The question women and reporters worldwide always ask me is: Which ingredient or ingredients are the best for skin? The good news is the same as the bad news, because there isn’t just one or even a few—there are hundreds of brilliant ingredients for skin. While that means there are great options to choose from, it also makes the selection process exceedingly difficult. Everyone wants a magic bullet, and the world of cosmetics has nothing even vaguely resembling a single-ingredient miracle. A cosmetics company may showcase an ingredient and make it sound sensational, but the truth is there are lots and lots of sensational ingredients. The next time a salesperson, infomercial, or advertisement wants to convince you of some miracle ingredient, ignore it, they are lying through their teeth.
A cosmetics chemist has access to thousands of ingredients that can go into a formula, and trying to translate them all into a format a consumer can understand is impossible. In the cosmetic ingredient dictionary on my web site at www. cosmetics-cop. com I have included over 3,000 ingredients, yet that is only the tip of a rather big and continually growing ingredient database. I spend endless time analyzing what the research says about the formulations and contents of each product I consider.