Commonly Confused Terms to Know

Selecting beauty products that are right for your skin is difficult enough, and with all the new terminology around, and move to organic products….well, I remember when picking out beauty products used to be about clicking open the top of a bottle to smell it. So here we go, let me fill you in on some misconstrued terms:

HYPOALLERGENIC : low risk of allergy but still some risk. It means there was a group of people tested and maybe one or two people from the group got some sort of reaction, probably very mild. People often think this means there is NO risk of allergy, and that is just untrue. However, skin products are usually the things that people get reactions to, generally not makeup products.
NONCOMEDOGENIC : This does actually mean that it will not clog pores. However, you must be careful, because if a product says “does not clog pores” or something along those lines and leaves out this word “noncomedogenic”, there is still a chance that it could clog pores.
FRAGRANCE FREE : there are no scents ADDED to a products. HOWEVER, it does not mean that the product does not have any smell. There could be, for example, lavender in the ingredients, and therefore, the product will smell like lavender. But the scent of lavender was not added, it was naturally occurring.
UNSCENTED : there is no scent at all. There are no ingredients that have a natural smell, and usually, a masking ingredient has been added to get rid of the smell of chemicals.
COSMECEUTICAL : it will improve the skin’s appearance because it has the ability to penetrate into the dermis and make changes to the skin from the cellular level. This is the only way that a product can actually change the appearance of skin, because once cells are past the dermis into the epidermis, they begin to die, and will not change. These products will usually have an expiry date which is a proper date shown in numbers.
ACTIVE AGENT : it is the ingredient which is working to do what the product says it will do (change the appearance of skin in some way). The product will usually say, “contains…” and you know that is the active ingredient which is making the product work.

Now go forth and shop all the wiser!