How to Read Skincare Product Labels

Skincare is yet another market within the U.S. that is poorly regulated and highly marketed, making it difficult for consumers to differentiate the good products from the well-marketed ones. Part of my job as a licensed esthetician is to familiarize myself with ingredients and product labeling, follow these tips to enhance your skincare consumer experience, and choose skincare products that are what they say they are.

Skincare Labeling: Identify Marketing vs. Reality

It is so helpful to train yourself to see past the beautiful packaging and marketing claims by learning to read skincare product labels. By knowing what to look for on a product’s label, you can effectively identify if the product does indeed do what it claims. One example of how marketing and labeling can be extremely confusing is…

Say you prefer your products to be vegan and you find many products that make the claim of being “plant-based”, but this term is not regulated and therefore the product may very well contain ingredients derived from animals.

To ensure you are getting vegan skincare products, you should look for the certified vegan logo. The trick is there are still vegan products out there that do not have this certification, as it can be costly for companies to obtain certified logos. Similarly, you can tell if a product is not tested on animals if it has the cruelty-free bunny stamp somewhere on the label, and you may assume if a product is cruelty-free then it is also vegan, but this is not true. 

If you prefer your products to be natural or organic for personal reasons then you should also watch out for products using the terms natural or organic. One ingredient may be organic in a formulation but unless the product is certified organic this is just a marketing tactic.

Take the Time to Actually Read the Ingredient List

I have covered this previously on the blog but whether a product is naturally or chemically derived does not mean one is safer or more effective than the other. Ingredients can be beneficial or harmful no matter if they are natural or synthetic, and this is another reason why it is so important to learn the art of reading product labels. If for personal reasons you prefer naturally derived products it is helpful to know that most synthetic ingredients start with PEG, PPG, or end in –eth.

There are many ingredients that may sound harmful by their names but are actually great for the skin. For example hyaluronic acid is a hydrating component of the skin, ferulic acid is an antioxidant, and tetrahexyldecyl ascorbate is a form of vitamin C, don’t judge an ingredient based on how its name “sounds”. Some ingredients that everyone should try and avoid are ingredients like sulfates, parabens, fragrance, dyes, and denatured alcohol that can be sensitizing to the skin and harmful to our health.

Pay Attention to Ingredient Concentration

When reading a products’ ingredient list it is important to know that ingredients are listed from highest to lowest concentration within the product. Ingredients at the top of the list are the most concentrated, and as the list goes on the concentration of each ingredient decreases. This means that you want good ingredients and specifically the product’s call out ingredients near the top of the list. If the call out ingredients are closer to the bottom the finished product results don’t support the benefits of the call out ingredients. 

This also goes for bad ingredients, for example, I recommend staying away from fragrance in your skincare, but if the fragrance is at the very bottom of a list versus at the very top it isn’t as big of a deal. On the other hand, some ingredients are still active and effective at low concentrations such as Coenzyme Q10, so don’t disregard all call out ingredients listed at the bottom without doing a bit of research. Ingredients with less than 1% of a concentration within a formulation are not required by law to be listed. 

Be Aware of Product Shelf Life

Every product has a shelf life, otherwise known as an expiration date. I know we are all guilty at some point in our lives of having a product graveyard and every now and then we have the urge to use some of these products up rather than just tossing them, but be sure that you check how old this product is before diving in. You can do this by looking for the small opened jar image on a product that most likely contains one of the following 6M, 12M or 24M. This stands for the number of months a product is good for after opening.

If you can’t remember when you bought this product it is probably time to throw it out. Using expired products can mean applying rancid ingredients that can be harmful but are most likely just not effective anymore, it can also mean your product has separated and the ingredients are no longer well combined in the formulation and can cause clogged pores and breakouts. Another way to check the expiration date is to search for the batch number, which is usually on the bottom of a product that will tell you when the product was made. 

Learning to read product labels and especially ingredient lists can be so incredibly helpful for choosing the best products for your skin. However, it is not an easy task to learn, that is where we come in! Chat with a Pomp Esthetician who has done the hard work and can recommend products with the right ingredients for your skin.