Prelude
Using flowers in skin care is increasingly becoming more common.  In fact, most if not all natural or organic skin care manufacturers these days use extracts taken from fresh flowers as active ingedients in their product range.  Apart from the fact that they are natural ingredients, using flowers in skin care recipes is great because it creates skin care products that smell absolutely delightful as there is nothing more lovely and breathtaking than the scent of fresh flowers.  Calendula, also known as pot marigold is a prime example.

Prelude:
I’ve created a new category labelled as Ingredients101 with the objective to put up brief notes on skin care ingredients that I’ve learnt about. The objective is really to help myself remember them. You see, even though I try to read a bit more about skin care ingredients, I find I usually cannot remember their benefits or worst, get them all confused. Hence, I’ve decided that a better way to aid my memory is to write about them here and hopefully, my readers will also find this useful. But instead of listing them down, I thought it’s easier to digest the information if I write about one ingredient each time.   So here goes my first one about Alpha Lipoic Acid:

While running through EWG’s Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database for updates, I noticed that they’ve put up an ingredient guide for children’s products which highlights 20 common ingredients of concern.  Some of these information are actually useful for us to know as many of our skin care products do contain the said ingredients too. 

Just the other day I was looking at a sunblock with interest because the name contains the word nano.  I was actually quite keen to get it but thank goodness I didn’t, especially now that I’ve read why we should avoid nano-sunscreens from Friends of the Earth.   

Some manufacturers are adding nanoparticles-incredibly small particles of otherwise familiar sunscreen ingredients like titanium dioxide and zinc oxide-to products without letting customers know that they’re buying nano ingredients.