chemicals in cosmetics

When choosing a skin or bodycare product I can’t stress enough, whatever you put on your skin make it as natural as possible, Many products have ingredients lists which are hard to read with words you can’t pronounce, there is no health or beauty benefit to most if not all of these synthetic chemical ingredients. These synthetic chemicals are cheep, and some prolong the shelf life for 3 years plus which intern benefits the company not your skin.

Plants and herbs are where our medicinal history began, but by mass producing, extracting and man’s greed we have reduced something originally so pure into somewhat of a monster. With increasing rates of cancer and disease in the western world are we really surprised when for the past 40 years we have be covering ourselves in hundreds of chemicals not recognisable to the human body, some of which have now been proved to be cancer forming.

The food industry is strictly regulated by a number of professional bodies, but the skincare and cosmetics industry is not. The organic sector has a number of different governing bodies across the world and they all have differing standards of what is acceptable and not, they have been trying for 5 years to put all this together in an organisation called COSMOS, but agreeing on details is not proving easy.

Although a product may be certified by a governing body, it is good to remember there is varying levels of certification and some chemicals are allowed as long as the governing body is OK with them.

A growing number of skincare companies are choosing not to be certified because they feel quite strongly that their products are more pure than the standards layed out by the governing bodies, and the goal posts are always being moved making the certification process lengthy, costly and time consuming.