Cleansing Gel
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Clef Cleansing GelIngredients explained
Good old water, aka H2O. The most common skincare ingredient of all. You can usually find it right in the very first spot of the ingredient list, meaning it’s the biggest thing out of all the stuff that makes up the product.
It’s mainly a solvent for ingredients that do not like to dissolve in oils but rather in water.
Once inside the skin, it hydrates, but not from the outside - putting pure water on the skin (hello long baths!) is drying.
One more thing: the water used in cosmetics is purified and deionized (it means that almost all of the mineral ions inside it is removed). Like this, the products can stay more stable over time.
A cleansing agent that's claimed to be so gentle on the skin that it hardly impacts the skin barrier. It also gives a rich, creamy foam, it's based on vegetable fatty acids and is readily biodegradable.
It's an especially important and popular ingredient in "syndet bars" (or soapless soaps). Dr. Leslie Baumann says in her great Cosmetic Dermatology book that thanks to the unique molecular characteristic of Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate, it "has defined a new dimension in the mildness of cleansing bars".
Super common ingredient in all kinds of cleansing products: face and body washes, shampoos and foam baths.
Number one reason for its popularity has to do with bubbles. Everyone loves bubbles. And cocamidopropyl betaine is great at stabilizing them.
The other reason is that it’s mild and works very well combined with other cleansing agents and surfactants. The art of cleansing is usually to balance between properly cleansing but not over-cleansing and cocamidopropyl betaine is helpful in pulling off this balance right.
Oh, and one more nice thing: even though it’s synthetic it’s highly biodegradable.
More info on CAPB on Collins Beaty Pages.
A vegetable origin (coconut or palm kernel oil and glucose) cleansing agent with great foaming abilities. It's also mild to the skin and readily biodegradable.
A clear, yellowish liquid that works as a cleansing agent. It has so-called amphoteric structure meaning that its head contains both a positively and a negatively charged part (surfactants are most commonly anionic meaning their head has a negative charge). Its structure makes Sodium Cocoamphoacetate very mild with great foaming properties. It's popular in baby products.
A type of sugar that has water-binding properties and helps to keep your skin hydrated.
A sugar beet-derived amino acid derivative with nice skin protection and moisturization properties. Betaine's special thing is being an osmolyte, a molecule that helps to control cell-water balance. It is also a natural osmoprotectant, meaning that it attracts water away from the protein surface and thus protects them from denaturation and increases their thermodynamic stability.
It also gives sensorial benefits to the formula and when used in cleansers, it helps to make them milder and gentler.
- It’s naturally in our skin and behaves there like a sponge
- It can bind up to 1000 times its own weight in water
- It is a big molecule from repeated subunits (polymer) so different molecular weight versions exist (unfortunately there is no way to determine MW from INCI list only)
- High-molecular-weight-HA (>500 kDa) is an excellent surface hydrator, skin protectant and can act as an osmotic pump helping water-soluble actives to penetrate deeper into the skin
- Low-molecular-weight-HA (< 500 kDa) can hydrate the skin somewhat deeper though it is still a big molecule and works mainly in the epidermis (outer layer of the skin)
- Low-molecular-weight-HA might also help the skin to repair itself by increasing its self-defense (~ 200kDa used in the study)
- Ultra-low-molecular-weight-HA (<50kDa) is a controversial ingredient and might work as a pro-inflammatory signal molecule
PCA stands for Pyrrolidone Carboxylic Acid and though it might not sound like it, it is a thing that can be found naturally in our skin. The sodium salt form of PCA is an important skin-identical ingredient and great natural moisturizer that helps the skin to hold onto water and stay nicely hydrated.
A clear, light yellow water-loving oil that comes from coconut/palm kernel oil and glycerin. It's a mild cleansing agent popular in baby washes and sensitive skin formulas.
It's also a so-called solubilizer that helps to dissolve oils and oil-soluble ingredients (e.g.essential oils or salicylic acid) in water-based formulas.
An easy-to-formulate, commonly used, nice to have ingredient that’s also called pro-vitamin B5. As you might guess from the “pro” part, it’s a precursor to vitamin B5 (whose fancy name is pantothenic acid).
Its main job in skincare products is to moisturise the skin. It’s a humectant meaning that it can help the skin to attract water and then hold onto it. There is also research showing that panthenol can help our skin to produce more lovely lipids that are important for a strong and healthy skin barrier.
Another great thing about panthenol is that it has anti-inflammatory and skin protecting abilities. A study shows that it can reduce the irritation caused by less-nice other ingredients (e.g. fragrance, preservatives or chemical sunscreens) in the product.
Research also shows that it might be useful for wound healing as it promotes fibroblast (nice type of cells in our skin that produce skin-firming collagen) proliferation.
If that wasn’t enough panthenol is also useful in nail and hair care products. A study shows that a nail treatment liquide with 2% panthenol could effectively get into the nail and significantly increase the hydration of it.
As for the hair the hydration effect is also true there. Panthenol might make your hair softer, more elastic and helps to comb your hair more easily.
It’s pretty much the current IT-preservative. It’s safe and gentle, but even more importantly, it’s not a feared-by-everyone-mostly-without-scientific-reason paraben.
It’s not something new: it was introduced around 1950 and today it can be used up to 1% worldwide. It can be found in nature - in green tea - but the version used in cosmetics is synthetic.
Other than having a good safety profile and being quite gentle to the skin it has some other advantages too. It can be used in many types of formulations as it has great thermal stability (can be heated up to 85°C) and works on a wide range of pH levels (ph 3-10).
It’s often used together with ethylhexylglycerin as it nicely improves the preservative activity of phenoxyethanol.
We don't have description for this ingredient yet.
Ferulic Acid (FA) is a goodie that can be found naturally in plant cell walls. There is a lot of it especially in the bran of grasses such as rice, wheat and oats.
FA - whose main job is to be an antioxidant - owes its fame to a 2005 research that discovered that adding in 0.5% FA to a 15% Vitamin C + 1% Vitamin E solution not only stabilizes the highly unstable, divaish Vit C, but it also doubles the photoprotection abilities of the formula.
Couple of other studies show that FA just by itself is also a nice addition to cosmetic formulations: it can penetrate the skin (which is kind of important to do the job) and it has protecting properties against UV caused skin damage.
So if you spot it on the ingredient list be happy about it. :)
Super common little helper ingredient that helps products to remain nice and stable for a longer time. It does so by neutralizing the metal ions in the formula (that usually get into there from water) that would otherwise cause some not so nice changes.
It is typically used in tiny amounts, around 0.1% or less.
We don't have description for this ingredient yet.
We don't have description for this ingredient yet.
If you are looking for a reason why red wine is good for you, good news, you have found it! Resveratrol, aka the "red grape antioxidant" is the thing that's suspected to keep the French from coronary heart disease despite their not so healthy eating habits (such as high saturated fat intake).
So resveratrol, found in the seed and skin of the red grape (and berries), is a pretty well-known and well-studied molecule that has potent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anticarcinogenic abilities. Most of the studies were done examining resveratrol's promising anti-cancer properties, but as for skin care, it shows a potent protective effect against UV-caused oxidative stress as well as promising effects against multiple types of skin cancer including the most severe one, melanoma (as an adjuvant therapy).
When it comes to skincare and antioxidants, "the more the merrier", so resveratrol is definitely a nice addition to any skincare routine.
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| what‑it‑does | solvent |
| what‑it‑does | surfactant/cleansing |
| what‑it‑does | surfactant/cleansing | viscosity controlling |
| what‑it‑does | surfactant/cleansing |
| what‑it‑does | surfactant/cleansing |
| what‑it‑does | moisturizer/humectant |
| what‑it‑does | moisturizer/humectant |
| what‑it‑does | skin-identical ingredient | moisturizer/humectant |
| what‑it‑does | skin-identical ingredient | moisturizer/humectant |
| irritancy, com. | 0, 0 |
| what‑it‑does | emulsifying | surfactant/cleansing |
| what‑it‑does | soothing | moisturizer/humectant |
| irritancy, com. | 0, 0 |
| what‑it‑does | preservative |
| what‑it‑does | moisturizer/humectant |
| what‑it‑does | antioxidant | antimicrobial/antibacterial |
| what‑it‑does | chelating |
| what‑it‑does | moisturizer/humectant |
| what‑it‑does | antioxidant |