Product and ingredient reference
À LA CARTE 0.1% Copper Peptide
À LA CARTE 0.1% Copper Peptide À LA CARTE 0.1% Copper Peptide ingredients explained: Aqua, Butylene Glycol, Phenoxyethanol, Sodium Hyaluronate, Tetrasodium EDTA, Bis (Tripeptide-1) Copper Acetate, Ethylhexylglycerin Show all ingredients by function Aqua solven
À LA CARTE 0.1% Copper Peptide À LA CARTE 0.1% Copper Peptide ingredients explained: Aqua, Butylene Glycol, Phenoxyethanol, Sodium Hyaluronate, Tetrasodium EDTA, Bis (Tripeptide-1) Copper Acetate, Ethylhexylglycerin Show all ingredients by function Aqua solvent Butylene Glycol moisturizer/humectant, solvent 0, 1 Phenoxyethanol preservative Sodium Hyaluronate skin-identical ingredient, moisturizer/humectant 0, 0 goodie Tetrasodium EDTA chelating Bis (Tripeptide-1) Copper Acetate Ethylhexylglycerin Good old water, aka H2O. The most common skincare ingredient of all. You can usually find it right in the very first spot of the ingredient list, meaning it’s the biggest thing out of all the stuff that makes up the product. It’s mainly a solvent for ingredients that do not like to dissolve in oils but rather in water. Expand to read more Once inside the skin, it hydrates, but not from the outside - putting pure water on the skin (hello long baths!) is drying. One more thing: the water used in cosmetics is purified and deionized (it means that almost all of the mineral ions inside it is removed). Like this, the products can stay more stable over time. Butylene glycol, or let’s just call it BG, is a multi-tasking colorless, syrupy liquid. It’s a great pick for creating a nice feeling product. BG’s main job is usually to be a solvent for the other ingredients. Other tasks include helping the product to absorb faster and deeper into the skin (penetration enhancer), making the product spread nicely over the skin (slip agent), and attracting water (humectant) into the skin. It’s an ingredient whose safety hasn’t been questioned so far by anyone (at least not that we know about). BG is approved by Ecocert and is also used enthusiastically in natural products. BTW, it’s also a food additive. It’s pretty much the current IT-preservative. It’s safe and gentle, but even more importantly, it’s not a feared-by-everyone-mostly-without-scientific-reason paraben. It’s not something new: it was introduced around 1950 and today it can be used up to 1% worldwide. It can be found in nature - in green tea - but the version used in cosmetics is synthetic. Other than having a good safety profile and being quite gentle to the skin it has some other advantages too. It can be used in many types of formulations as it has great thermal stability (can be heated up to 85°C) and works on a wide range of pH levels (ph 3-10). It’s often used together with ethylhexylglycerin as it nicely improves the preservative activity of phenoxyethanol. It’s the - sodium form - cousin of the famous NMF, hyaluronic acid (HA). If HA does not tell you anything we have a super detailed, geeky explanation about it here. The TL; DR version of HA is that it's a huge polymer (big molecule from repeated subunits) found in the skin that acts as a sponge helping the skin to hold onto water, being plump and elastic. HA is famous for its crazy water holding capacity as it can bind up to 1000 times its own weight in water. As far as skincare goes, sodium hyaluronate and hyaluronic acid are pretty much the same and the two names are used interchangeably. As cosmetic chemist kindofstephen writes on reddit "sodium hyaluronate disassociates into hyaluronic acid molecule and a sodium atom in solution". In spite of this, if you search for "hyaluronic acid vs sodium hyaluronate" you will find on multiple places that sodium hyaluronate is smaller and can penetrate the skin better. Chemically, this is definitely n what‑it‑does moisturizer/humectant | solvent irritancy, com. skin-identical ingredient | moisturizer/humectant