We believe that the most important thing to consider when selecting a product to use on your body or to eat, is if it can be grown by certain methods or harvested by certain methods.
In other words, if you are going to put something on your skin, it isn't any different than if you were going to eat it, don't you think?
The best way to assess the products you are using in your personal care or intimate regimen is to ask yourself if the ingredients included are "manufactured" or "harvested." The easiest way to answer that is to ask yourself if the ingredient can be grown either by planting or by picking or collecting. In other words, even honey can be harvested but not necessarily grown. And salt can be collected but not necessarily planted. See what we mean??
To determine if your products contain anything unnatural, you can always ask the manufacturer or just look up their ingredients online very easily!! You can even check out this great site that references the benign nature of each ingredient used in the cosmetics and personal care industry: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/. It's called Skin Deep, and it tells you everything you want to know about cosmetic safety and harmlessness of ingredients and it is very accurate and filled with information and safety data!! There is another great site called Green People that really gets into the details and lists numerous manufacturers and product groups for healthy living!!
Not all products are the same and many contain very dangerous carcinogenic ingredients known to cause cancer and create disease in lab animals!! And you know what a problem animal testing has with karma and the like! We don't like animal testing at all and many companies support animal or rat testing and probably the same companies are using ingredients in their products that you shouldn't be using on your bodies either, since they need to test for safety limits and percentages before they can put an ingredient in their product to meet safety codes! That means in so many words, if they have to test it on an animal or rodent, then they probably shouldn't be putting that in their products in the first place. Though we don't live in Utopia and this is a practical website and we are not living in an ideal world, so we realize that not everything is the way it could be or could ideally be set up! Even though people die everyday from exposure to these chemicals and or long term exposure to them through cosmetics and personal care products worldwide! There just isn't any higher level of regulation and all the government agencies are bought out by lobbyists over the years and nobody really knows what is really safe anymore.
We just know that Mother Nature doesn't grown much that has been made from chemical substitutions and synthetic chemical processing!!
Read your ingredient lists before you buy and make sure it doesn't contain stuff like hydro-carbon petroleums, parabens, silicones, glycols, etc. All of these potentially create compound allergic responses from the body!! All of them!!
And the best "preservative" we have found on the market is rose ether distillates of phenoxyethanol, made from natural sources. This preservative seems to have an excellent profile making it very amiable to human skin. Another great preservative with super natural benefits and is very effective is something called glyceryl monocaprylate and is Eco-Cert certified, and is manufactured from natural plant sources. Preservatives are a touchy subject and one we don't treat lightly! But if you don't have a product with water in it, or water-based ingredients, then the only thing that is necessary is some way to keep the product fresh, and most skin care manufacturers use natural Vitamin E for this or rosemary oleoresin. Both of which are fine if you aren't allergic to soy-based vitamin E, which most of you aren't, most probably!! It is a very benign and healthy ingredient and often is listed as tocopherols or natural tocopherols in ingredient lists for products.
The most important thing to remember when picking out products for your skin and your body is that they don't contain petroleum-based ingredients like petrolatum, mineral oil, parabens, etc. And try to stay away from names you can't pronounce if possible. Though you may need to learn a little Latin, since most plant-based ingredients are listed with their Latin nomenclature!! (LOL)
Buy the best!! Buy natural and check your ingredient lists!!
Cheers!!
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April 20, 2009