Daily skin care routine at home with natural products
Natural cosmetics for your everyday skin care routine at home.
I want to help you know how to do a good daily skin care routine at home, which are the correct natural skincare products to use and how to use them in a correct way.
My thoughts on how to take care of skin naturally
At the time, it was something I didn’t know. Maybe I even thought that enjoying benefits of using natural skin care products was only for those who had money to pay for all the magical natural and organic skin care ingredients.
The reason why I thought so, was probably because when you compare some cheap skincare sets of a conventional brand to a skincare set of a brand that has its products packed with natural and organic ingredients many times you will notice the significant difference in price. But then I became more interested in the individual ingredients and found that the vast majority of them were synthetically produced.
Now, let me explain this – I have no problem with certain synthetically produced ingredients, for example peptides, retinoids, ceramides or niacinamide. These synthetically produced active ingredients can do miracles for your skin. But what you certainly wouldn’t find in my skincare routine are synthetically produced ingredients, such as silicones, already mentioned sodium laureth sulfate or certain kinds of alcohol bad for skin. This is simply because these ingredients irritate my skin (and I know there is evidence that they caused skin reactions in a high number of people, so I am not alone in this). Moreover, some of them aren’t biodegradable.
What exactly does it mean? The term biodegradable means any materials or ingredients that have the ability to decompose in the environment naturally.
I know that, for example dimethicone is a great emollient that works to prevent moisture loss. But I also know that it is not biodegradable and it doesn’t do anything else for the skin than creating a layer on the skin to prevent water loss.
If I want to use an emollient to make my skin smoother and to protect it from cold or wind, I simply prefer using some more natural and organic ingredients, for example borage oil. It has great skin rejuvenation, anti-aging, scar treatment abilities which makes borage oil useful for the treatment of eczema and psoriasis as well as burns and open wounds such as cuts and grazes. Moreover, borage oil also creates a thin layer on the skin to prevent the water loss.
On internet you can often find endocrine disrupting chemicals list of raw materials that cause hormonal imbalance. Surely there is carcinogenic chemicals list that may be found in cosmetics, too. In this case I guess I follow the golden mean. I don’t use such ingredients myself, but I don’t encourage others to stop using them either.
Why? Because all the researches offer different information and even scientists are not able to come to a conclusion. That’s why I am choosing to not include them in my daily skin care routine at home. Just in case they would in ten years confirm that this endocrine disrupting chemicals list and the carcinogenic chemicals list really do have all the negative effects on our health.
Simple and ideal solutions in skin care: What is natural cosmetics?
Here I would like to point out one thing. Currently the problem with natural cosmetics definition is that the term “natural skincare“ is not regulated. Each company and manufacturer and even consumer might be looking for a different standart of “natural“ in the products they formulate, purchase and use on their bodies. This means that each company can pick and choose what ingredients they consider natural in terms of the beliefs and standards of each company.
Be careful with “Greenwashing“. Not all natural and organic ingredients may be so natural and organic. Greenwashing is a term used when brands make claims that could be misleading to encourage people to choose their product. For example, they could highlight natural or organic ingredients on the label even though the other ingredients present would not be considered natural or organic ingredients.
So don’t just blindly believe everything you can read on the packaging and rather focus on the INCI list itself, ,which is the list of ingredients that should be written on each and every product.
Another good indicator that you are looking at a product with natural and organic ingredients is a logo of a recognized certification body.
This logo indicates that this brand follows certain important standards of environmentally friendly production and/or, for example vegan, natural and organic ingredients. This, of course, depends on the chosen certification. On the other hand, these certificates are really expensive. Especially for small brands that are just starting. So here we are coming back to the importance of being able to read the ingredients list.
Source of information: zdravaplet which mean skin care in czech is a very specialized website about skin wellbeing and healthy life style in general.