Avoid Skin Care Products Containing Propylene Glycol. Why?

Is there a safe effective alternative to skin care products containing Propylene Glycol?

Propylene Glycol is used in a wide range of other products including for generating smoke, in anti freeze, a solvent in photographic chemicals, to regulate humidity in a cigar humidor, as brake fluid, in beetle traps and a wide range of other uses.

It is used in skin care products and in particular in moisturisers as a humectant. A humectant in skin care products is added to help the skin retain moisture, and to prevent general moisture loss.

It is also useful to help ingredients to penetrate the skin, or what is known as a skin penetration enhancer.

If you look at a Material Safety Data Sheet on Propylene Glycol you will see that amongst other things that it warns any user of this chemical to avoid contact of Propylene Glycol with the skin as this can cause skin irritation and other health problems.

At the Cosmetic Safety Database products containing Propylene Glycol are linked to cancer, development and/or reproductive toxicity, skin irritation, organ system toxicity, neurotoxicity (in other words potential damage to the brain) and more.

It would seem unusual that skin care products which are supposedly intended to improve the health of your skin could include an ingredient that is actually harmful to, or an irritant to, your skin. Sadly that is the case, and if you look at the Cosmetic Safety Database you will see hundreds, no in fact thousands of anti aging skin care products such as moisturisers and others which contain Propylene Glycol.

It is also used as a food additive and is commonly recognised as safe when taken orally. The health risks appear to relate to the use of this chemical on the skin.

It is considered by the National Library of Medicine to irritate the eyes and induce the flow of tears.

Cellex-C Betaplex New Complexion Collection is an example of a moisturiser which contains Propylene Glycol. It scores a 10 out of 10 (high health hazard) at the Cosmetic Safety Database and has a myriad of health warnings for all sorts of health conditions including cancer.

The Cosmetic Safety Database lists the ingredients shown on the packaging of this product and the list of ingredients is frightening, including 2 that we have already spoken about as being worrying, Propylparaben, (one of the parabens family of chemicals used as preservatives) and fragrance.

This particular product is one of 339 moisturisers listed on the database as containing Propylene Glycol.

Sadly the use of chemical ingredients which may be damaging to your health is quite unnecessary. Commonly they are used in the big brand-name skin care and anti aging products because they are cheap.

Other ingredients are commonly available which pose no risks to your health, which are quite natural and which are very effective at producing optimum skin care. Avocado oil, macadamia nut oil and Shea butter are just 3 examples of such ingredients, all of which are found in the very highest quality natural skin care products, all of which are safe to put on your skin, or for that matter to eat, and all of which produce a very effective quality skin care outcome.

So the obvious question is if ingredients such as these are commonly available why are they not used by the big brand-name companies? That’s an extremely good question. The best answer we can give from our observations is that these ingredients are much more expensive, and that these companies seek to keep the cost of their ingredients as low as possible so that they can keep the product competitively priced whilst still spending the maximum on marketing.

Of course this approach works very well and accounts for the fact that these companies make billions of dollars every year selling these products. Sadly that may well be at the risk to the consumers health.

One niche natural skin care company however turns this formula on its head. Rather than spending as much as possible on marketing it spends nothing on marketing and redirects the budget into product quality. This allows them to produce much higher quality natural skin care products which are highly effective, but which are highly competitively priced as well, because of the savings to the marketing budget.

This company competes in the marketplace not by saturation advertising but by producing high quality products. Once a customer tries the products they usually become a customer for life. Read the rest of this entry