Skin Care, Beauty and Cosmetic Ingredients to Avoid

Labels on cosmetics products sound like Chinese for most of us. And sadly, most people don't read them at all. That's a big mistake, because some ingredients can affect your beauty and health.
Each ingredient might have a side-effect that you wouldn't like to experience at all. However, mainstream beauty product brands (both high-end and cheap ones) use several standard chemicals that are cheap, but not so healthy for our bodies. Let's look through the list of the most harmful ingredients, so you will be able to recognize them and avoid them.

There are natural products or natural ingredients used for body care as well. You don't have to damage your health in order to look great.

• Propylene Glycol. It is a byproduct of petroleum and it is used for locking humidity. Results of several researches report that it causes kidney and liver damage simply through skin contact! Propylene Glycol is toxic and our organism tends to ‘refuse' it with various allergic reactions. If these are not enough for you, here's the last argument: you can find Propylene Glycol in industrial anti-freeze.

• DMDM Hydrantoin is used in cars as anti-freeze. Does it sound OK to put some anti-freeze on your skin?

• Both Imidazolidinyl Urea and Diazolidinyl Urea are still used as preservative materials. They keep products suitable to use for a long time, but they cause inflammation of skin. Sadly, these are very popular preservatives in the industry; only parabens are more commonly used then these two.

• Ethyl, Methyl, Propyl and Butyl Parabens. You can find a certain combination of these materials in almost every beauty product, because they inhibit microbial growth and greatly extend product's use time this way. Parabens are popular because they are very cheap ingredients. But you may suspect that cheap doesn't mean healthy. Parabens irritate skin and cause allergic reactions because they are highly toxic.

• Synthetic Colors are not good for you as well. You can recognize them as they are labeled as ‘D&C' or ‘FD&C' with a color number next to them. Most lipsticks contain these synthetic colors, so when you put on a lipstick, you put on these ingredients as well. These materials are dangerous, because they are based on coal-tars that are carcinogens.

• Petrolatum is used as moisturizer, although it actually works the other way around. Petrolatum is so called mineral oil jelly; it coats a skin (which is very unhealthy effect), stimulates sun damage and inhibits natural moisturizing processes of skin. Why is it used in the industry then? You can guess it easily: it is extremely cheap.

• Sodium Lauryl Sulfate. You can find the name of this harsh detergent on almost every shampoo label.