Skincare is literally food for your skin…or is it?
These days it seems like a lot of the products we put on our skin do more harm than good, and worse yet, we often don’t even know exactly what ingredients we’re putting on our face.
Who has been through the nightmare of splurging on products that claim to fix our blemishes, whether that’s breakouts, pigmentation, or signs of aging, only to see no improvement, or even see things worse than they were?
We’ve all been there.
And it’s a vicious cycle, in which we go out and splurge on more and more skincare products to try fix things.
It’s hard to find skincare with a clean ingredient list, which still does the job it promises to.
We are Australian doctors who struggled with keeping our skin healthy while juggling with the balance between work and life.
We couldn’t help but start to research the new skincare we were trying out, and apply our medical knowledge in breaking down the ingredients list and formulations.
Now we dedicate our spare time to finding the best skincare routine with more organic, natural ingredients.
We analyze the ingredients list of skincare using resources such as the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit organization dedicated to research and education about environmental and health concerns. EWG uses a scoring system from 1-10 to rate the known and suspected hazards of ingredients based on published literature.
Factors that we evaluate include:
- carcinogenicity (associations with cancer)
- developmental and reproductive toxicity (e.g. infertility, birth defects, and developmental delays)
- allergies and immunogenicity (harm to the immune system)
- endocrine disruption
- eye, skin and lung irritation
- organ system toxicity, and
- ecotoxicology (toxicity posed to the environment).
A score of 1-2 is classified as “low hazard”, 3-6 is “moderate hazard” and 7-10 is “high hazard”.
We like to limit use of skincare containing ingredients in the high hazard category, and recommend skincare with the majority of ingredients that fall in the low hazard category.
Apart from online resources, we also analyze product labels, product websites, ingredient disclosure documents, and toxicity databases to make our recommendations.
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