It’s a common experience for users of skin care products from any brand to glance at the label on the back of a container, see the imposing paragraph of complicated, scientific-sounding terms, and think: what is all this stuff? Surprisingly, it can be difficult to get a clear answer to that question, especially since many brands use intentionally confusing terminology to obscure questionable formulation practices. Without the assistance of a trustworthy, transparent brand to assist in decoding the ingredient list, consumers are left to investigate the ingredients independently.

Where to Look for Trustworthy Information on Skin Care Ingredients 

Researching ingredients on your own presents another set of challenges, especially for skin care users without extensive knowledge of chemistry. The authoritative guide to ingredient terminology, the INCI dictionary, published by the Personal Care Products Council, is a professional publication far too expensive for the average skin care consumer to purchase. At the same time, many online resources for explaining ingredients are less than strictly educational. Some groups may support themselves by selling certifications, while others may rely on scare tactics to drive advertising revenue. So how are we, as skin care users with a legitimate interest in the substances we are applying to our skin, able to cut through the jargon and derive meaningful conclusions from the information provided on a label? 

First, it’s important to understand what you’re seeing when you look at an ingredient list. As the founder of Skin Actives Scientific, Hannah Sivak, PhD, writes in her book, The Scientific Revolution in Skin Care, 2nd Edition: “Following FDA regulations, the ingredient list of a skin care product in an enumeration of the chemicals and plant extracts that make up the product, in order of concentration from the highest, usually water, to the lowest, often preservatives or fragrances and colorings.” Here we see that trace ingredients, those listed at the tail end of the ingredient label, are often added by commercial skin care brands for marketing value, while serving a negligible role in terms of efficacy on the skin. 

 But what about the rest of the ingredients, those that constitute the majority of the product by volume?

How To Tell What Matters on an Ingredient List 

For the most part, these ingredients consist of acidity adjusters, butters and oils, emulsifiers, preservatives, and thickeners, each serving a particular role in the formulation. In other brands, some of these ingredients make the product work better, while others are useless, harmful, or simply added to prolong shelf life. When tackling this portion of the ingredient list, a quality glossary of skin care ingredients from a trustworthy source is indispensable. Skin Actives features a basic glossary on our website, which can be helpful, especially as it allows users to filter our product catalog by ingredient content. But this glossary is limited to ingredients that Skin Actives approves of and regularly uses, so it may not cover specific ingredients found on the labels of other brands. 

Recently, Dr. Sivak put together an expanded, book-length glossary of skin care ingredients, The Chemicals Life Makes, featuring a much longer assortment of ingredients, along with extended commentary on the function and effectiveness of each one. Available in digital form as a conveniently searchable PDF, The Chemicals Life Makes differs from our online glossary in that it includes many common ingredients that Skin Actives does NOT use, but that may be found in other brands’ products. 

We highly recommend that our customers have a copy of this text on their personal devices, as Dr. Sivak highlights several problematic ingredients used regularly by the industry, along with an explanation of why Skin Actives refuses to include them in our formulations. As it happens, this may be the perfect time for Skin Actives customers to obtain a free copy of this helpful research aid—but more on that in a moment. 

The Alarming Truth Behind “Mystery Ingredients”

Before we get to that, let’s consider some challenges you may encounter when trying to decode ingredient lists, even if you have the right tools. If you’ve looked up an ingredient in one or more trustworthy glossaries and still found nothing, already your suspicion level should be elevated: you may have found a “mystery ingredient.” In The Scientific Revolution of Skin Care, 2nd Edition, Dr. Sivak notes the alarming trend of skin care companies hiding unsavory ingredients, sometimes large groups of them, under vague but pleasant-sounding names. 

She highlights the example of “fruit flower complex 12,” a black box of an ingredient name that reveals essentially nothing about what it contains, aside from it sounding positive to the average reader. Another, she writes, is “Simulgel… a mix of hydroxyethyl acrylate/sodium acryloyl-dimethyltaurate copolymer, isohexadecane, and polysorbate 60.” It should be less of a mystery why a skin care company interested in presenting itself as healthy and naturalistic would seek to compress that mouthful into a single, friendly-sounding word. 

If you encounter mystery ingredients, treat the product with caution. Not necessarily because the obscured ingredients are harmful, but because of what the practice of obscuring ingredients says about the company that does it. Skin care brands are expecting you to put their products on your skin; shouldn’t they at least be open about what’s in them? 

The Skin Actives Commitment to Transparency

Skin Actives has always practiced a healthy sense of minimalism and transparency in our ingredient selection. Not only do we never use ingredients that are harmful, but we also keep our products free of unnecessary fragrances and preservatives that serve no significant benefit on the skin. Furthermore, we never engage in the practice of creatively naming “mystery ingredients” to conceal the true contents of our product. We want you to know what’s in our products, and we want you to know why we added those ingredients.

We offer a digital download of Dr. Sivak’s expanded glossary, The Chemicals Life Makes, purchase and download it today and you can use it as a reference forever.

Citations:

Sivak, H. (2021). Labels and Ingredient Lists. In The Scientific Revolution in Skin Care (2nd ed., pp. 1–20). chapter, IngramSpark. 

Sivak, H. (2020). The Chemicals Life Makes. www.skinactives.com.