Tuesday, November 24, 2009

What You Should Look for (and What You Shouldn't Find) in the Best Moisturizer.

By Peter Albertonach

Can your moisturizer be dangerous? What a silly question. Moisturizers are intended to benefit our skin aren't they. How could a moisturizer possibly be dangerous?

Sad to say but there are many chemical as well as petrochemical ingredients which are used in so many of the big brand-name skin care products, including moisturizers, which we all take for granted. 2 examples of these chemical ingredients are sodium lauryl sulphate and mineral oil, a petrochemical.

Many of these chemical ingredients are used in so many of our personal products such as moisturizers because they are extremely cheap. Many are manufactured in laboratories. Mineral oil is so cheap that it actually costs less to buy it than to dispose of it.

There is an organisation called the Environmental Working Group which maintains a database of ingredients used in these sorts of products. This is called the Cosmetic Safety Database and provides information on the massive range of chemical ingredients used in so many of our personal products, including moisturizers.

If you search for sodium lauryl sulphate in the Cosmetic Safety Database you'll see that the results tell you that sodium lauryl sulphate is linked to cancer as well as developmental and reproductive toxicity, neurotoxicity, organ system toxicity, skin irritation and much much more. And you will get similar results if you search for mineral oil.

Studies have shown that many of these ingredients commonly found in skin care and anti aging products such as moisturizers can have negative health risks. For example a study recently published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology called "Tumorigenic Effect of Some Commonly Used Moisturizing Creams when Applied Topically to UVB-Pretreated High-Risk Mice" demonstrated that a number of moisturizers which contained mineral oil and sodium lauryl sulphate, when applied 5 days a week for 17 weeks, "increased significantly the rate of formation of tumors and the rate of increase in tumor size per mouse".

The researchers were extremely surprised from this result because this was not what they were studying. They were actually studying to see if caffeine could cause skin cancer in mice. When confronted with this result the researchers requested that the manufacturer of the moisturizer in question manufacture another moisturizer without any mineral oil or sodium lauryl sulphate in it and when tested they discovered that using this moisturizer produced no effect at all on the growth of tumors in the mice.

If you search at the Cosmetic Safety Database you can find, and read, many of the studies which are relied on by the database to produce the results.

Although it may never have occurred to you there is a wide range of health risks that you may be exposed to because of the use of chemicals and petrochemical ingredients in modern moisturizers and other anti aging skin care products, it is clear that the health risks exist.

So perhaps you should decide that it's dangerous to use these products and you should swear off anti aging skin care products forever. However this is unnecessary. There are good alternatives.

There are small niche companies which recognize the problem with mainstream chemical laden anti aging skin care products and see this as an opportunity to manufacture safe and effective skin care products containing none of the chemical ingredients that are commonly found in mainstream skin care products such as moisturizers.

The anti aging market is massive and there are billions of dollars at stake and it is extremely difficult for small companies like this to compete with the big brand names, but they do so by differentiating themselves by producing safe and effective natural skin care products that will produce the results you want without risking your health. These companies do not use the chemical alternatives used by so many of the big brand-name manufacturers despite the fact that these chemical alternatives are much cheaper.

Whilst these products are not household names as so many others are you will be pleasantly surprised at the results you get if you track down these natural skin care products and try them. You won't be putting your health at risk and you'll find highly effective at serious skin care. But sometimes it's difficult to find these natural skin care products because these small niche anti aging companies cannot compete with the big brand names on marketing budget and cannot afford to advertise on television.

So the bad news is that if you use modern big name moisturizers the chances are that they are laden with chemical additives which, whilst very cheap for the manufacturer to use, may be putting your health at risk. The good news is that there are natural skin care products available which are highly effective at producing better skin health and which don't use the chemical ingredients.

On my website about natural skin care I try to alert my readers to these problems and point them in the direction of safe are more natural alternatives such as natural moisturizers and other natural anti aging products. Visit my website to find out more. - 14130

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