Skin Care Routine?? - I wish...

So I was planning on this being a post about the lovely skin care regimen I've put together since talking about how my skin care was just a mish-mash of things I wanted to use up. Unfortunately for this post, but fortunately for my skin, I have been learning about ingredients in skincare and makeup that are common and aid in skin aging instead of anti-aging. Two big ones are fragrance and alcohol. Looking at the ingredients on the back of products I'm using, I had kind of a minor freak out. I'm not claiming to be an expert on this or even to know a lot about it, but here's what I've gathered so far.

Fragrance, it seems, is in just about every sort of skin care product you could imagine, which means products I thought I wanted to buy now have to be reevaluated. If you think about any kind of high end skin care product, more than likely it has a lovely scent. It adds to the luxurious feeling of pampering your skin, right? While it may make you feel like a million bucks, in the long run, it can really damage your skin.

Alcohol too, is in many products we put on our faces. Alcohol is another known irritant to the skin. There are, however, some alcohols that are bad for your skin (isopropyl alcohol for one) and others that are actually good for your skin. Here's a video explaining the differences and listing the names of both kinds. I reference her list of goodies and baddies often when researching products. This youtuber used to be an esthetician and makes very informative videos. Check out more of her stuff if this really interests you.

Even if you don't have typically sensitive skin, which I don't, the damage is still being done. I've heard it likened to smoking - you may smoke for years without major health problems, but all the time tar and crap(very scientific) is building up in your lungs and it will one day become very apparent just how bad for you the habit has been. While fragrance doesn't build up on your skin, it does work to break down elastin in the skin - something that cannot be replaced once it is damaged. As far as I know, elastin is what keeps your skin elastic (I'm a genius, I know) and keeps it from sagging and wrinkling while your young. It's normal for this to break down as we age, but we don't have to speed it along with irritants in our skin care and makeup.

Aiding to my minor freak out is just how difficult it is to find products without alcohol or fragrance. Organic ranges seem like a good place to start, however natural fragrance is still an irritant to skin. *doh* So there's a brand called Simple that is supposed to be for sensitive skin, but not every single product they make is free of irritants. *getting grumpier* I've found that there aren't many entire brands or ranges of skin care or makeup without known irritants. So much for an easy answer of just being able to blindly use products from a brand because you know it is "safe". This means I have to do actual work to research each product that I want to try. And not just reviews and videos, but reading ingredients and looking them up.

I have found a tool that is fairly helpful in trying to figure out what is ok for skin and what isn't. It's called Beautypedia. Before anyone takes this as their only source of information on what products to use, here are a few things to keep in mind: this site is maintained by a skin care brand - Paula's Choice - that obviously wants you to buy their products before anyone else's. They have a rating scale that goes from Poor, to Average, to Good, to Best. Of course, all of the Paula's choice products have a "Best" rating because they're not going to say anything bad about what they sell. Talk about having to take advice with a grain of salt! That being said, here is how I use this site - I look for a product I want to try and pretty much ignore the rating they give it. I do this because I have seen products rated Poor or Average just because of the price and the fact that there are lower cost alternatives out there. In those cases, the rating has nothing to do with the appropriateness of the product for use on skin. I've learned that I have to read their reasoning for rating the product the way they did. Did they rate it poorly because of cost? because even though there are no detrimental ingredients, there are no particularly beneficial ones either? because of some other bias? or because it genuinely does contain irritants? This site is not the end-all-be-all of skincare information. So take all that for what it's worth.

I don't know if this is helpful to any of you, but it's made me think twice about picking up just any old lotion from the drugstore, or even from Sephora for that matter. Does anyone have any other or better sites for identifying products without bad ingredients?