Podcast 162: The Gentle Skincare Revolution – rethinking formulation

The word gentle is touted around in the beauty industry and is familiar to consumers; however, the ingredients inside certain cosmetics may be anything but gentle to our skin. The beauty industry creates products to help reduce the visible signs of ageing, like fine lines and wrinkles, by over cleansing, exfoliating and peeling our skin. But this can remove the microbiome we so badly need for good skin health and the maintenance of our skin barrier.

We heard about the human microbiome and its vital role in maintaining skin health in our previous guest episode with Leo Salvi of Kind to Biome, a firm developing rigorous, verifiable tests to assess the microbiome gentleness of cosmetics.

In this opinion episode, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier asks: “Isn’t it time we see the industry formulating with a different and gentler agenda than antiageing and turning back the clock on our skin?”.

Humans have used certain cosmetic plants for millennia, and we have information about how they are tolerated on the skin. A lot of the graduate brands we showcase in our gallery describe their formulations as being gentle on the skin. Created with natural, organic ingredients, cosmetics can be gentler and kinder to the human microbiome. The Formula Botanica community is familiar with formulating gentler products to assist our natural skin barrier.

Among the synonyms for the word gentle is the word “humane”, which means to be tender, compassionate and exude empathy. Lorraine wonders, however, if these words would also apply to many of the cosmetics on retail shelves today.

We see consumer retail products, and not only professional salon products, offering the promise of peels and deep exfoliation designed to reveal those newer layers of skin that are, of course, glowing, more radiant, more “youthful looking,” and so on. These products are far from gentle on the skin and certainly not, as Lorraine suggests, gentle on our mental health either.

By rethinking formulation to be gentle on the skin (our microbiome and skin barrier), we can be gentle in the expectations we set ourselves about our skin. Lorraine’s challenge to us in this opinion is to shop for beauty products that are genuinely gentle to our skin, scalp and hair and gentle to us as individuals. Start with the graduates listed in our gallery and find a skincare brand in your part of the world that embraces gentleness. Your skin will thank you for it.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Formula Botanica Green Beauty Conversations podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share, subscribe and review this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Youtube so that more people can enjoy the show. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Facebook and Instagram.

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Lorraine Dallmeier

Lorraine Dallmeier is a Biologist, Chartered Environmentalist and the CEO of Formula Botanica, the award-winning online organic cosmetic science school. Read more about Lorraine and the Formula Botanica Team.