There’s been a growing movement toward ditching complex chemical products and getting back to basics with more natural products for every aspect of life: cleaning, eating, dressing, and so on. First of all, allow me to say this: I’m all for it! Living a life with fewer artificial products and chemicals can have outstanding benefits for your health and the environment.
As with any movement, though, there are some cases in which the quest to go natural has gone in a direction that is causing more harm than good. Unfortunately, that’s the case with DIY skincare. It’s easy to find “recipes” all over the web for exfoliants, masks, cleansers, and so on that you make at home with ingredients like egg whites, sugar, or honey. As much as you should applaud yourself by looking for a natural solution, the fact is that there are several serious dangers to these experiments.
1. Abrasive Ingredients
One of the most common types of DIY skin care you’ll hear about is DIY facial scrubs. These recipes aim to exfoliate your skin using rough-textured ingredients like granulated sugar, coffee grounds, or even crushed-up walnut shells.
First of all, ouch. Second, it’s important to understand that there’s actually a precise method behind creating safe and effective exfoliants. Skin care creators have pinpointed the textures and levels of abrasiveness that are rough enough to exfoliate but not so rough that they injure healthy skin. Using a DIY recipe puts you at risk for using textures that create scrapes and micro-tears in your skin, leaving you vulnerable to infections.
For exfoliation without the harshness, reach for a targeted treatment like theGlyMed Plus Skin Astringent No. 5 with 5% salycylic acid. This astringent also contains aloe vera to treat, hydrate and soothe acne-prove skin.
2. Ingredient Interactions
Mentos and coke. Baking soda and vinegar. Each of those combos starts with two ingredients that are just sitting peacefully on their own but if you put them together, they interact in a famously explosive way.
Every ingredient you use, including those basic ingredients you have in your kitchen, has its own molecular makeup that could interact poorly if you combine it with certain other ingredients. When skin care ingredients are developed by knowledgeable chemists in a lab, the chemists are experts in knowing what they can and cannot combine. The simple fact is that if you’re mixing up ingredients at home, you don’t know what negative interactions you could create – until you put the mixture on your skin and end up with inflammation or worse.
You’ve probably heard plenty of cautionary tales about washing your makeup brushes to avoid serious skin infections, and that’s a must-do part of your routine. But dangerous bacteria can live in the ingredients in your kitchen, too.
That’s especially the case if we’re talking about ingredients that you stash in the cupboard for many months while they’re closed but fully sealed, like sugar. These ingredients could harbor small amounts of bacteria that might be just fine to ingest or that may become harmless when you cook the product but are dangerous to put on your skin. So if you’re using a DIY cleansing mask, for example, you might actually be making your skin less clean.
Instead, you may want to opt for a mask like the Revision Pore Purifying Clay Mask, which deep cleans pores and leaves skin feeling soft and smooth. This mask also includes anti-inflammatory ingredients that promote healing and soothe irritation.
4. Environmental Interactions
When mixing your own skin care products, you don’t just need to be concerned about interactions between the ingredients. You need to worry about the way those ingredients could interact with elements of your environment too.
For example, have you ever heard of citrus burns? If the juice of certain citrus fruits like limes gets on your skin and then your skin is exposed to the sun, it can cause severe second-degree burns.The scary truth is that you don’t know what you don’t know, so in DIY skincare, you have no way of knowing that you aren’t setting yourself up for an unfortunate reaction.
5. Skin-Specific Reactions
One of the biggest challenges with skin care is that each person’s skin is so unique. Depending on your skin’s unique anatomy, its hydration level, and so on, a product that works perfectly well for some people could be a recipe for disaster for others. This is why skin care products have labels telling you what skin types and concerns they’re designed for.
In DIY skin care, though, it’s all a gamble. Most of the recipes you find are posted by one person who tried them and found that it worked great for them, but they have no way of knowing if it’s compatible with other skin types, skin pigmentations, hydration levels, and so on.
The Truth: Professional Skin Care Isn’t As “Chemical” As You Think
The purpose of explaining all those dangers above isn’t to scare you into giving up your goal of living a more natural lifestyle. In fact, now that we’ve gotten all the bad news out of the way, we can get to the good news. Natural skin care is actually much easier than you think it is!
There are countless trusted skin care brands that have the same mission you do: to make skin care more natural and organic. And they’re making products that fit those criteria but are designed by scientists who specialize in skin and can make sure their products are safe.
So, if you want to switch to natural skin care, all you need to do is shop Skin Elite for natural skin care products . In fact, all of the products we’ve linked above are natural products – surprise! No recipes or messy dishes needed!