How To Actually Decode Your Skin Care Labels: 8 Ingredients To Watch

How well do you know your beauty labels? You may steer clear from a few noteworthy flags (parabens, phthalates, and the like), but the beauty world is so vast and complex—not to mention, we're learning right along with the research. It can be tough to keep up, which is why we had our beauty director, Alexandra Engler, help break it down on the mindbodygreen podcast. (She'll also chat more about it on our new beauty podcast, Clean Beauty School.)

Of course, you can always seek out clean beauty retailers that set strict, high standards—if reading labels is just simply not your thing, most of the time you can trust that each brand they carry adheres to their stringent guidelines. But not everybody has access to these retailers, which means you might have to peer at inky lists yourself (plus, it's always a good idea to stay well-informed, no?). 

Silicones are tricky. Technically, silicones are not inherently bad. Linear cyclical silicones, like dimethicones or your MFA codes, are not dangerous to human health or the environment.

However, some brands stay away from them altogether because they don't really have a health-forward standpoint point—in skin care, they make lotions feel nice and silky; in hair care, they provide a superficial coating around the strand and make it feel smooth and shiny. But they don't provide nutrients or moisture, and they tend to stick on hair and skin.

"So it changes user behavior in a really interesting way," notes Engler. "If you are using a hair cream that has a dimethicone in it, it doesn't rinse out of the hair all that easy, and then you have to be super aggressive when you're washing your hair." Same goes for skin: "If you're using a face cream that has one of these silicones, you're going to have to be kind of aggressive to get it off, or it's not all going to come off, and then it might clog pores," Engler adds. We digress. 

Next, we have PEGs (or polyethylene glycols). These are petroleum-derived products, and they're typically used as emulsifiers and thickeners. "They can be super, super irritating to the skin," says Engler. "They can be quite disruptive; they can cause allergies; they can cause sensitivities." 

But PEGs are interesting—they used to be only petroleum-derived (and contribute to the host of skin issues noted above), but now formulators have found a way to create the structure from botanicals. While relatively new, these aren't as irritating as their petroleum counterparts.

Take propylene glycol, for example: When derived from petroleum, it can be incredibly harsh on the skin (it was even selected as the American Contact Dermatitis Society's "Allergen of the Year" in 2018); however, plant-derived versions do exist (converted from glycerin rather than petroleum), and these have not been found to be as sensitizing.

At mindbodygreen, "clean" beauty is so much more than how your skin reacts to a certain product. Engler puts it perfectly: "When we talk about clean, we're talking about safe beauty. We're talking about beauty that is not going to harm you. It is not going to be agitating to your skin. It is not going to harm the environment around you. It is not going to harm the environment when it goes back into the environment, and it is not going to harm the environment when it is taken out of the environment. You have to think about all of those things that go into it."