How to use this table

• Welcome to DIY (Do It Yourself) skin care. You do like product "X" but do not want to pay $250 for 0.5 oz.? Then, do it yourself. You woner whether you do it? If you can make a salad, then you can make a cream that will have the actives of both Re Vive and Lancome. Don't be scared, we will help you step by step, and answer all your questions.
• The active ingredients in a number of popular skin care lines can be found in this table. We carry a number of these actives; for those actives which we do not stock we have suggested alternatives which should perform as well as or better than those in the branded lines.
• Long lists of actives do not necessarily mean that a product is better. Some brands use long lists of plant names as a marketing device. On the other hand, plants are a resource of chemicals that it would be silly to ignore, because plants contain many thousands more chemicals than the pharmaceutical companies can ever hope to create (they have been around for a few more million years). If Skin Actives "ignores" a plant extract is not because it is not a good product but because it can be replaced by another, and we do not want to ask our clients to buy 100 different ingredients.
• Our stocked products are standarized extracts: the extracts have been enriched greatly in the active chemicals, eliminating the inactive ones. For example, "Philosophy the big skinny" contains tea leaf (Camellia sinensis) powder, and most of it will be cellulose (not much use for your skin). Skin Actives Scientific sells a green tea extract that contains almost 90% ECGC, the chemical responsible for the cancer preventive activity of green tea.
• There are some very good products around, but there are also some crooks (as in any other human activity). Although the FDA regulates labeling, some brands still cheat in the ingredient listings. One example of creative listing is including tocopherol polypeptide, saccharide isomerate and retinyl palmitate polypeptide: none of these chemicals exist but they sound really fancy, the names are 'marketing names' for common ingredients rather than 'scientific names' for special molecules.
• The order of ingredients in the list means something: they are listed in order of concentration, the most abundant first and the least abundant last. When an ingredient appears after the usual preservatives (example: methyl paraben, propyl paraben, diazolidinyl urea, DMDM hydantoin, Lavandula angustifolia, tocopherol) then you know that you should be looking for your vitamin E somewhere else. This is very important when you consider that when we sell you an active ingredient we are providing enough for it to have a real impact rather than just providing enough to make a label look good.
• There are other factors such as interaction between ingredients that may turn an active ingredient into an 'inactive' ingredient as well as very relevant questions of freshness.
• t is our sincere belief that when you make your own skin care line from our actives you are not only saving money but creating a product which is much better for you than the fanciest/trendiest/most expensive brand on the market.