Benefits of Botanicals and Extracts in Your Soap and Self Care Products

Adding Botanicals and Extracts to your products is a wonderful way to increase the benefits of your creams, beauty products and natural soap. This has been happening for thousands of years, all over the world.

Most of the time, the reasons for adding the botanicals and extracts in commercial products are for the promotional benefits rather than the skin benefits.

This is what the industry calls Fairy Dusting.  The process of Fairy Dusting is when a company puts an almost undetectable amount of the botanical into the product to be able to add it to the label and most of the time, make it the major feature of the product.

Consumers have no real way of knowing how much of the ingredient went into the product.  This is because of the labeling laws.

When it comes to labeling, the ingredients must be in quantity order until the content is 1% or less.

In the following $150 skin care product ingredient list, all of the ingredients up to the Cetearyl Alcohol were over 1%.  After this ingredient, the rest are mainly extracts, preservatives, and fragrance oils.  Since fragrance oil is generally added to 1% so it can appear on the ingredient list as the last item, and Potassium Sorbate is usually .5%, we can already tell this list of ingredients after the Cetearyl Alcohol is out of order.

We can probably assume that many of the extracts will be under the 1%.  This is a legal option for this company, because at 1% and less, they can rearrange the order of the ingredients to make their product look more impressive than it is.

Aqua/Water/Eau, Glycerin, Squalane, Triheptanoin, Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil,
Helianthus Annuus (Sunflower) Seed Oil, Candelilla/Jojoba/Rice Bran Polyglyceryl-3, Esters,
Glyceryl Stearate, Cetyl Alcohol, Dimethicone, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Cetearyl Alcohol,
Rosa Canina Extract, Sodium Hyaluronate, Saccharum Officinarium (Sugar Cane) Extract,
Acer Saccharinum (Sugar Maple) Extract, Citrus Aurantium Dulcis (Orange) Fruit Extract,
Citrus Medica Limonum (Lemon) Fruit Extract, Soybean Sterols, Glycine Soja (Soybean) Seed Extract,
Avena Sativa (Oat) Kernel Extract, Macadamia Integrifolia Seed Oil, Bisabolol, Tocopheryl Acetate,
Trehalose, Zingiber Officinale (Ginger) Root Extract, Panax Ginseng Root Extract,
Vaccinium Myrtillus Extract, Sodium Phytate, Potassium Sorbate, Ethylhexylglycerin,
Phenoxyethanol, Parfum/Fragrance.

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Another sneaky ingredient listing game that the commercial companies play is the use of freeze dried aloe extract.

Though water may be the main ingredient in a product, many companies choose to use freeze dried aloe and
count all of the water they have added to reconstitute the aloe.

This allows the Aloe Extract to appear as # 1 on their ingredient list.  Even though they have used
far more water than they needed to hydrate the aloe, they then use a few cheaper ingredients to thicken the product.

Thank goodness there are alternatives to purchasing these over priced under beneficial products.
We can make our own and we can use botanicals and extracts as a functional part of our products.

You can even make your own Natural Extracts.  This is better than purchasing many of the
spray dried extracts (powder)  that are known to be filled with more cyclodextrine (from sugar)
and starch than the actual botanical or herbal ingredient.

This is not damaging to your health, you are just not getting as much of the herbal benefit
that you are paying for when you purchase powdered extracts.

You can learn how to make your own extracts at Soap Making School.

There are over 70 Videos to guide you through making cold process soap, hot process soap,
natural liquid soap, creams, lotions, skin care, spa products, sugar scrubs and so much more.

Join today for $7 a week (12 weeks then the rest is free) or join the
entire program for $84 and get access to all of the videos immediately.

You can also choose certain classes you want to take ( soap or just skin care)
through Karma Suds

Take a look and check out the options:
Soap Making School

Don’t forget to join “Taking Back Your Skin” on the right side of this page.
It’s a free email series that gives you information and
free recipes to get back to the basics with your skin.

Happy soaping

Rene