Organic Skin Care Custom Product Formulation
From LoveToKnow Organic
Finding the right organic skin care custom product formulation for you will have a lot to do with your type of skin and your budget.
Understanding an Organic Skin Care Custom Product Formulation
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) evaluates personal care products differently from food and pharmaceuticals. There is typically little oversight, particularly if the manufacturer of a custom product conducts some testing on its own. If there's a question about a particular product, the FDA can force the manufacturer to include what amounts to a warning label that states that a particular formulation hasn’t been tested yet.
This gives rise to some potential problems and opportunities. If you're on the look out for the latest and greatest ingredient to keep your skin young looking, your custom skin care supplier can probably get it for you without having to hassle with too much red tape. A quick perusal of the label will also tell you the major ingredients in the product. The label "certified organic" will give you a few hints too.
Certified Organic
Including an organic designation on a cosmetic or skin care product indicates that one of a number of regulating boards evaluated an ingredient or ingredients in the preparation and is confident that they meet a list of minimum guidelines. This sounds vague because it is. In principle, organic means grown without pesticides and kept as close to its natural state as possible. It often also means that the product isn't chock full of additives, preservatives and coloring agents. Interestingly enough, the FDA stringently regulates coloring agents. Although "organic" looks promising on a product label, there's quite a bit of wiggle room for interpreting just what you're buying.
Organic Skin Care Buying Tips
The best practice is to take a wary approach to any products not strictly regulated by the FDA, which would include almost all cosmetics, skin care products, and personal care preparations. To be on the safe side:
- Read all label information carefully.
- Custom and over the counter preparations can make wild, unsubstantiated claims and charge dearly for their products. Before you buy, do your homework. Skin rejuvenating creams may tout the advantages of including collagen in their topical product, but collagen isn't absorbed by the skin, so slathering it on your face is an expensive waste of time. Taking a few minutes to explore the effectiveness claims of a product can save you time and money.
- Try a product before you buy. When you're contemplating a custom skin care preparation purchase, try a small sample first. Products may not live up to their claims, and even if they do work for your friends, that's no guarantee that they'll work for you.
- Start small when you make changes to your skin care routine. Instead of buying an entire line of products, audition a couple of products at a time. This will help you to isolate the source of any problems if you start to develop a rash or other symptoms.
- Avoid buying in bulk. With organic preparations, smaller is usually better. Organic products contain fewer preservatives. This is good for your body, but can reduce a product's shelf life. Another good idea is to always make sure your hands are clean when you open jars or bottles. With fewer preservatives, it's easier to contaminate organic products, causing potential problems down the road. It might also be wise to keep organic skin care products refrigerated.
Your new organic skin care custom product formulation may be just what you've always dreamed of, but to make sure that there aren't any unexpected surprises, take the time to be an enlightened consumer.
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