The skin is the first barrier between inside and outside world. Dust, dirt, environmental agents and skin care ingredients enter the body through this important protective organ providing significant access to the blood stream.Usually, to protect yourself from all the potentially dangerous factors and to keep your good appearance, you are using skin care products. Their purpose is to cleanse, nourish, regenerate and protect. In todays market the modern cosmetic industry is given us skin care products with splendid texture, appealing color, nice smell and chemical ingredients. You know exactly which is the most active ingredient or ingredients from a skin care formulation: collagen, alpha- hydroxy acids, vitamin C-ester, testosterone and so on. The advertising is based on the known effect of each primer ingredient onto the skin such as: Collagen-anti wrinkles, alpha-hydroxy acid- peeling and wrinkles reducer, et cetera. What you dont know is how all the other chemical ingredients from a skin care product, even in tiny amount, will affect your health in time. Even a low dosage at repeated exposure will affect your body as much as a high dosage will affect at one time application. You are not aware that the chemicals are not recognized by our body and therefore they can not be used in our metabolic pathway to be destroyed and eliminate. They are stored in fat tissues, in the blood arteries and veins, and ultimately in organs. On the other hand they can induce alterations at the cellular level. Some of the chemical ingredients have been already proven to induce cancer and birth defects. A cosmetic company, developing natural skin care products (And I am not talking of products that have one or two natural ingredients in the list and they are claiming being natural) is more difficult to establish. The reasons are multiple and I will reveal them in a future article. In spite of the difficulties, it is very rewarding for a company to offer his customers healthy products with no long term side effects. What you get is a complex of vitamins, minerals, phytohormons, fatty acids, enzymes everything that the skin needs. It is difficult to eliminate deep wrinkles, but you can diminish them most of all prevent them! The way to do this is to let the skin cells properly function by giving them everything they need, the right amount of recognizable nutrients. What you dont know about natural Cosmetics is the complexity and difficulty to create a synergy of the active molecules to get the maximum skin benefit. In order to get these results you must have a deep understanding of the biochemical processes to evaluate and predict how a natural mixture acts as an entirety. This is a time consuming process and requires long term studies and tests. I think that in this particular time a returning to the ancient herbs and oils knowledge with a complete understanding of a modern science is one of the trends that we will have to promote in the cosmetic business as well as in food technology. |
