My career truly began or at least became possible in November 1976 when the United States Food and Drug Administration required all cosmetics to have complete ingredient listings on their labels in descending order (largest percentage first, smallest percentage last). The FDA also standardized the way ingredients needed to be listed to minimize the confusion that would surely arise if various synonyms or trade names for chemical names were used (Sources: www. fda. gov; and Contact Dermatitis, April 2006, pages 94-97). While there are certainly products that fail to follow the regulation by using ingredient names that either hide the real nature of the ingredient or make it sound more natural than it really is, that now happens much less often.
To grasp how significant this regulation was, it took till 1995 for Australia to be the next country to mandate ingredient listings on cosmetics, then Europe in 2000, and finally Canada—are you ready for this—in 2008 (but they have until 2010 to comply). In other words, until fairly recently a product being sold in the U. S. would have ingredient listings while in the rest of the world the exact same product would have no ingredient listing. Clearly there was something the cosmetics industry didn’t want consumers to know! But it gave me a mission and a job. I wanted to know and understand what was in the products I was using and eventually I came to share what I had learned in my books and online.
There is a caveat to all this. As wonderful as this worldwide ingredient regulation is, the downside is that it is almost impossible for a consumer to decipher the ingredients on a label. The words are incomprehensible. They are either too technical or multisyllabic, or the plant extracts, which are supposed to be in Latin for botanical accuracy, are in a language no one knows. Though even if you knew the Latin name of the plant that wouldn’t necessarily be helpful because each part of the plant has its own properties. Stem, leaf, flower, and roots may be more or less beneficial for skin. Even vitamin C as an ingredient has many derivatives that can show up on a cosmetic ingredient list, such as ascorbic acid, ascorbyl glucoside, L-ascorbic acid, ascorbyl palmitate, sodium ascorbate, potassium ascorbate, calcium ascorbate, tetra-isopalmitoyl ascorbic acid, and tetrahexyldecyl ascorbate, to name a few, each having its own benefits, stability profile, and potency.
Cosmetics companies love to showcase the way the part or form of some plant, mineral, or vitamin their products contain is the best. Vitamin C is one of those ingredients that has often been at the front of this marketing ploy. You may have heard of Ester-C, which contains mainly calcium ascorbate, but also a small amount of other vitamin C metabolites. Supposedly this makes Ester C more bioavailable than other forms of vitamin C. This information only comes from the company selling Ester C and there is no published research showing this to have any merit. On the other hand, there has been research showing Ester C to have no preferred benefit over other forms of vitamin C.