The untold truth about “all-natural” products and why they can actually be bad for breakouts

Consumers are bombarded with products touted as “all-natural,” “organic,” “non-comedogenic,” and “hand-crafted” in advertisements every single day.

 There are tons of websites glorifying natural products, it’s all a marketing tactic!

The growing popularity of this subject shows that we need to make sense of it all. Most “natural” skin care products, which proclaim to have “no chemicals” are actually terrible for acne and make it much worse.

Most “natural” and “organic” skin care lines contain pore-clogging ingredients like shea butter, olive oil, coconut oil, beeswax, essential oils, etc and recommend applying them directly to acne prone areas. But, poison ivy is all natural yet harmful to humans.

If it smells like candy and unicorns, it’s probably going to break you out. While most of the natural ingredients smell great, they are the worst ingredients to treat acne. The molecule is so small that they penetrate the pores quickly, they don’t have antibacterial properties nor do they increase cell turnover inside the pore.

It’s pure marketing aimed at the person who is living a healthy, vegan or low-carb diet and wants to extend those health benefits to their skincare routine.

The idea that nature can harm us is nothing new. Have you ever heard of malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, or tetanus? Why are so many of us convinced that anything and everything natural is healthier for us than synthetic products? It's true that modern chemistry has introduced us to various toxic chemicals, like DDT and dioxins, but do you really think that nature's chemicals are any less harmful to you? In fact, the most toxic chemicals to humans are completely natural!

Natural chemicals are produced by nature without any human involvement. Synthetic chemicals are made by humans using different methods than nature uses, and these chemical structures may or may not be found in nature. This definition means a synthetic chemical can be made from a natural product (i.e. naturally derived).

Researchers in California who studied natural and synthetic chemicals in the human diet in 2001 and wrote, “Among the agents identified as human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research in Cancer 62% occur naturally: 16 are natural chemicals, 11 are mixtures of natural chemicals, and 10 are infectious agents. Thus, the idea that a chemical is “safe” because it is natural,is not correct.”(source)

So that leads many of us to be frustrated and skeptical about various claims we see on packaging because we have been “burned” (myself included).Did you know that the terms “natural” and “all-natural” are completely unregulated by the FDA? Any company can stamp the word on a label.

That’s why it’s important to turn the bottle around and read the ingredient label itself.

The natural vs synthetic issue is an ongoing debate, which still hasn’t been fully solved. Everything needs to be considered on a case by case basis. So we use ingredients in our products that have been around for awhile and researched extensively. Our ingredient lists don’t include 30+ items of would be fillers and nonsense that won’t benefit you. We prefer quality over quantity and only include the ingredients you need and work well together.

Fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter if a product is “all-natural” or partly natural with some safe synthetic ingredients. “All-natural” sounds better so companies go with it, at the end of the day the ingredients need to be beneficial for your particular skin type (natural or not). So don’t let the “natural” approach keep you from getting clear!