Facts about the skin care industry you need to know before you buy.

Unfortunately the majority of the face skin care products available in Australia contain ingredients which are potentially damaging to your health.

There’s no need to take our word for it, just watch the video below. It deals primarily with cosmetics, however all the same considerations apply to virtually all personal, skin care and beauty products including soaps, shampoos, deodorants and more.

We highly recommend you watch the video, and if you’re interested to find out more about how to locate effective and safe face skin care products then continue reading below the video, or just click here.

If you find the video a little shocking then continue reading this page. By the end you’ll know much more about choosing safe and effective skin care products that give you the skin care results you desire without the risks to your health.

We don’t know you, however even so we’re sure that you’re sick and tired of the claims made about skin care products, when the product doesn’t live up to the claims. Now, after watching the video, you’re also aware that not only do many skin care products not live up to their claims, but they can also contain potentially harmful ingredients.

And sadly you’ll often find that the most expensive skin care products are the most ineffective and potentially the most harmful.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are some excellent natural face skin care products on the market that can genuinely make your skin look more youthful. Any superior quality skin care product should help reduce wrinkles, reduce bags under and fine lines around your eyes, deal with age spots and more, and there are excellent products that do that.

The problem is that amongst the thousands of skin care products to choose from it’s almost impossible for the average consumer to find the product that produces a real result, taking years of aging from your face, and which is safe to use. There are many products on the market which are totally ineffective.

Many people spend huge amounts of money trying to make themselves look younger. That’s why the cosmetic surgery industry is a billion-dollar industry. So is the skin care industry and like all industries it has many companies making ineffective products.

And as demand increases more products flood the market. But this doesn’t mean they are effective, or safe.

Many of these skin care products are advertised in glossy magazines and on television, however are manufactured with little scientific research to back up their claims of effectiveness. Expensive research doesn’t help sell the product and in many cases the vast majority of the product budget goes into marketing rather than research.

So those creams come in beautiful looking bottles, the magazine adds look great complete with a wonderful looking teenage model or a celebrity who usually doesn’t use of products.

And of course all these costs have to be factored into the price of the products. So there are some seriously expensive skin care products around, many of which do very little.

But an educated consumer should be sufficiently well-informed to understand that much of this is just about marketing. Most people are unable to sufficiently research individual anti aging products to establish whether they are likely to be effective and whether they contain ingredients which may be harmful your health and your skin. And so they fall for the marketing.

Our goal with his website is to turn you into an educated consumer, so that you understand more about what to avoid when buying skin care and anti aging products, what works and what doesn’t.

Let’s start with what to avoid. Which ingredients shouldn’t be in your skin care products? Which ingredients may damage your skin and your health?

Mineral Oil.
Mineral oil is a petrochemical, or in other words it comes from crude oil. You may see it called liquid paraffin, petrolatum or paraffin wax on the label and it goes by other names as well. It’s used extensively in personal products such as anti aging skin care products like moisturisers because it’s incredibly cheap.

But putting mineral oil on your skin stops your skin from “breathing”. It clogs pores, interferes with the natural ability of the skin to eliminate toxins and can cause acne. It can irritate the skin and can cause dryness as well as premature ageing of the skin. We are always stunned to see mineral oil listed as an ingredient in skin care products.

Dioxane.
This is a synthetic derivative of coconuts. It is widely used in skincare products. 1,4-dioxane is readily absorbed into the skin, and then into your bloodstream.

Although it sounds crazy 1,4-dioxane is a chemical “known to the State of California to cause cancer”. It’s scary to think that people are putting it on their skin.

Fragrances.
Everyone likes to smell nice. However fragrances are just chemicals that smell good. They are generally produced in a lab biochemist. Many of them contain ingredients that are known to be carcinogenic. Avoid all products that contain fragrances, if you want to smell good use just a touch of perfume.

Perfume of course is also a chemical fragrance, however usually a dad two is sufficient, but applying skin care products usually involves spreading them all over your face, neck and even the rest of your body. As your skin absorbs just about anything put on it chemical fragrances on a large area of skin are not a great idea.

Parabens.
Methyl, propyl, butyl, and ethyl paraben are some of them. There are many face skin care products including moisturisers that use parabens as a preservative to increase shelflife. There are other safe ingredients which can be used as preservatives however they are more expensive than parabens.

Studies suggest that parabens can cause cancer and interfere with the endocrine system, can cause skin rashes and allergic reactions.

Alcohols.

Specifically, ethyl alcohol, ethanol, methanol, benzyl alcohol, isopropyl alcohol and SD alcohol, all of which can be found in skin care products. These irritate the skin, strip away the skin’s natural acids and can irritate your skin making you more vulnerable to viruses and bacteria.

That’s a few, and only a few, of the ingredients you don’t want to see listed on the label of your skin care products. There’s lots more.

Lets see what you do want to see listed.

First though lets have a discussion of what makes a good and what makes a bad skin care product.

The major reason why our skin starts to develop wrinkles, lines and to sag is that the elastin and collagen in our skin starts to break down with age. Sorry if this gets a little technical, there’s not too much technical stuff.

Collagen is a fibrous protein which has huge tensile strength and which provides our skin with firmness and resilience. As it breaks down as you, and your skin, becomes older, it loses its ability to keep your skin firm yet flexible.

Pinch a piece of your skin, pull and let go. If you’re young your skin should snap back into place. If you’re older that snap becomes slower and slower. That’s partly the result of the breakdown of your skin collagen.

As you age elastin in your skin, which performs a similar function, also starts to break down.

All this is well known to skin scientists.

Many skin care products do not deal effectively with the loss of collagen and elastin over time. They seek to obscure those fine lines and wrinkles making you look younger, but only until you wash the product off.

Many skin care products contain collagen and elastin, but these are only in the bottle for marketing purposes so they can be listed on the label to help sell the product. It has been known for some time that collagen and elastin have molecule sizes which are too large to enter the skin.

You need a product which genuinely stimulates elastin and collagen production in your skin. Only then will your skin start to restore some of it’s vigour.

Not only are some ingredients added to the bottle for the purposes of listing them on the label. There are many ingredients which are very effective, but in most cases these ingredients are expensive, and even if they are in the bottle they are usually only there are in very small quantities, sufficient to allow them to legally list the ingredient on the label to help sell the bottle.

So choosing a safe effective skin care product is not just about finding the right ingredients in the bottle and avoiding the wrong ingredients. It is also about ensuring that the right ingredients are there in sufficient proportions, not the minimum.

It’s been known for some time that many naturally occurring substances that come from plants in particular can be highly effective as skin care agents. In fact many native peoples have used these ingredients obtained from the fruits and nuts of plants around them for centuries to make themselves look younger.

And of course, as these ingredients typically come from fruits and nuts that are edible, and are eaten by many people, we know they are safe.

For example there are many natural oils such as Avocado oil, Shea butter and Macadamia oil which are highly nutritious both for your body and your skin and work extremely effectively as natural moisturisers.

And high quality natural skin care products make use of such ingredients rather than the cheaper alternatives such as mineral oil.

And there are other more exotic ingredients which can also be used in the highest quality skin care products which are highly effective at promoting optimum skin health. Here’s 3.

Phytessence Wakame.
This is a kelp found around the coast of Japan which has been eaten by the Japanese for centuries and is, according to the research, one of the principal reasons why Japanese women have such wonderful skin.

The reason why it is effective in promoting skin health is understood. It blocks a harmful enzyme in your body called hyaluronidase. But why would that matter?

An acid in your skin called hyaluronic acid helps elastin and collagen fibres work. But hyaluronidase breaks down hyaluronic acid. So if Phytessence Wakame blocks the actions of hyaluronidase this allows the collagen and elastin in your skin to work better, and in particular helps reduce the appearance of dark circles under the eyes.

Cynergy TK.
This is a cutting edge skin care ingredient that actually stimulates the collagen and elastin to regrow in your skin. Putting collagen and elastin on your skin does very little, but stimulating your skin to produce more of it’s own is highly effective.

Cynergy TK comes from the wool of sheep and has been shown in scientific studies to produce a 14% improvement in skin moisture retention over 18 days and a 42% improvement in skin elasticity over 18 days.

It is found only in the highest quality natural skin care products and is highly effective.

CoQ10 (Coenzyme Q10).
Often you will see CoQ10, which is short for Coenzyme Q10, in bottles of skin care products. CoQ10 is found in all the cells of the body including in your skin.

CoQ10 is a very powerful antioxidant. It combats free radicals which wreak havoc on the cells of your skin and in your body. But as you age CoQ10 is gradually lost. However there are variations in the form of CoQ10 available as ingredients in skin care products. One, called Nano-Lipobelle H-EQ10, is head and shoulders above all the rest in effectiveness.

Unlike most forms of CoQ10 Nano-Lipobelle H-EQ10 can penetrate deeply into the skin and is much more effective at promoting skin health.

Nano-Lipobelle H-EQ10 is also highly effective at combating free radicals in your skin and this has a powerful effect against wrinkles.

These 3 ingredients can make a significant improvement to the look and feel of your skin when used conjunction with each other, and in products that do not contain any petrochemicals or other toxic ingredients.

However all these ingredients are expensive.

One company produces high quality natural skin care products that contain these 3 ingredients along with many others.

This is the Xtend Life natural products company.

Lets talk more about the company and it’s products. Xtend Life is far from being a household name in the skin care industry. Although it’s products are natural, safe and effective most people have never heard of it. There is a good reason for this.

Skin care manufacturers try to produce a product which is cheap to produce. They need the product to be cheap to produce because then the maximum amount of money can be spent on marketing, and it’s marketing that creates profits for the skin care industry, not product quality. People are so used to buying ineffective skin care products that they simply assume the products will work, taking this on trust.

However Xtend Life have chosen to reverse this philosophy. You will not see television or magazine ads for their products. They do not market their products like the major players. Instead they direct a much higher proportion of the budget into product quality rather than marketing.

The major skin care companies will not put ingredients such as those above in their products because they are very expensive. Xtend Life chooses to use the highest quality ingredients and to keep their products price competitive in the marketplace by eliminating marketing expenses. In fact the products are relatively inexpensive.

They allow their products to do the talking. When they get a new customer that person will usually become a lifetime customer.

Therefore, gradually, they build a loyal following of customers who understand the value of the products, will appreciate the fact that they are buying high quality products at competitive prices, and who will tell their friends.

In this way Xtend Life is beginning to compete with the major players in the skin care industry, not on marketing budget but on product quality.

One of the ways they evidence their commitment to product quality is by offering customers a 90 day unconditional money back guarantee on the products. Try getting a money back guarantee like that on any of the major brand name products.

We hope now we have educated you more about the risks inherent in modern skin care products, about some of the toxic ingredients using these products, and alerted you to the fact that there are small niche skin care companies such as Xtend Life, the best of these, which are bucking the trend to producing low quality but heavily marketed skin care products.

And you can try their safe and effective natural face skin care products risk free, protected by a 90 day guarantee. We urge you to give their products a try. You may be pleasantly surprised at how effective a skin care line can be.