From now on, I shall be adding a short section called The Ingredients Dictionary. I have been using beauty products for many years, and it was only until very recently that I started to actually notice the ingredients list in the products. I had no idea which does what! And to think I’ve been putting a lot of junk on my face for so many years, e.g. alcohol. It was no wonder that I had breakouts and dry patches.

As part of the learning process, I thought I’d share with you the meanings of the some of the popular ingredients we see in our beauty products. We’d get to learn together and hopefully avoid the stuff which we had no idea was causing irritation and breakouts to the skin.

The short excerpts regarding product ingredients that I’d be using will be from Paula Begoun’s books, Don’t Go To The Cosmetics Counter Without Me, and The Beauty Bible. Now I understand that there’s been a lot of mixed reviews about the books, especially with the biased reviews in the former book.

Okay, to be honest, I couldn’t be arsed by her biased reviews of beauty products. It was fun reading most of them, even though I disagreed with some. Always take reviews, no matter who writes them (me included), with a pinch of salt, I’d say, as everyone have different opinions about everything. But I admittedly respect her research into the ingredients of the skincare and therefore believe that the information gathered from the books could be useful (reviews aside). Ingredients are simply, well, ingredients. It’s biology. It’s chemistry. You can’t make it up, you can’t lie about what it can or cannot do. You know what I mean?

In between, do also check out for more information about product ingredients at Viva Woman, where Sesame has written a lot of great articles on debunking certain product ingredients, which I’m sure you’ll find useful.

Stay tuned 🙂