You’ve probably heard that our skin is our largest organ. What you may not know is how absorbent it is, and how important it is to choose carefully what we put on it.

The trend in food in terms of wellness is to go back to the way our grandparents or great grandparents ate, which is minimally processed or unprocessed foods in their natural states, preferably grown without the use of pesticides, antibiotics, and other chemicals. Well, what we put on our bodies ends up being pretty much the same as what we put in our bodies - our skin absorbs our skincare and makeup quickly, and the statistics say the average woman eats seven pounds of lipstick in her lifetime! With that knowledge, if you wouldn’t eat formaldehyde, maybe you should reconsider putting it on your skin!

The demand for “clean” beauty products is so great that even stores like Sephora have a seal for clean products specifically, to show shoppers that those particular products have minimal synthetic fragrance, no formaldehydes, parabens, sulfates (SLS and SLES), formaldehyde- releasing agents, phthalates, mineral oil, retinyl palmitate, oxybenzone, coal tar, hydroquinone, triclocarban, or triclosan. This is a lovely development because often these ingredients are legally given names that can make them harder to find in an ingredients list - especially since those are usually in tiny print! Natural products automatically don’t have most of these scary chemicals, because most of them don’t occur in nature.