Your Face Oil Has 25 Ingredients.
It needs 3.
Turn your face oil over and count the ingredients. Most land between fifteen and twenty five. Then ask what each one is doing for your skin. The honest answer, for most of them, is nothing. They are there for the product, not for you.
I spent years inside global beauty houses, and I can tell you where those twenty extra ingredients come from. Here is what they are, and what your skin needs instead.
What the extra ingredients are for
Preservatives. Any product containing water needs them, or it grows bacteria within weeks. Phenoxyethanol, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate. They protect the formula. They do nothing for the skin, and on reactive skin they are a frequent cause of irritation.
Emulsifiers. Oil and water do not mix, so a cream needs chemistry to hold them together. Polysorbates, cetearyl alcohol, glyceryl stearate. Again, for the texture, not for you.
Fragrance. Listed as parfum, fragrance, or aroma. A blend of aroma chemicals designed to make the product smell like something it is not. The European Union requires twenty six of these to be declared on the label because of how often they cause allergic reactions.
Texture agents and silicones. Dimethicone, carbomer, xanthan gum. They make a product glide and feel expensive. They sit on the surface.
Marketing ingredients. A trace of an exotic extract, at a fraction of a percent, so the name can go on the front of the box.
None of these feed the skin. They feed the formula.
What the skin actually needs from an oil
An oil has no water, so it needs no preservative and no emulsifier. That removes most of the list at once. What remains is the question of what the skin can use.
Skin that is dry, sensitive or dull is usually skin whose barrier is short of lipids. A good face oil does one job: it supplements those lipids with ones the skin recognizes, and adds the vitamins and antioxidants the skin uses to repair itself. That takes three things.
The three
Damask rose petals. Not rose essential oil, which is distilled and concentrated thousands of times, and not rose fragrance, which never contained a rose. Whole petals, left in oil for months, give the skin what the petal holds: vitamins A, C, E and K, flavonoids, polyphenols and anthocyanins, at the strength the flower itself carries them. ETHERNAL is seventy percent petals by weight.
Jojoba oil. Technically a liquid wax, and the closest plant material to human sebum that exists. The skin recognizes it and absorbs it without a greasy layer. Rated non comedogenic.
Sweet almond oil. Rich in oleic acid and vitamin E. Used on infant and eczema prone skin for generations because it is one of the least reactive plant oils there is.
That is the complete ingredient list of the ETHERNAL Signature Oil, the 30 ml face, body and hair oil. Rosa damascena petals, jojoba oil, sweet almond oil. Nothing to preserve, nothing to mask, nothing to defend against.
How to check yours in ten seconds
Look for the word parfum or fragrance. If it is there, the product is scented with chemicals.
Look for alcohol denat or SD alcohol. If it is there, the product will dry the skin it claims to hydrate.
Count the ingredients. If there are more than ten, ask what the rest are for.
If the list reads petals, then one or two carrier oils, and nothing else, you have found an infusion. That is the form the skin has always met the rose in.
Giselle
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