The ideal face cream

On my blog you can find information about products and ingredients, but I notice that it is difficult for a lot of people to find a suitable skin care product. I can also imagine that the sweat breaks you out when you try to read hundreds of ingredient lists in high-speed stores while a circled saleswoman full of well-intentioned but not always useful advice stops you from your work. I am going to give you a number of tips that will put you back in no time (well, at least before closing time) with a fine product, or preferably another tester. For convenience we start with the face cream; the cleanser, toner, exfoliate and sunscreen follow later....

Step 1. Throw jars into the glass container

First you look at the packaging of the product, this is of course the first thing you see. The jars or glass containers let you stand on the shelf. Products where light or air can get in, probably do not contain high concentrations of active ingredients. If this is the case, then the cream will turn brown due to oxidation. You can really assume that a white cream in a jar is actually just a jar of 'fat'. Can be great if you suffer from dry skin, but we will get a similar product for a few euros at the drugstore or pharmacy! We are now looking for a real effective cream with antioxidants that can calm, strengthen and prevent sun damage. A cream that ensures beautiful healthy skin. That is why we only have tubes or flasks with pump system in our shopping cart, but even better an airless packaging. This means that there is as little oxygen as possible to the product and the effectiveness of the ingredients remains maximal. And do not be fooled, the ideal product for your facial skin may be a serum, a night cream, a day cream or even an eye cream. If it is not too greasy or too watery for your skin, it does not matter what is on the packaging. There is no difference between these products outside the consistency! Do not go home with multiple products that actually contain the same ingredients, really a waste of your money...

Step 2. Banish products with perfume or alcohol!

The ingredient list (or INCI list) is crazy. Although I have been studying INCI lists for a large part of the day for many years, I regularly get ingredients that I have never heard of. Not surprisingly, because there are thousands of cosmetic ingredients and there are new ones every day. Before you get desperate, I can reassure you, most of the ingredients do not matter. They are added to thicken or mix a product (compare it with cornstarch) and are not good, but also not bad for your skin. Let's keep it as simple as possible, we skipping products with the 2 most common ingredients of which we know from research that they do not contribute anything to the functioning of the product but can cause skin problems; alcohol and perfume. Perfume is number one allergen and besides there may be nasty substances like phthalates added to your perfume mix. This does not have to be mentioned! If you see perfume (fragrance) on the ingredient list, put the product away. And do not be fooled, there are also fragrances that must be mentioned separately because they give an extra chance for an allergic reaction. There are cosmetic manufacturers who then pretend that the product is not perfumed. You can find them on my blog about these fragrances. Then you scan the products for the ingredient alcohol. There must be a small side note here, not all types of alcohol are bad. The bad alcohol types (and which you see most in cosmetics) are: alcohol denat, ethanol, ethyl alcohol, methanol, benzyl alcohol and isopropyl alcohol. If you see this ingredient at the bottom of the list, then the product most likely contains a very low concentration. You do not have to worry about it, as long as the product also contains good ingredients!

In an ideal world, you would now check whether there are even more potentially harmful ingredients in the products. Unfortunately, that is quite a work ... Because the chance of preventing these ingredients is smaller and there are probably no products left, I advise you to first check whether there are also active ingredients in the products that are left over. Otherwise you have another cream that only keeps the skin a little bit fat and we do not want that!

Step 3. Choose ingredients that really do something for your skin

Now you actually come to the most important thing: the good ingredients. Vitamin C is, like niacin amide, a topper for its many good qualities. You should actually have it because there is so much evidence for the efficacy. Other good ingredients are, for example, vitamin E (tocopherol) and allantois. In my book you can find a whole list, but on my blog there are also a lot of descriptions. Also read the review article The Truth about Over-the-Counter Topical Anti-Aging Products: A Comprehensive Review from Catherine K. Huan. Please note that for almost all ingredients, at least 1% of the product must be in the product. Niacin amide and vitamin C at least 3%. In practice, these ingredients are then relatively at the forefront of the ingredient list. If they are in the last 1/3 part you can assume that the concentration is lower. If you still have a number of products left over, compare them to the presence of other bad ingredients and choose the product that contains as few irritating or potentially harmful substances as possible.

Step 4. Make sure the product fits with your skin

What is good for you, does not have to be the case for your neighbor. But it is not as complicated as those cosmetic manufacturers want us to believe. They especially want to make money and make it unnecessarily complicated with all those rare fabrics and new hype ingredients. Almost all active ingredients are suitable for both oily and dry skin and have several functions such as calming, repairing sun damage and moisturizing. With sensitive skin, you should be more careful with exfoliating substances such as glycolic acid, and such ingredients should not be in your day cream but in a separate product. There are ingredients that you can better avoid if you have very oily skin with pimples. These are, for example, coconut oil, grapeseed oil and oleyl alcohol. You can therefore better choose a product where aqua is at the top or at least thinner. A serum can also be suitable and even with very oily skin, using only a toner with active ingredients can be a good solution. With a drier skin you can opt for a "fuller" cream, but it is also possible to apply a thin layer of a somewhat greasy simple (and cheap) base cream over your product. This is often even better because the ingredients can do their work even better!

Step 5. Do not pay too much!

A good product does not have to cost much. I have never seen a cream above the Û60, - euro that is worth the price. Just assume that you pay for the name, marketing, or the golden bottle, but not for the ingredients. There are a lot of very expensive bad products, but unfortunately also much cheaper bad products. Just like there are good expensive and cheap products. Almost always there is a body double for that 100 euro cream with almost the same ingredients but for a fraction of the price.

Nevertheless, you can assume that a cream below 10 euros does not contain sufficiently high concentrations of active substances. So invest something in a good face cream. You do not need much of a good face cream and prefer to save on your cleanser and body products.

Step 6. Ask a tester

Although the product selected by you contains the very best ingredients, it is possible that your skin is not doing well. Then look carefully at the reaction of the product on your skin. With a product with high concentrations of active ingredients, it may be that your skin first becomes a little restless and a few pimples are temporarily formed. We see that in medical cosmetic treatments such as a peel. If your skin becomes really red and it also starts to swell and itch, stop using it. Then you are most likely allergic. You may even have the misfortune of being allergic to "good" ingredients such as vitamin C. Remember that the chance of a skin reaction is greater with a cream containing many good and active ingredients than with a jar that is mixed with water. So be sure to play and try a tester first,