Admist a Sea of Products Part 2: Reading Product Labels

To best understand what makes a product effective you need to be able to read a label. Anyone watching what they eat will tell you reading the labels allows them to know exactly what they are getting and make educated choices on what they put into their bodies. The main problem with reading skin care labels is that most of us know what partially hydrogenated soybean oil is, but we don’t know what Dimethicone 350 is and what it does. This makes reading skin care labels very difficult, but there are a few questions you should keep in mind:

• What are the Active Ingredients?
• What does this Active Ingredient do?
• Is there enough of the Active Ingredient in the product for it to work?
• Does the product’s formulation allow Active Ingredients to penetrate the skin?
• Do any of the inactive ingredients (the other stuff) interfere with the effect of the active ones? Do they have the potential to harm the skin, e. g. by causing allergic reactions, irritating or dehydrating the skin, clogging pores, etc.

Some of the above questions I will address in another part of this series, but much of the above info can be found in a product label if you know how to decipher it. I am not going to delve deeply into the FDA laws on labeling since they are complicated, and most cosmetic companies ignore them anyway, but I am going to give you a basic run down of how to read a label.

Breaking Down A Label

So lets start at the top. Active Ingredients. An Active ingredient is the substance that is pharmaceutically active. In other words, what makes the product work. We all want to effect changes in our skin and the only way to do that is to use products that have ingredients designed to target specific problems.

In this label the Active Ingredient is Salicylic Acid 0.5%.

The next part of the label is a laundry list of what makes up the product, including the Active Ingredient.

You might notice that Salicylic Acid is almost at the bottom of the ingredient list. This is completely normal. Most products are made up of water and other ingredients that create feel, smell, slip, color, and preservation. A good manufacturer will carefully chose these other ingredients to enhance the Active Ingredient and help get you the end result you seek, but many manufacturers use cheap filler substances to sell to your senses, or just plain trick you. My favorite example of this is menthol. A client will come in and tell me that they “feel” a product working. When I look at the label I discover that what they are feeling is menthol – a key ingredient of Vapor Rub – tingly on the skin. Trust me, it isn’t doing anything but making you “feel” like the product is working.

Although the US federal regulations require ingredients to be listed in descending order from most to least, the FDA doesn’t require that a distinction be made between active or inactive ingredients. Also, any ingredients with concentrations below 1% may be listed in any order the manufacturer sees fit. This means that the top third of the ingredients listed generally consist of around 80-90% of the entire product, the middle third represents around 5-8% of the product, and the bottom third represents 1-3% of the total product. Doing this math is easier than you think. Let’s work with the 22 ingredients in our sample product label. We take our 22 ingredients, divide them by 3, and get 7 1/3. So we can estimate that the first 7 ingredients make up 80-90% of the total volume of the product.

An easy trick for comparing products is to compare labels. Start by counting how many total ingredients are listed on each product. Try to chose products that have close to the same total number of ingredients. Then count down from the first ingredient until you reach your Active Ingredient. If you find your Active Ingredient listed as #8 on one product and #10 on the other product, then the #8 listing is the product that contains more of the Active Ingredient because it is closer to the top of the label. But remember that this trick is useless if the ingredient you seek falls into the bottom third or 1% of the label because these ingredients can be listed in any order.

Now that you have the basics of reading a label let’s learn to chose the correct ingredient with the correct amount of oomph!