Authors: Julie Gabriel
Tags: #ebook, #book
The Green Beauty Guide: Your Essential Resource to Organic and Natural Skin Care, Hair Care, Makeup, and Fragrances (4 page)
It is important to feed aging skin with substances that resemble the skin’s own oils.
TEWL is the constant movement of water through the epidermis. Water evaporates through the epidermis to the surrounding atmosphere. Environmental factors such as humidity, temperature, season, and the moisture content of the skin can all affect TEWL.
Our skin gets drier as we get older because it loses some of its intercellular lipids after age forty. It is important to feed aging skin with substances that resemble the skin’s own oils. These moisturizers should become oilier, but not necessarily heavier, as our skin ages. Essential fatty acids can greatly help skin retain moisture, and since they are natural, our skin accepts them more happily, which means less irritation.
Skin Eats, Too!
Advocates of synthetic skin care insist that our skin is virtually watertight. Many say skin can be scrubbed, steamed, and washed, and nothing penetrates it deep enough to cause any damage. At the same time, many conventional cosmetics claim they deliver collagen, vitamins, and minerals to feed our skin. So do cosmetics really “get under our skin”?
In fact, beauty is skin deep. Human skin is a powerful absorption organ that seems to be constantly hungry for anything that touches its surface. Just like a curious toddler, our skin grabs every available molecule, every single drop of water, every lick of makeup, and every whiff of fragrance and takes it to its cellular “mouth” to taste, chew on, and, most likely, ingest.
Oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, as well as toxic pollutants, enter our skin via three doors: sweat ducts, hair follicles and sebaceous glands, or directly across the stratum corneum. This ability of skin to absorb chemical substances so they can be spread throughout the body is widely used in medicine. Transdermal delivery drugs for motion sickness, cardiovascular disease, chronic pain, smoking cessation, and birth control are already widely used.
According to new estimates, our skin can absorb up to 60 percent of substances applied to its surface. Unfortunately, along with water, vitamins, minerals, and oxygen, skin soaks up potentially carcinogenic ingredients that increase our risk of having cancer at some point in our lives—as if breathing polluted air and eating chemicals was not enough!
To perform their magic, many cosmetic products need to push active ingredients deeper beyond the stratum corneum, the uppermost layer of skin comprised of dead skin cells. Traditionally, it was thought that hydrophilic (water bonding, or dissolvable in water rather than oil) chemicals do not penetrate deep into skin, while lipophilic chemicals (oils or oil-in-water emulsions) diffuse deeper inside the dermis.
Today, scientists know that the process is much more complicated. Various substances can penetrate the skin using different vehicles, sometimes as simple as water. This is when penetration enhancers, also called sorption promoters or accelerants, come into play. To deliver active ingredients, they decrease the resistance of skin’s barrier. Some dissolve intercellular matrix, some change the skin’s metabolism, and some damage or alter the physical and chemical nature of the top skin layer.
Most common penetration enhancers include alcohols (ethanol), glycols (propylene glycol), and surfactants. Liposomes, biomolecular spheres that encapsulate various chemicals from drugs to active components of cosmetic products, also serve as penetration enhancers. The most common liposome is phosphatidylcholine from soybean or egg yolk, sometimes with added cholesterol. Nanoparticles, currently used to deliver sunscreens and vitamins A and E, can boost the skin’s permeability by up to 30 percent. Some penetration enhancers, such as transferomes, which are made of surfactants and ethanol, are able to deliver up to 100 percent of the drug applied topically! The greater its alcohol content, the deeper the solution is able to penetrate. Many essential oils have been reported to be gentle yet effective penetration enhancers.
What happens when a potentially toxic substance passes the skin’s barriers? It ends up in blood vessels and lymph ducts located in the epidermis and dermis layers. Skin cells get their nutrients and excrete toxins thanks to an endless circulation of blood and lymph. Lymph, a colorless fluid made of plasma, performs a vitally important drainage function since it provides white blood cells that produce antibodies to fight infection.
As chemicals are absorbed, they enter the bloodstream and travel with lymph across the body, to be eventually filtered out by the liver and flushed away by the kidneys. However, some substances remain inside the body, adding to the systemic load that can accumulate for decades. Since the skin is the largest organ in our body, it soaks up contaminants in much larger amounts than the intestines or lungs.
Most skin care products on themarket contain hundreds of synthetic additives whose safety is based on animal, not human, studies. These studies usually analyze the action of separate ingredients applied on an animal’s skin in enormous doses for short periods of time. Granted, humans are unlikely to encounter such doses. But many of us are loyal to cosmetic products. As a result,we are exposed to small doses of the same toxic chemicals for decades. No one can tell how daily applications of SPF50 sunscreen may impact our health ten years from now—apart from pale skin and possibly a lower risk of skin cancer—simply because these sunscreens have been introduced quite recently, and clinical studies do not cover long periods of time.
Chemical industry insiders say that only small amounts of potentially toxic ingredients are used in cosmetics, from 1 to 10 percent, or just a few micrograms. Medical researchers today are concerned about the long-term, snowballing effect of small doses of questionable chemicals that people absorb from products used consistently over long periods of time.
Let’s say you have been using a fruit-smelling shampoo that contains 1 percent of potentially carcinogenic diethanolamine (DEA), a surfactant that helps to stabilize foams, every day for five years. That is 2ml of DEA per 200ml bottle of shampoo. You may have switched from brand to brand, picking a “volumizing” or “energizing” shampoo variety, but core ingredients remained the same (emollients, penetration enhancers, and shine-boosting silicones). With daily shampooing, you end up using nearly an ounce of pure, industrial-strength DEA in a year. Now imagine that you pour a glass of this transparent, gooey substance over your head and start massaging it vigorously into your skin. Then you wash it off with a stream of hot water so this goo spreads over your freshly scrubbed, warm, and unprotected body. Does it make you feel healthy or more beautiful?
Skin can absorb up to 60 percent of substances applied to its surface.
Part of the problem is that no laboratory has ever found a human volunteer to participate in a study that would involve voluntarily rubbing your head with undiluted diethanolamine—whether derived from coconut or petroleum. Only rats can handle this tough job. A recent study by a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that fetuses of pregnant mice that were exposed to DEA showed slower cell growth and increased cell death in parts of the brain responsible for memory. Simply put, they were smaller and less smart. This happened because DEA has a similar structure to choline, a molecule that is needed in large quantities for normal brain development (Niculescu et al. 2007).
When potential cancer-causing poisonous chemicals are absorbed by the skin and carried with the blood all over the body, the offending chemical can interact with other chemicals in our system. Sometimes these reactions produce substances that provoke cells to evolve in the wrong way, resulting in cancer. Diethanolamine can combine with amines present in cosmetic formulations to form nitrosamines, among them N-nitrosodiethanolamine, which is known to be highly carcinogenic. Toxic ingredients may lead to many other serious diseases, including allergies, fertility problems, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. In the best-case scenario, they may worsen existing acne or cause an allergic reaction that resembles acne. If you do not understand that toxic chemicals in cosmetics make us sick and age prematurely, you will remain a victim of the chemical industry, and it is not good for your skin or the health of the planet.
PREDICTING HOWWELL YOUR SKINWILL SOAK UP
THE GOOD AND BAD IN COSMETICS
How strong is the solution?
If the concentration of a certain ingredient is high, then it has a better chance of sneaking though the skin’s protective barriers. For example, the skin will be exposed to more retinoic acid from a potent prescription-only cream than from an over-the-counter lotion that contains the same ingredient.
How long will it remain on the skin?
The longer the product sits on the skin’s surface, the more of its ingredients will be absorbed. Our skin will soak up more paraben preservatives from a moisturizer that remains on the skin for hours than from a cleanser that is quickly washed off, but if you rub the cleanser vigorously, the absorption rate will increase.
How much water does it contain?
It was once thought that oil-based skin care products penetrate the skin more readily than those that contain water. Today, we know that well-hydrated skin absorbs chemicals at a much higher rate. Besides, hydration can be increased by paraffin, oils, and waxes. Paraffin, oils, and waxes as components of skin creams, ointments, and water-in-oil emulsions—basically anything that prevents transepidermal water loss—can improve the amount of chemicals soaked up by skin. Water acts as an excellent natural penetration enhancer. That’s why your skin can absorb more chemicals when you soak in synthetic bath foam for long time.
How healthy is the skin?
Undamaged, strong skin can shield us from many toxic substances and germs, but even a slight scratch or cut becomes a welcome sign for anything we do not want inside our bodies. Even something as innocuous as the removal of outer layers of skin with a facial scrub or a peeling mask can dramatically increase dermal absorption. Inflamed, swollen acne pimples absorb more benzoyl peroxide than the healthy skin just a millimeter away.
Where do we apply the product?
Skin on different areas of the body varies in thickness. For example, facial skin will absorb ingredients twenty times faster than the thicker skin on the palms of the hands.
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hat is in your morning bathroom routine? Most likely, you take a shower with a zesty, invigorating shower gel; you shampoo and condition your hair; you wash and maybe scrub your face with a foaming fresh-smelling cleanser; if you are a man, you also shave. You splash your skin with a toner or an astringent, top it with a moisturizer with (hopefully) some sunscreen in it, followed by makeup (again, optional), rub some antiperspirant under your arms, and add a spritz of a fragrance to seal the deal. Within fifteen minutes, you have exposed yourself to a whopping amount of chemicals—and you haven’t even left home yet!
After a quick count of ingredients contained in a typical cleanser, toner, moisturizer, eye cream, facial scrub, body wash, body lotion, and sunscreen, I came up with more than two hundred different chemicals that we diligently apply to our skin daily. This is not counting hundreds of synthetic fragrance ingredients in your favorite eau de toilette! Soon you will inhale car emissions, pesticides, radon, volatile organic compounds, persistent organic pollutants, tobacco smoke, dust, and microscopic droplets of grease. You will eat food that contains artificial preservatives, flavors, and colors, and you will drink water that has subpar purity standards, adding to the already brewing cocktail of chemicals that enter your system nonstop.
In 2006, a consumer advocacy group, Environmental Working Group, with the support of the Breast Cancer Fund, Breast Cancer Action, and the National Environmental Trust, released a study of the listed ingredients for 7,500 bestselling beauty products. Here are some of the findings:
About 90 percent of cosmetic ingredients have never been analyzed for health impacts by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review Board, a panel that oversees cosmetic safety. More than seventy popular hair dye products contain ingredients derived from coal tar, a known carcinogen. Nearly 55 percent of products contain “penetration enhancers” that increase the ability of chemicals to enter the bloodstream.
About 90 percent of cosmetic ingredients have never been analyzed for health impacts.
Too Good to Be True?
How many times have you stumbled upon the phrases “our studies show” and “dermatologist tested”? These marketing clichés are so common, you hardly pay attention. The cosmetic industry, one of the largest and most profitable of all industries, spends more on advertising than any other trade. Each advertisement claim should be validated, and there’s a well-established claim validation business that serves the beauty industry.