Why Should You Care About Paraben-Free Face Moisturizers?

Parabens are preservatives. Those words alone should sound alarm bells in your head. We see parabens used in shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, and shaving cream. Parabens are the ingredient that protect these products from different kinds of contaminants and other outside chemicals that might make them spoil.

To be absolutely fair to parabens, they were not just thrown into our facial creams on a whim. Rather, parabens were considered necessary to prevent bacteria, microbes, and other small but living things from creeping up on our everyday bathroom creams and pastes.

Preservatives are okay for those particular everyday products, as far as we know--but it’s not so great for face moisturizers. One research that still needs to be developed suggests that parabens may be linked to cancer. However, a simpler and much more practical reason to go with a paraben-free face moisturizer is that parabens are chemicals, and there’s always a risk with those. And you never want to take a risk with your face.

Paraben-Free Face Moisturizers Are Gentle with Your Skin

Synthetic products and chemicals are sometimes harsh with skin, especially if your skin is sensitive. You wouldn’t want to find out that your skin is redder or itchy or dry because of a certain chemical product, and you wouldn’t want to risk it in the first place.

Paraben-free face moisturizers are usually water-based, which means they are lighter than most, dry faster (not leaving so much on your skin for your face to deal with), although they are less fast-acting. They usually depend more on vegetable or carrier oils that mimic our skin-produced oil, which blend into the skin and have their own natural preservatives.

At the very least, they take away one more chemical from the risk list.

How Can You Tell If You Are Buying a Paraben-Free Face Moisturizer?

That’s an excellent question. Unless the face moisturizers says “Proudly Paraben-Free,” you have no way of knowing exactly what you’re getting into. Let’s make this easy with a list. If your product does not have any of the following ingredients, then you are investing in a paraben-free face moisturizer.

• • Butylparaben

• • Ethylparaben

• • Isobutylparaben

• • Methylparaben

• • Polyparaben

• Propylparaben

Found the pattern? When skimming through the different ingredients on the bottle or jar, put it down if you find any word that includes the suffix -paraben. This asks for some careful reading on your part, but it’s worth the risk to get a little tongue-tied. And remember one of the most important rules of avoiding chemicals: if it sounds like something you associate with your chemistry class, put it down and do a little more research.

What Should Paraben-Free Face Moisturizers Have?

We keep telling you what you shouldn’t get, but what should you get when you look at your face moisturizer ingredient list? Let’s walk through what you should see on that bottle.

• • Antioxidants - Your face moisturizer has to be able to fight the free radicals bouncing around your body, breaking down your skin cells. Antioxidants grab onto free radicals and make them harmless.

• Vitamins - A good vegetable diet will do wonders for your skin; finding moisturizers with such ingredients as Vitamin A and Vitamin C will boost your skin health and make you glow.

Now that you know what you’re looking for, we highly recommend you check out our all natural, organic face moisturizer!