There are a lot of great skin care products out there. There are a lot of bad ones as well. So how can you sort the chaff from the wheat, so to speak? Let’s discuss some methods and considerations for evaluating skin care products, natural or otherwise.
A good place to start is the ingredients list. Any reputable skin care cream, natural or synthetic, will list out its ingredients. Often, you can find the ingredient list on product pages. Check out our Hydrating Skin Mask page and you’ll see the key ingredients highlights and the full list at the bottom of the page.
Take a glance at the list? Good. But what does it mean? How do you evaluate skin care creams? First, we firmly believe that all natural skin care products are the best way to go. We recommend avoiding synthetic ingredients as they can actually damage your skin. Paraben, alcohol, synthetic dyes and colors, phthalates, and other chemicals should be avoided as they can be harmful.
If you looked at the ingredients in our Hydrating Skin Mask, you’ll notice that all of those ingredients are missing, and with good reason. All natural skin care products will contain ingredients like: “Herbal Extracts: (White Peony, Rhemmaniae, Goji Berry, Ginseng, Radix Polygoni Multiflori, Burdock Root, Angelica, Poria Cocos, Lilyturf Root.”
What makes natural skin care products so great? All natural, organic skin care ingredients are generally hypoallergenic. This reduces the risk of an allergic reaction. Jadience also avoids testing on animals. Usually, skin care products and/or brands if they are NOT tested on animals. If it’s not explicitly mentioned, there’s a good chance that animal testing was used.
Evaluating individual ingredients is a bit more difficult and time-consuming. Each ingredient has to be evaluated for its individual properties. Fortunately, many academics and skin care experts have been studying herbal skin care treatments and their applications.
Let’s take a glance at some of the ingredients in our Hydrating Skin Mask.
White peony: contains its own unique paeoniflorin antioxidant. Research suggests that paeoniflorin is a powerful anti-wrinkle treatment.
Radix Polygoni Multiflori: Contains many antioxidants, and specifically stilbenes. Research conducted at Hanbat National University (S. Korea) has found that stilbenes are good for radical scavenging.
Green tea: A glass of green tea can provide an extra caffeine boost when consumed and is highly regarded for its antioxidant properties. Hundreds of studies have been conducted on green tea, both for consumption and natural skin care purposes. Green tea has been found to protect DNA from UV exposure and can inhibit the formation of scar tissue, among many other things.
This is just a cursory glance at the ingredients and their properties. When you buy from a trusted, well-researched brand, like Jadience, you can rest assured that its developers have put in a lot of their own research.
Further, don’t limit your evaluations to “just” natural skin care products. Natural herbs and other ingredients are great for other treatments, such as all-natural muscle and joint pain relief. When evaluating natural pain relief products, you should use the same approach. Read the ingredients, figure out how they work, and see if there is any research backing the claims.
For example, if you take a gander at QiVantage’s you’ll see yet another long list of all natural ingredients.