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Are you a person that scans and checks out labels? On Food? But what about in your day to day skin care and body care products? There are so many things that are snuck in and added to our “beauty products” and one of those seemingly harmless products is alcohol. In fact, men have been trained to like alcohol in some of their products like aftershave, as it creates the tight feeling and sting that tannins used to be responsible for. Let us take a few minutes and dive into why one should steer clear of products using alcohol as a cheap filler and preservative.
Isopropyl Alchohol is produced by combining methyl ethylene and water together. It is a very inexpensive product used liberally to lighten up the feel of lotions and other beauty products, to force penetration into the layers of skin, to create the coveted “burn” of aftershave, and to preserve the product at hand.
Here’s the problem, in other blogs I have spoken briefly about the acid mantle of the skin. This is our bodies first protective layer against allowing potentially harmful things onto our skin and thus into our bodies. Adding alcohol strips this precious protective layer strait away, allowing what ever other ingredients that otherwise the acid mantle might guard against (ie the other junk added to said product) to penetrate and go deeply below our skins surface. Once stripped, it takes minimum of 14 hours to rebuild our acid mantles, leaving us vulnerable to external factors for that entire time. Think if you use lotion with alcohol in it twice a day. This would be equivalent to always having your acid mantle stripped away!
But it goes even further than this: What goes onto our skin enters our bodies. And our bodies metabolize the alcohol in our livers. This releases a byproduct called acetaldehyde.
This is TOXIC to body tissue. It leaves the skin highly dehydrated, our cells in a shrunken state and is thought to cause premature aging in skin cells.
One case where this is not entirely true. There are some products that use botanical ingredients. To distill the fat soluble constituents from the plant material, grain or grape alcohol is used. Often the alcohol is then “burned” off leaving behind the desired plant material and only trace amounts of alcohol. In this case a good manufacturing practice would be to label something to the effect as alcohol used in tincturing said ingredient. This is worlds different than what I spoke of in the former situation. And often the pro’s far outweigh the con’s in this individual circumstance.
Here at Recherch’e, alcohol is never used in any of our products. It is our firm belief to protect the acid mantle and only put ingredients into our products that the coveted first layer of protection will naturally allow to penetrate into our skin.
Tell us what you think, connect with us on Instagram and Facebook, let us know what you think and have learned.
Until Next Time Beauties,
Hillari