GMEELAN

Calendula Gold Brightening Essential Oil Soap 24k

It's a sweet tasting sugar substitute that helps your skin to hold onto water when used in cosmetic products. It also helps to thicken up products and give them a bit more slip. 

• It's a helper ingredient that improves the freeze-thaw stability of products
• It's also a solvent, humectant and to some extent a penetration enhancer
• It has a bad reputation among natural cosmetics advocates but cosmetic scientists and toxicology experts do not agree (read more in the geeky details section)

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. 

Expand to read more

• A natural moisturizer that’s also in our skin
• A super common, safe, effective and cheap molecule used for more than 50 years
• Not only a simple moisturizer but knows much more: keeps the skin lipids between our skin cells in a healthy (liquid crystal) state, protects against irritation, helps to restore barrier
• Effective from as low as 3% with even more benefits for dry skin at higher concentrations up to 20-40%
• High-glycerin moisturizers are awesome for treating severely dry skin

A type fo sugar, usually refined from cane or beet sugar. On the skin, it has water-binding properties and helps to keep your skin hydrated. 

The famous or rather infamous SLS (not to be confused with SLES). It is a cleansing agent known for being too good at the job and potentially irritating the skin. But, on the positive side,  it can produce copious, creamy and luxurious foam compared to the more gentle and thus nowadays much more commonly used Sodium Laureth Sulfate.

In fact, SLS is so good at irritating the skin that it is very commonly used in dermatological studies just for that. It is a so-called "primary irritant", a substance that irritates the skin in one go (without prior sensitization) but doesn't do any other big harm (such as being carcinogenic or systematically toxic - those claims are not true). Also, the formula can greatly influence the irritating potential of SLS, and mixing it with other cleaning agents makes it milder. 

Expand to read more

There is definitely some craze going on for coconut oil both in the healthy eating space (often claimed to be the healthiest oil to cook with but this is a topic for another site) and in the skin and hair care space. 

We will talk here about the latter two and see why we might want to smear it all over ourselves. Chemically speaking, coconut oil has a unique fatty acid profile. Unlike many plant oils that mostly contain unsaturated fatty acids (fatty acids with double bonds and kinky structure such as linoleic or oleic), coconut oil is mostly saturated (fatty acids with single bonds only) and its most important fatty acid is Lauric Acid (about 50%).  Saturated fatty acids have a linear structure that can stack nice and tight and hence they are normally solid at room temperature. Coconut oil melts around 25 °C so it is solid in the tub but melts on contact with the skin. 

Expand to read more

Exactly what it sounds: nice smelling stuff put into cosmetic products so that the end product also smells nice. Fragrance in the US and parfum in the EU is a generic term on the ingredient list that is made up of 30 to 50 chemicals on average (but it can have as much as 200 components!). 

If you are someone who likes to know what you put on your face then fragrance is not your best friend - there's no way to know what’s really in it.  

Expand to read more