luscious lips, or hiding what we view as imperfections like unsightly brown spots. Sometimes, we may be so enamored with a product, we even overlook cost.
This brings me to today’s post, a story I want to share.
Just a few days ago, my cousin and I went to the mall. Inside the mall, is a lovely skin care/ cosmetics store with oodles and oodles of products to play with and sample (so yes, we do luv going into this store!).
So I start browsing the skin care section while my cuz checks out foundations. About 20 minutes later, I finish perusing the walls and wonder, "Where IS this girl? And why hasn’t she come back to me in a while?" which is very unusual. So I walk around the store and find her sitting in a chair, getting her face done!
I walk over to check things out.
Her face looks very prettily done and covered in terms of hiding the brown spots on her cheeks (which she confesses to bothering her).
She sees me walking towards her, smiles and asks me, “How do I look?”
I tell her the make-up covers well and that she looks quite darling.
Meanwhile, the female makeup artist, who was such a lovely girl btw, reviews the products she has used to give her that beautiful, porcelain look.
My cuz shows me one of the products, a cream in a jar and tells me how much she likes the cream. "Look how wonderful this feels and how nice it smells” (if you could only see the excited look on her face, she's like a child in a candy shop).
I ask the make-up artist if the cream is a new product for the store and she informs me it is. So of course, I do what I always do first, I check out the ingredients!
The first ingredient I see listed is water, the remaining ingredients are broken down as such:
11 Skin Conditioning ingredients
2 Emulsion Stabilizers
6 Preservatives
6 Fragrances and/ or masking ingredients
2 Antioxidants
2 Thickeners
1 Mineral
2 Natural skin moisturizers (butters)
This skin cream has 32 ingredients total not including water.
I'm thinking this product isn't very natural. There are so many synthetic chemicals in it and do we really need 11 skin conditioning agents?? (I’m not a party pooper, really).
I told my cuz the product contained more chemical ingredients than natural ones. She happily agreed to wait and search for another cream. I was pretty impressed by her decision as it showed me how serious she was on her journey to decreasing her exposure to chemicals. I knew for sure I could find her a cream that smelled just as nice, felt just as good AND more importantly, contained less chemicals.
So I know it’s not realistic to live in a bubble and live a life without any exposure to chemicals (and not all chemicals are toxic), but what I encourage consumers to do is, look at a product’s ingredients. Learn what makes the product smell insanely yummy and what materials make it feel so luxurious on your skin; to go beyond just your senses. Afterall, your skin is the largest organ of your body and science has shown chemicals have traversed over the skin barrier and into our bodies. Chemicals are showing up in our urine and breast milk. Just think about how many products you expose yourself to in a day, 6?, 10? 15? You have control over what you expose your skin to in the products you choose.
So my fellow skin ravers, you really must ask yourself questions when you do your shopping.
Are the product ingredients synthetic? What do they do? Where do they come from? animals? plants? neither? Can they be harmful to my body?
Check the ingredients to see if it connects with the way you live your life.
Is the product eco friendly or source ingredients from sustainable resources? How does the product break down in the environment?
After researching the ingredients in the face cream, I found out one of the ingredients, cetyl palmitate can be derived from sperm whale heads or dolphin heads! Omg?! I don't want to use any product with material from killing a sperm whale!
I am all for using the senses when shopping for a great new product to use. My hope is for people to start adding some healthy sleuth work into the equation.
Besides factoring in cost, smell, color, packaging, how a product looks or feels on your skin, add "check ingredients."
What ARE these yummy ingredients? Don’t you wanna know?
L