Why Get Informed? Because Your Skin is a Conduit, Not Armour

Think for a moment about the number of personal care products and cosmetic items you use in a day. All of which gets sprayed, slathered, rubbed and painted directly onto your largest organ.

Skin absorption studies have shown a wide range of absorption rates when substances are applied. The skin on your face has been found to be much more absorbent than skin elsewhere on your body.

How much of which products ends up in your bloodstream is impossible to tell without extensive blood and urine testing at intervals after application, but you can at least know for certain that stuff does go in. The highest absorption rate ever recorded was ingredient.

We recognize that just because an ingredient is natural, doesn't mean it’s safe (arsenic and hemlock for instance). However there are a wonderful plethora of natural ingredients that have been used for hundreds if not thousands of years and are known for their therapeutic benefits (lavender and shea butter for example).

According to Gillian Deacon’s ‘There’s Lead in Your Lipstick’, 85% of the more than 85,000 chemicals in use in today’s marketplace have not been tested for long term human health impacts.

This is a call to you to inform yourself. Make educated buying decisions. In an effort to make a gray world a little more black and white, we created a Red List of ingredients we’ll never use. We made a promise to use only 100% natural ingredients. We defined natural, so everyone would know what we meant when we used the word. We also recognize that toxicity is a matter of dose, in extremely large quantities even water is toxic. But to make it easy for people to understand that we don’t use any of the toxins typically found in body care products we refer to our products as Toxin-Free.

There are many resources out there to help you navigate the world of natural. Starting with Gill Deacon’s book mentioned above, ThinkDirty, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, and EWG’s Skin Deep Database.  

1. Robinson et al. The Importance of Exposure Estimation in the Assessment of Skin Sensitization risk. Contact Dermatitis 2000; 42:251-259