Reset Cleansing Emulsion
Ingredients overview
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Suqqu Reset Cleansing EmulsionIngredients 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 super common emollient that makes your skin feel nice and smooth. It comes from coconut oil and glycerin, it’s light-textured, clear, odorless and non-greasy. It’s a nice ingredient that just feels good on the skin, is super well tolerated by every skin type and easy to formulate with. No wonder it’s popular.
- 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
Triethylhexanoin is a colorless to pale yellow liquid ester that makes the skin nice and smooth, aka emollient. It has a pleasant non-sticky, non-greasy feel to it, gives formulas smooth application properties and also helps moisture retention.
Butylene glycol, or let’s just call it BG, is a multi-tasking colorless, syrupy liquid. It’s a great pick for creating a nice feeling product.
BG’s main job is usually to be a solvent for the other ingredients. Other tasks include helping the product to absorb faster and deeper into the skin (penetration enhancer), making the product spread nicely over the skin (slip agent), and attracting water (humectant) into the skin.
It’s an ingredient whose safety hasn’t been questioned so far by anyone (at least not that we know about). BG is approved by Ecocert and is also used enthusiastically in natural products. BTW, it’s also a food additive.
A super common, medium-spreading emollient ester that gives richness to the formula and a mild feel during rubout. It can be a replacement for mineral oil and is often combined with other emollients to achieve different sensorial properties.
A popular, vegetable-derived oil-loving emulsifier that helps water to mix with oil. In itself, it is suitable for water-in-oil emulsions (where water droplets are dispersed in oil), but it is more often used as a co-emulsifier next to other, water-loving emulsifiers.
Chemically speaking, it comes from the attachment of sorbitan (a dehydrated sorbitol (sugar) molecule) with the fatty acid Stearic Acid, that creates a partly water (the sorbitan part) and partly oil soluble (stearic part) molecule.
We don't have description for this ingredient yet.
A common multi-tasker fatty acid. It makes your skin feel nice and smooth (emollient), gives body to cream type products and helps to stabilize water and oil mixes (aka emulsions).
A fatty alcohol (the non-drying type with a long oil loving chain of 22 carbon atoms) that is used to increase the viscosity of the formula and it also helps the oily and the watery parts to stay nicely mixed together (called emulsion stabilizing).
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.
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.
A common little helper ingredient that helps water and oil to mix together, aka emulsifier.
An amino acid-based emulsifier that helps water and oil to mix and stay that way. It is considered as natural, environmentally friendly, and hypoallergenic.
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.
Also, if your skin is sensitive, fragrance is again not your best friend. It’s the number one cause of contact allergy to cosmetics. It’s definitely a smart thing to avoid with sensitive skin (and fragrance of any type - natural is just as allergic as synthetic, if not worse!).
A big molecule created from repeated subunits (a polymer of acrylic acid) that magically converts a liquid into a nice gel formula. It usually has to be neutralized with a base (such as sodium hydroxide) for the thickening to occur and it creates viscous, clear gels that also feel nice and non-tacky on the skin. No wonder, it is a very popular and common ingredient. Typically used at 1% or less in most formulations.
The oil coming from the seeds of the nice, little, yellow-flowered plant called Evening Primrose. Similar to other plant oils, it's loaded with nourishing and moisturizing fatty acids. It's a very rich source of linoleic acid (66-76%), and also contains the soothing and healing superstar fatty acid, gamma-linolenic acid (aka GLA, 7-12%) (Btw, the richest known source of GLA is the borage oil, but evening primrose still counts as a very good source of it). It also contains oleic acid, but not too much around 6-15%.
Since the 1980's, EPO is a well-known food supplement and there are quite a lot of studies examining what happens if you take it orally. It seems to be helpful with a bunch of things: atopic dermatitis, dry eyes, brittle nails, sunburn and even acne.
As for the skin, it's a great hydrating plant oil, that can also reduce inflammation and irritation. It's a superb healing agent that can truly help dry skin, not just on the surface by covering it (and not letting water to evaporate) but by initiating structural changes within the skin. If that's not enough, it also helps skin cell regeneration.
All in all, a real goodie especially for dry, easily irritated skin.
We don't have description for this ingredient yet.
It's a very alkaline stuff that helps to set the pH of the cosmetic formula to be just right. It's similar to the more often used sodium hydroxide and pretty much the same of what we wrote there applies here too.
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.
A super common and cheap fragrance ingredient. It's in many plants, e.g. rosemary, eucalyptus, lavender, lemongrass, peppermint and it's the main component (about 50-90%) of the peel oil of citrus fruits.
It does smell nice but the problem is that it oxidizes on air exposure and the resulting stuff is not good for the skin. Oxidized limonene can cause allergic contact dermatitis and counts as a frequent skin sensitizer.
Limonene's nr1 function is definitely being a fragrance component, but there are several studies showing that it's also a penetration enhancer, mainly for oil-loving components.
All in all, limonene has some pros and cons, but - especially if your skin is sensitive - the cons probably outweigh the pros.
Linalool is a super common fragrance ingredient. It’s kind of everywhere - both in plants and in cosmetic products. It’s part of 200 natural oils including lavender, ylang-ylang, bergamot, jasmine, geranium and it can be found in 90-95% of prestige perfumes on the market.
The problem with linalool is, that just like limonene it oxidises on air exposure and becomes allergenic. That’s why a product containing linalool that has been opened for several months is more likely to be allergenic than a fresh one.
A study made in the UK with 483 people tested the allergic reaction to 3% oxidised linalool and 2.3% had positive test results.
Citronellol is a very common fragrance ingredient with a nice rose-like odor. In the UK, it’s actually the third most often listed perfume on the ingredient lists.
It can be naturally found in geranium oil (about 30%) or rose oil (about 25%).
As with all fragrance ingredients, citronellol can also cause allergic contact dermatitis and should be avoided if you have perfume allergy. In a 2001 worldwide study with 178 people with known sensitization to fragrances citronellol tested positive in 5.6% of the cases.
There is no known anti-aging or positive skin benefits of the ingredient. It’s in our products to make it smell nice.
It’s a common fragrance ingredient that is one of the “EU 26 fragrances” that has to be labelled separately (and cannot be simply included in the term “fragrance/perfume” on the label) because of allergen potential. Best to avoid if your skin is sensitive.
It’s a common fragrance ingredient that has a light floral smell. It’s one of the “EU 26 fragrances” that has to be labelled separately (and cannot be simply included in the term “fragrance/perfume” on the label) because of allergen potential. Best to avoid if your skin is sensitive.
A common fragrance ingredient that has a sweet scent somewhere between lily and fruity melon. Can be found in essential oils, such as lavender oil, orange flower oil or ylang-ylang.
In cosmetics, it can be used up to 1%. It’s one of the “EU 26 fragrances” that has to be labelled separately (and cannot be simply included in the term “fragrance/perfume” on the label) because of allergen potential. Best to avoid if your skin is sensitive.
Geraniol is a common fragrance ingredient. It smells like rose and can be found in rose oil or in small quantities in geranium, lemon and many other essential oils.
Just like other similar fragrance ingredients (like linalool and limonene) geraniol also oxidises on air exposure and becomes allergenic. Best to avoid if you have sensitive skin.
A common fragrance ingredient that smells like jasmine. It is one of the “EU 26 fragrances” that has to be labelled separately because of allergen potential. Best to avoid if your skin is sensitive.
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what‑it‑does | solvent |
what‑it‑does | emollient |
what‑it‑does | skin-identical ingredient | moisturizer/humectant |
irritancy, com. | 0, 0 |
what‑it‑does | emollient | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | moisturizer/humectant | solvent |
irritancy, com. | 0, 1 |
what‑it‑does | emollient |
irritancy, com. | 0, 2-4 |
what‑it‑does | emulsifying |
irritancy, com. | 1, 0 |
what‑it‑does | viscosity controlling |
what‑it‑does | emollient | viscosity controlling |
irritancy, com. | 0, 2-3 |
what‑it‑does | emollient | viscosity controlling |
what‑it‑does | emulsifying | surfactant/cleansing |
what‑it‑does | preservative |
what‑it‑does | emulsifying | surfactant/cleansing |
what‑it‑does | emulsifying | surfactant/cleansing |
what‑it‑does | emulsifying |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | viscosity controlling |
irritancy, com. | 0, 1 |
what‑it‑does | soothing | emollient |
irritancy, com. | 2, 3 |
what‑it‑does | buffering |
what‑it‑does | chelating |
what‑it‑does | perfuming | solvent |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |
what‑it‑does | perfuming |