At first glance, the majority of ingredients listed on commercially sold face, body, and skincare products look like a jumble of complicated and impossible-to-pronounce scientific names. They feel foreign and far removed from our experience. How can we connect more directly to the sources of our ingredients when the ingredients that are listed intimidate and alienate us?
When you start making your own beauty products, the world of ingredients suddenly opens up to you, and you become better equipped to decode ingredient labels found on commercially sold personal care products. What once seemed impossible to decipher becomes less intimidating—and through the clouded dust of the jargon, you can now detect a pattern and begin to interpret why specific ingredients were selected and used.
Before we share a few guidelines to help you read ingredient labels like a pro, let’s make sure you understand some basics, like what an ingredient actually is and what the ingredient list (or “deck,” as the industry insiders call it) reveals.
What Is an Ingredient?
An ingredient can be defined as a component of a blend, or a mixture, that contributes to the whole completed recipe. You can also think of it as a part, an element, or a constituent. In a recipe, whether for a food dish or a beauty item, an ingredient is a particular part that is added, mixed, blended, or combined to make up the whole final product.
1. It has a function in the formula, meaning it helps make the product creamy, or sticky, or smooth, etc., and/or it has a relationship to the other ingredients in the recipe, such as the way they behave together.
2. It has a function on the skin, meaning it has therapeutic actions: it soothes irritation, provides moisture, softens, etc.
Ingredients come from two sources:
1. Botanicals are derived from plants.
2. Synthetics are artificially designed in a laboratory by chemists.
What the Ingredient Deck Tells Us About the Product
On a deck, ingredients are listed in descending order of concentration or prevalence.1 In other words, the order in which the ingredients are listed reveals how much of each ingredient is actually used in the formulation, or recipe, of the product. For example, if water is listed as the first ingredient, the percentage of water is higher than that of any other ingredient listed on the label, and the product is primarily made of water. Another thing to note is what is listed last on the ingredient list; if “fragrance” is the final ingredient listed, it most likely constitutes less than 1 percent of the total formula.
By having an idea of how much of each ingredient is used, you can begin to see how the recipe is composed.
What the Order of Listed Ingredients Reveals About the Formula
A formula is basically composed of four general categories, or types, of ingredients, and each category has a very particular function within the recipe.
— The largest percentage of the recipe is composed of what many formulators and cosmetic chemists call the base or foundation ingredients.2 This ingredient usually makes up between 65 and 80 percent of the product, and it is always listed first.
— Next are the active and supporting ingredients, which some cosmetic chemists may also refer to as diluents or fillers.3 These ingredients often provide two different supporting activities to the recipe:
1. the actual therapeutic actions, like anti-inflammatory or skin-softening effects (such ingredients are usually easy to identify because they have names that sound like plants, botanical extracts, or specific biological compounds such as amino acids or enzymes), and
2. a textural or aesthetic function, meaning the ingredient’s purpose is to combine with other ingredients to change the product’s texture, consistency, or color.
This category of ingredients generally appears after the base or foundation ingredients and can constitute between 5 and 10 percent of the product.
— Following the active and supporting ingredients, we find the functional ingredients, which play a very specific physical (functional) role in the product (for example, exfoliant, emulsifier, or humectant). Like the active ingredients, functional ingredients may constitute anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the formula. This category of ingredients can also sometimes share characteristics with the active and supporting ingredients, meaning an active ingredient can also be designated as a functional one. A good example of this would be soy lecithin, which acts as both a functional ingredient (it is an emulsifier) and an active ingredient (it helps make the product feel smoother).
— Listed at the very end of the ingredient deck, you will find a category of ingredients cosmetic chemists and formulators call additives, adjustment agents,4 or harmonizers.5 Their role is to pull everything together, keep the product stable, make it smell and look pretty, and so on. None of these ingredients are ever more than 2 or 3 percent of the product, and they generally include preservatives, pH balancers, colors, aromas, and other aesthetic touches.
A simple trick to help you unpack the long list of ingredient names is to try to isolate the first three to four ingredients listed, and then take note of where the first plant-sounding name appears. This will give you a general idea of what makes up the majority of the product and then reveal what the active therapeutic components may be. Everything listed that follows that first recognized active ingredient is likely to be less than 1 percent of the recipe.
A quick scan like this can immediately reveal what makes up the majority of any product. And if you see that the first three to five ingredients of a product are water and alcohol or petroleum (listed as paraffin or mineral oil), chances are there is nothing therapeutic about it.
Plant-based beauty products shouldn’t be too difficult to decipher either. If they are authentic, you’ll easily find that the first three to five ingredients listed are botanicals, like shea butter, beeswax, cocoa butter, almond oil, and so on. The top listing of these ingredients demonstrates that anywhere between 65 and 80 percent of what you are getting is actually from a genuine plant source and known to be therapeutic.
We’ve included two examples of body cream ingredient decks below, with some notes explaining how we decoded each one.
aqua (water, eau), glycerin, isopropyl myristate, stearic acid, propylene glycol, cetyl alcohol, | fucus vesiculosus extract, hydrolyzed elastin, collagen, sodium hyaluronate, glyceryl acrylate/acrylic acid copolymer, carbomer, parfum (fragrance), sodium chloride, phenoxyethanol, potassium sorbate, methylparaben, propylparaben, sodium benzoate, triethanolamine, diazolidinyl urea, mica, CI 77891 (titanium dioxide), (red 40) CI 74.340.
Note that the first three to six ingredients (highlighted in yellow) make up the bulk percentage—we estimate about 85 percent of the product. In this case, the majority of the product is composed of water, glycerin, and a synthetically created oil, isopropyl myristate. The red line indicates the first listed botanical, and we can assume that everything that follows it will be at about a 1 percent or lower level, including the color additives, preservatives, adjustment agents, and fragrance.
EXAMPLE B: BODY CREAM
helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed oil, butyrospermum parkii (shea) fruit butter, mangifera indica (mango) seed butter, | cucurbita pepo (pumpkin) seed oil, rosa canina (rose hip) fruit oil, persea americana (avocado) fruit oil, manihot esculenta (arrowroot) root powder
This product has only genuine botanicals listed. The first three ingredients reveal what 85 percent of the product is most likely made up of: emollient-rich butters and oils. And what follows are supporting (active) botanical ingredients to increase the therapeutic actions of the product’s skin-soothing properties. The arrowroot powder listed at the very end is what would be categorized as an additive; it affects the texture of the product rather than its therapeutics.