Product and ingredient reference
Believe beauty Hyaluronic Acid Serum
Believe beauty Hyaluronic Acid Serum Believe beauty Hyaluronic Acid Serum ingredients explained: Water, Butylene Glycol, 1,2-Hexanediol, PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Phenoxyethanol, Sodium Hyaluronate, Chlorphenesin, Panthenol, Ethylhexylglycerin, Niacinami
Believe beauty Hyaluronic Acid Serum Believe beauty Hyaluronic Acid Serum ingredients explained: Water, Butylene Glycol, 1,2-Hexanediol, PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Phenoxyethanol, Sodium Hyaluronate, Chlorphenesin, Panthenol, Ethylhexylglycerin, Niacinamide, Pentylene Glycol, Sodium Acetylated Hyaluronate, Sodium Hyaluronate Crosspolymer, Hydrolyzed Sodium Hyaluronate Show all ingredients by function Water solvent Butylene Glycol moisturizer/humectant, solvent 0, 1 1,2-Hexanediol PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil emulsifying, surfactant/cleansing Phenoxyethanol preservative Sodium Hyaluronate skin-identical ingredient, moisturizer/humectant 0, 0 goodie Chlorphenesin preservative, antimicrobial/antibacterial Panthenol soothing, moisturizer/humectant Ethylhexylglycerin Niacinamide cell-communicating ingredient, skin brightening, anti-acne, moisturizer/humectant superstar Pentylene Glycol solvent, moisturizer/humectant Sodium Acetylated Hyaluronate moisturizer/humectant Sodium Hyaluronate Crosspolymer skin-identical ingredient, antioxidant, moisturizer/humectant Hydrolyzed Sodium Hyaluronate 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. A really multi-functional helper ingredient that can do several things in a skincare product: it can bring a soft and pleasant feel to the formula, it can act as a humectant and emollient, it can be a solvent for some other ingredients (for example it can help to stabilize perfumes in watery products) and it can also help to disperse pigments more evenly in makeup products. And that is still not all: it can also boost the antimicrobial activity of preservatives. A mildly viscous, amber-colored liquid with fatty odor, made from Castor Oil and polyethylene glycol (PEG). If it were a person, we’d say, it’s agile, diligent & multifunctional. It’s mostly used as an emulsifier and surfactant but most often it is used to solubilize fragrances into water-based formulas. 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 what‑it‑does moisturizer/humectant | solvent irritancy, com. emulsifying | surfactant/cleansing skin-identical ingredient | moisturizer/humectant preservative | antimicrobial/antibacterial soothing | moisturizer/humectant cell-communicating ingredient | skin brightening | anti-acne | moisturizer/humectant solvent | moisturizer/humectant moisturizer/humectant skin-identical ingredient | antioxidant | moisturizer/humectant