Skin care trends to avoid: trendy stuff!

When your doctor is deciding how to treat XYZ, does he/she go for the newest fad? No, because there are standards of care in medicine. New therapies need to be proven as actual “therapies”, i.e. that they remedy the health affliction before they are adopted.

Skincare is a whole different world. In fact, skincare is dominated by fads and gimmicks and it takes effort to avoid falling into those traps, which cost money and, in some cases, skin health.

Look for these key terms, they are indicative of gimmick/fads

• Delivery
• Nano
• French-sounding words in an American made product
• Magical sounding words, like Lunar, Celestial, Alchemy
• Neuro whatever
• New chemicals like “new vitamin C!” and fluorphlogopite
• expensive stuff like caviar, platinum, diamond (infusion!), gold, pearl, orchid, etc. They can be fun items, but don’t pay extra for them.
• Light. We have no receptors for light, with the exception of our eyes, and have no beneficial light-responding mechanisms
• Silly jars. If you want a sculpture, buy a sculpture!
• gimmicks like ingredients shaped like polysaccharide spheres that are powdered and mixed with a serum. Why didn’t they just mix them to start with?

Why avoid gimmicks

It’s important to remember what we need for our skin: useful stuff. The new and gimmicky is the enemy of the useful. When you buy and use a silly product, are you neglecting to use a good one?

Delivery: the skin is not impermeable and we don’t need special delivery chemicals to deliver ingredients to the skin. Then you have to worry about the chemicals used to “deliver”, say, vitamin C into the skin. In the pursuit of novelty, you are getting too much novelty, which adds danger.

Nano: no need for “nano” anything. Topical preparations for the skin are not intended to penetrate the tissue, as is the case when you need to deliver medication.

French: in France, they sell French products with American names. They are just appealing to our silly thirst for fancy.

Plasma, neuro, and other fancy terms: nothing to do with anything, just words to make you think that you are buying sophisticated technology when you are probably buying a run-of-the-mill cream

New chemicals: have they been proven to be OK for your skin? The bar for “cosmetics” is very low and the potential for a new chemical to damage your skin is not zero.

In short? Go for scientifically proven ingredients. Like what you find in Skin Actives. If you are going to go for trendy and silly, go ahead, but don’t forget to use what is good for your skin.