What Lies Within Your Beauty Products?

Do you know what’s in your makeup and skincare? Stephanie Yap talks to an expert to learn more about where beauty ingredients come from and how they affect your skin.

- Stephanie Yap

What’s the first thing you look for before purchasing a beauty product? Do you just look at the pretty packaging that aims to captivate your attention, or are you the kind who would read the product’s fine print? Understanding the ingredients listed in skincare and makeup products, and figuring out if those ingredients are actually effective for your skin, is an important skill for each consumer to have.

However, it’s one thing to become a pro at thoroughly inspecting the ingredient labels on food (especially if you’re allergic to certain foods), and another to analyse them on your beauty products. First of all, most of the beauty ingredients listed on the bottle don’t even look or sound like English. Like, come on, do they really have to say ‘aqua’ instead of ‘water’? That’s plain confusing. And if we were to Google every single word that we don’t understand, it’ll take forever. Hence, most of us have adopted the ‘just buy it and hope it doesn’t irritate our skin’ policy when it comes to beauty. Besides, sometimes a scary-sounding ingredient can actually be a beneficial vitamin or mineral.

Sorting out the innocuous ingredients from the harmful ones sounds like a job for the chemist, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add these common ingredients into your vocabulary.

Hyaluronic Acid

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