Trying to read a cosmetic ingredient label is a lot like trying to read Shakespeare: you know it’s important, but you may have no idea what you’re reading really means. The Cosmetics Cop Team’s Cosmetic Ingredient Dictionary can help a lot, but the issue of how much of an ingredient should be in a formula is, for the most part, impossible for a consumer to understand.

For example, if you decide to look up decyl glucoside you’ll find out it is a gentle cleansing agent. But how much of that ingredient do you need and what other ingredients does it work best with? Or what about the dozens of other gentle cleansing agents that can be used instead? The same is true for antioxidants and countless other beneficial ingredients.

Making it even more complicated is the more than 20,000 cosmetic ingredients that a cosmetic chemist can select from to use in any formula in an endless variety of amounts. Now that’s really confusing!

Here’s what you need to know to make the most sense of it all:

1. The benefit or risk of any ingredient is in the dose, the form, and the delivery system. For example, salt is composed of sodium and chloride. Pure sodium and chloride by themselves are corrosive (think what happens when salt is sprayed on ice-covered roads), but together they become a tasty seasoning for food. But consuming too much salt can be a serious problem for high blood pressure. It works this way for each and every cosmetic ingredient as well.

2. While concentrations and formulation are everything, there is very little consensus in the cosmetic industry on how much of an ingredient is best or in what combination with other ingredients it should be used with. What studies do exist have limitations as the possible combinations are, quite literally, endless.

3. For most ingredients, knowing the percentage doesn’t give you much information at all because ingredients often work in combination with other ingredients, or as a part of other products’ formulations it is meant to work with. How much of each, and with what other products it’s to be used with, is the art of the formulator. I could never explain that for the large range of ingredients and products I’ve chosen to use for Paula’s Choice various skin-care systems, which is why, with a few exceptions, I have chosen not to reveal specific percentages for ingredients.

Delving a bit further into individual ingredient percentages, we always disclose the percentage of active ingredients required by the FDA for sunscreens, skin lightening, and acne products. We also share concentrations of the salicylic acid and glycolic acid we use because those ingredients do have specific research about how much is needed for optimal efficacy. But for the other ingredients I use in my products the specific percentage is what makes each formula unique to Paula’s Choice. Most important for you to know is that I have formulated my products based on my 30 years of experience in the cosmetics world using a cocktail approach to skin care.

Why “cocktail”? Research makes it abundantly clear that skin requires a cocktail (mixture) of ingredients to keep it healthy. Just like your diet requires many different foods to keep you healthy, skin is just as complex. No one skin-care ingredient can provide what skin needs.
Mixing different, state-of-the-art, and effective ingredients results in a more powerful blend that can make your skin look beautiful and radiant. Now that’s great skin care—even though the ingredient lists may stir more questions than answers!

Every time I see a tanning salon I want to make a picket sign of some kind and parade in front shouting “Stay away, cancer lurks inside!” Very little has been done to protect people from what these businesses really have to offer. Campaigns to stay out of the sun for some reason rarely, if ever, mention tanning beds. Hopefully that will change since the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC a division of the World Health Organization, WHO) has re-categorized indoor tanning devices as being a carcinogen for humans. Tanning beds now share the spotlight with other dangerously high cancer risks.

I expect that this news will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes for those who are fans of using tanning beds. Those fans include 30 million people who tan indoors in the United States annually. Among that figure, 2.3 million are teens. According to the American Academy of Dermatology (AADA) research shows that the risk of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, increases by 75% when regular use of tanning beds and sunlamps begins before the age of 30. Sadly, melanoma is the most common form of cancer for young adults 25-29 years old and the second most common form of cancer for adolescents and young adults aged 15-29 years old.

As the AADA has stated in the past, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should ban the sale and use of tanning equipment for non-medical purposes. Unless and until the FDA bans the sale and use of tanning equipment for non-medical purposes, the AADA supports the following requirements for indoor tanning facilities:

• No minor should be permitted to use tanning devices.
• A Surgeon General’s warning should be placed on all tanning devices.
• No person or facility should advertise the use of any ultraviolet A or ultraviolet B tanning device using wording such as “safe,” “safe tanning,” “no harmful rays,” “no adverse effect,” or similar wording or concepts.

AADA, on this one you rock! And to my readers who still use tanning beds (and especially to parents of teens that visit tanning salons), I beg you to reconsider the risk you’re taking in the name of beauty (and by most standards around the world isn’t beautiful in the least). You may prefer a tan to your natural skin color, but what you perceive now as beautiful will lead to leathery-looking wrinkled skin and a very good chance of having a potentially life-threatening disease in the future.

“Reading the ingredient list won’t really tell you about the product; it’s all about how the ingredients react to your skin.”

I couldn’t disagree more. The ingredient list is the only part of the product’s copy that you can and should rely on because it is the only part of a cosmetics label that is regulated by the FDA (Source: www.fda.gov). It’s true that knowing how to decipher an ingredient list is difficult, but even if you know how it doesn’t tell you exactly what percentage of each ingredient was used to create the formula; it is a far more reliable source of information than the product’s description and claims. Yes, the way the ingredients react on the skin is also important, but if a product has lackluster or irritating ingredients, or only minuscule amounts of helpful ingredients, then it is a waste of money, plain and simple. In contrast, an elegant product loaded with ingredients that can make skin look, feel, and function better will in all likelihood cause a noticeable improvement, and that has everything to do with what ingredients the product contains and how they react on your skin!