Botanicals or all natural?

Is it worthwhile to look for natural ingredients in skin-care products? Leaving aside the fact that the process of removing a plant from the ground, cleaning off the dirt and insects, getting the key parts of the plant extracted, and then stabilizing and preserving it in a cos­metic renders it fairly unnatural, the answer is yes and no. There are bountiful numbers of wonderful plants and plant extracts that have beneficial effects on skin—and there are plenty of plant extracts that present problems for skin, too. Even so, let’s say a natural or botanical ingredient is effective as a disinfectant; if so, that doesn’t make it better than a synthetically derived disinfectant, it just makes it an alternative. One shortcoming of natural ingredients in skin-care products that the cosmetics industry hasn’t addressed is that each natural ingredient has a large range of limitations. These include what happens as a result of the purification process it goes through to get into a product, which part of the plant is effective, bad crops, possible contamination with pesticides, and maintaining consistent concentrations. In many ways synthetic ingredients are often more reliable for the skin; chief among them is that developers have control over the outcome and functionality.

It is also important to reiterate that just because an ingredient is found growing in na­ture doesn’t mean it’s good for the skin. Lots of plants are poisonous if ingested and lots of plants can irritate the skin. While plants sound great—pure and natural and all that—and while sesame oil and licorice extract sound far better than capric/caprylic triglyceride (a fatty acid) and glycyrrhetinic acid (a derivative of licorice), they aren’t better or worse. Each individual ingredient, of which there are thousands, has its pros and cons, and it would be a delusion to assume otherwise.

Updated: September 11, 2015 — 12:47 am