Beauty Tips For Body Care
WATER CREAMS, GELS AND ANGST. After being asked a lot of questions and being asked to post in R/skincareaddiction and R/asianbeauty, here goes!About me: I'm a Cosmetics Formulation chemist. I look at products you buy and tell you how overpriced they are and if they have anything in them that works in any concentration of value. So, my inbox has been absolutely fucking FLOODED with questions about eye-creams and peel gels and the like. I'm trying to respond to all, but I think I'm just going to do a blanket post. First, let's start with a story.A few years ago, some coworkers and I were LAUGHING at the idea of creating a 'water cream' which was literally 1% carbomer, water, glycerin, propylene glycol, some inane tiny drop of ingredient and titanium dioxide to make it white, then selling it for $50 an ounce and claiming it 'hydrated your skin.'Nowadays...I'm seeing just that. I'm literally BALKING at these fucking products, one after another that are 70-80% water.Why? Because they can.Because they fucking can!I'm sitting here shitting my pants because I had this great damn idea that I passed on because 'ethics' and 'morals.' Pft.Alas, I digress.Watercreams and gels are just water, a bit of a polymer that hydrates in the face of something like Triethanolamine or some other mild caustic, and something to make it white, usually titanium dioxide. You're paying for jellified opaque water. When you find a product on the shelf that looks attractive and makes amazing claims, you naturally want to do two things, sniff, test and buy. Sure it smells nice, and we've all been there coughcoughCaudalieEauDeBeautecough, but there's a fine line between customer abuse and manipulation and a functional product. The long story short is that, simply put, that the working good products just don't sell. People WANT cheap junk in expensive pots with nice smells.Now, this being said, some of them are REALLY GOOD, some are REALLY expensive. Some are really bad and really expensive. Going forward, it's going to be my goal to show you guys what to look for and what the actual cost of your creams and things are. Are you paying for hype or happening?Things to look out for: When you're reading the list of ingredients and you see things like 'mineral oil' in your seventy plus dollar an ounce cream...NO! Bad! Mineral oil, at current market value, is running less than a dollar a pound. The filtered water they use is under $0.10 a gallon and carbomers, they run the gamate but usually under $30 a pound.Let me cost out a formula for you for a 1oz jar of eye cream: Water .75oz [.01 cents worth of water] Mineral Oil 0.15oz [.01 cents of mineral oil]Carbomer .02oz [at $30/lb, $0.04 of carbomer]Niacinamide 0.0001oz [trust me, this stuff is effective in this dosage!] [5,000+/kg, five bucks a gram, let's be super super generous and say $0.50 of niacinamide]Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) .002oz [$40/lb, $0.01 of vitamin C] Preservative .0002oz [Around $20/lb, $0.01 of preservative] some 'miracle' hype oil: .0797oz [The most expensive thing I can think of, Saffron oil at $10/gram $22.32] Let's add this up together.We're making the world's most expensive and probably harmful eye cream, because that much saffron oil on your eyes is probably dangerous. If you made this yourself, you'd probably run at about 22.90 for an ounce of this stuff. The same stuff, watered down, is selling for 90+ an ounce. Marketing, labor, and fancy packaging adds up, but when you're not getting any value, it doesn't make shit for sense.Some companies even add extra carbomer and WHIP their product, adding air, to make them even more 'watered' down. Caudalie moisturizing sorbet. It's 'whipped' so you know it's light and fluffy goodness for your skin. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE that product, but it's just so much money for AIR and water.Now, the above prices I quoted are prices that YOU would pay as a non-wholesale customer. Big companies that contract to make these things get them for pennies on the dollar of what I quoted above. You're not paying for quality, results or even components. You're paying for a famous youtuber, diva or someone else to tell you its great.Better alternatives you can do: Argan oil. Butylene glycol based sheet masks. [That gel thats inside those, yep, that's the same serum you pay 80 an ounce for] pour your excess goop into a vial for later use. Peel a cucumber and put the thick skin peels on your face, white side to skin. The goo that leaks out of them is very hydrating and refreshing. Toners: Orange blossom water! I can't stress how nice this stuff is.Going forward, expect to hear more from me. I'm going to be saving up some money to set up a home lab. With this, I'm going to be making dupes of hype products, showing off cheaper alternatives and pushing a conservative effort to pull back on how much you're blowing on these expensive products. :D
Girls Blog 2015
Submitted by MikRose
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