Surely there can’t be dangerous ingredients in facial skin care products and other beauty products?

That title looks sensationalist doesn’t it? What do natural facial skin care products, or any skin care products for that matter, have to do with cancer? Let’s see.

It’s sad to say but there is a whole range of personal and beauty products on the market, that you probably see on the shelves of your local store every day, that contain ingredients that in some cases are “known to cause cancer”. Today we’d like to tell you a little bit more about dangerous skin care products and dangerous cosmetics and give you some of the suspect ingredients that you should look for when examining the labels of any bottles of product you are considering buying.

It’s not just facial skin care treatments or products. The same applies to a wide range of personal products such as cosmetics, soaps and shampoos, beauty products and personal products such as deodorants as well as anti aging products. Examine the label of any of these products and chances are you’ll find the following ingredients:

1. Sodium Laurel Sulphate. This is found particularly in shampoos but in many other products as well. In skin irritation tests Sodium Laurel Sulphate is used as the standard skin irritant. Research has shown that Sodium Laurel Sulphate is a potential carcinogen and can cause skin inflammation.

2. Mineral oil. Mineral oil is used in a wide range of products because it is very cheap. Mineral oil is a petrochemical product derived from the distillation of crude oil. Here’s a quote from a mineral oil Material Safety Data Sheet:”minerals oil are suspected carcinogens of the skin and scrotum, larynx, lung and alimentary tracts” and ” may cause eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation”.

3. Lead. We don’t need to tell you how bad lead is for your is for your health, we’re sure you know already. A recent study found lead in over 50 percent of big brand-name lipsticks tested. Lead is banned in lipsticks in Europe and now in California however is still an ingredient in lipsticks you may be buying now.

4. Glycerin. Glycerin is found in many facial skin care products as a moisturizer. It doesn’t moisturize skin however draws moisture to the surface of the skin and also absorbs moisture from the air. It can actually make the skin drier. The Material Safety Data Sheet describes it as “irritates the eyes, the skin and the respiratory tract.”

5. Propylene Glycol. This is used as a moisturizer in many products used on the skin. It is used in hydraulic fluid, paint and floor wax and has been shown to cause liver damage, kidney damage and central nervous system problems.

There’s many more suspect ingredients in your personal products such as facial skincare treatments and other beauty products.

So if you’re looking for top quality skin care products that do not contain these ingredients what do you do? The most important thing is to know what is in the product before you buy it. Educate yourself about the sorts of ingredients you ought to avoid and then read the label of any product before you buy.

And when you find a product that does not contain suspect ingredients and works for you then stick to it.

And for those seeking excellent (and safe) facial skin care products we consider the best to be those from Xtend Life, a small niche skin care company that specializes in natural facial skin care treatments and products that do not contain dangerous ingredients.

Chances are you’ve never heard of Xtend Life. There are very small skin care company that has no marketing budget and does not advertise on TV. However this means that they are able to direct all of their budget into product quality and they are extremely proud the fact that their products use only known safe ingredients.

But they make great skin care products. Read the rest of this entry

Synergy TK is a safe effective moisturizer, petrolatum is not.

You may have been using moisturizers for many years but despite that you may never have heard of Synergy TK. That’s because it is not a moisturizer but is in fact an essential ingredient in the best moisturizer, or the best skin care products. But you may well have heard of Petrolatum.

Petrolatum is an ingredient found in many of the best-known and most popular moisturizers. If you have a moisturizer at home right now have a look on the label and see if petrolatum is listed there. It probably is but Synergy TK (or what is often called Xtend TK) is probably not.

Petrolatum is a petrochemical product as the name suggests. Vasoline is petrolatum. It is used in a wide range of skin care products and other products such as cosmetics for a number of reasons. For example it is used in lipsticks because of its lubricating qualities.

There are a number of other petrochemical products commonly found in mainstream skin care products and other personal and beauty products including mineral oil. You may also from time to time see glycerin and paraffin listed on the labels.

These ingredients are not effective moisturisers. Rather what they do is to repel moisture. That’s why petrolatum, or vasoline, works so well on diaper rash, because it repels moisture. The principle behind using these ingredients in skin care products is that they form a film over the skin to prevent moisture loss because the moisture cannot use the film of oil.

The main reason these ingredients are used is that they are extremely cheap. Mineral oil for example is cheaper to buy than it is to dispose of.

However they are not good moisturizers. Mineral oil has been linked to a number of health problems and is now no longer allowed in any form of medication. Petrolatum has also been linked to breast cancer and is now banned for use in these products in the European Union.

It is gradually becoming more well-known that many of the ingredients used in mainstream personal and anti aging products are not particularly effective and can lead to health problems. There are now entire organisations set up to combat this proliferation of suspect ingredients in personal products, for example the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

Enter Synergy TK.

This is one of the major active ingredients found in the best natural skin care products that moisturize skin far more effectively than the big brand names that use petroleum based products.

Synergy TK has no petroleum products in it. It is a patented high quality ingredient used only in the very best skin care products. It is sourced from the wool of sheep and everything in Synergy TK is naturally occurring and safe to use.

You may have heard of the important role of keratin in your skin. Many products contain keratin because it is an essential component of healthy skin and helps in the production of collagen. However the keratin used in most skin care products is sourced from the hooves and horns of animals and is removed from these by a process using heat and acid. This alters the form of the resulting keratin and makes it effectively useless to the skin.

The process that extracts keratin from the wool of sheep for Synergy TK does not use either heat or acid. This results in a form of keratin that is available to the skin and which use far more successful at stimulating the natural production of collagen in the skin.

Only the very best skin care products use Synergy TK because it is extremely expensive to buy. Most skin care companies try to minimise the cost of the products and spend most of their budget on marketing. That’s why you see so much of their advertising on TV.

However one small niche skin care company chooses not to advertise at all but rather to spend its budget on product quality and not on marketing, on the principle that a new customer will become a customer for life. Therefore they can afford far more expensive ingredients at much greater quantities in their products and still sell them at a price that is cost competitive with the big brands.

This company doesn’t make a moisturizer. The reason for this is that all their skin care products contain Synergy TK, though they call it Xtend TK, together with a range of other effective natural moisturizers and therefore customers do not need to buy a dedicated moisturizer. All the products moisturize successfully. Read the rest of this entry