Skin care is an everyday part of our lives. Having healthy, good looking, skin is essential to our general well-being and self-confidence. However there are so many products out there that it can often be hard to find a beneficial, healthy and well priced skin care facial cream. The problem lies partly in the fact that skin care products are so heavily marketed that it is often impossible to tell fact from fiction. Every cosmetic company tells us their products are better than their competitors, but we know better than to trust everything advertisers tell us, don't we?

So, how do we decide what makes a quality facial skin care product? Good looking packaging? Or perhaps we could look at what seems to be most popular at the time? Or, you could assess the quality of a skin care product, in a more logical manner, based on its ingredients. But herein lies the fundamental problem. Unless you have studied chemistry at university who among us knows what trietholamine or propylparaben is? On the other hand in other skin care products you can notice immediately that the ingredients are everyday recognisable produce. You can see ingredients like avocado, turmeric and green tea. These sort of ingredients are much clearer to understand. We know that all those ingredients mentioned above are, firstly, natural, and secondly, safe. A good rule of thumb for skin care products is; if it tastes ok then it will probably be ok for your skin. This may sound strange but think about it, who consciously wants to put something on their skin, especially their face, that they would not at least taste. If you were sat down in front of two baths, one full of green tea and one full of propylparaben, which one would you know is safe for your skin, even healthy. The point is we seem to have been convinced that artificially produced skin care products are as good as their natural counterparts. This is just not true. Another way to think about this is to think of the artificial banana flavour as compared to a real banana, few if any of us would choose the artificial flavour as superior to the real banana.

So, short of running surveys and polls on what makes a good skin care product we can use everyday knowledge to ascertain that natural products are probably alot better for our skin than laboratory manufactured chemicals. Laboratory chemicals are also relatively untested and their long term effects are unknown as yet. Whereas we know that green tea has been used for both cosmetic and medicinal purposes for thousands of years.

Copyright (c) 2007 Ethought Australia