How much skin care ingredients are absorbed by your skin?
In today’s day and age, skin care products have become very common in the market and are used by every demographic from young adults to older women. As mass production and automation have given rise to cheaper products, the overall penetration of the industry has grown several folds over the last few decades. With this increase in usage, the skin care products have also been upgraded time and time again to keep up with the current trends. They deal with a lot more problems now than they did in the past. There’s a skin care product for everything from aging signs to facial scars to products that claim that they can change the skin tone entirely. It is a highly competitive industry and the competitors are continuously trying to come up with new agents and chemical formulas to improve the overall effect of the product on the skin of the customer. But even so, do these products just stay on the surface of your skin or do they really go deeper, as they advertise? The following article gives a brief idea as to how these products work, what all the customers should know and a basic understanding of the biology behind working behind this. By the end of this article, we hope that the reader would have a fair understanding of the effect of skin care products on their own body.
The barrier to all chemicals, human skin!
Surprisingly, chemicals and other cosmetic ingredients can’t actually penetrate the skin that easily. The skin is a very thick barrier to all foreign agents and very little (if any) skin care ingredient ever reached the layers underneath the skin. So, speaking from a health perspective, using skin care products should not be hazardous to your health. For any product to be able to penetrate into the body, it needs to be very small and fat-soluble but a regular skin cream or sunscreen usually doesn’t have these defining features.
The SCIENCE behind it all!
Now that we know that the skin care products can’t really harm our body, the question becomes “why?”
Well, the scientific evidence behind this is rather strong and we will try to explain it as simply as possible. The skin you feel is actually a combination of three different layers of skin. And further, these layers are further divided into sub-layers. Tests show that a majority of the products we use on a daily basis can’t get through the top layer of the skin which is known as the epidermis. This is the layer that we can touch and feel. This happens because this layer is very tightly packed and only very tiny particles can get through this layer and its sub-layers. This layer gives our body the required protection against most of the harmful agents found not only in cosmetic products, but also other things found in our environment such as oil and dust. Imagine what would happen if all the dust particles that you encountered on a daily basis went straight into your body!
As we discussed, most cosmetic ingredients never reach the inner layers of the skin. But, if this is the case, then how do these products even have any effect on the human body? Shouldn’t all these products just bounce right back when applied? No, that’s not how it works and there’s a reason behind it.
Absorbing skin care products
When skin care products are applied to the skin, no absorption takes place. This is different from penetration that we have talked about so far. Absorption refers to the chemical reaching and mixing in with the bloodstream. This distinction is very important and defines how dangerous any product can be for the human body. Absorption is different for every chemical compound. Some compounds increase the absorption rate of other chemicals while some compounds make our skin impenetrable to other chemicals. Overall, it is a very complicated process and things become difficult to figure out after this point. Added to this is the fact that human beings all differ from each other in their chemical composition. This makes accurate study even more difficult.
The final call
Here’s the final question, should we or should we not use skin care products? The answer is yes. You can use skin care products, but with moderation. Even though the ingredients won’t pass through into your bloodstream, they can have adverse effects on your skin itself, effects such as rashes, acne, allergies, etc. Every chemical compound has a different way of reacting with the human body and every human has a different way of reacting with these chemical compounds. Keeping this in mind, moderation is the best way to go about as far as skin care products are concerned.
