Reading Ingredients Labels

how to read an ingredients label

Reading and understanding an ingredients label is the only way to determine if a product is truly pure or natural.

Learn to do this and you will be able to separate fact from marketing hype.


Ingredients are listed in order of proportion of the total content i.e. the first couple of ingredients found on the list are the main ones, and the ones listed at the bottom are found in much lower proportions.

By law, products classed as cosmetics, must be labelled this way in most countries.


While we are still unable to determine how much harm synthetic additives will do to your skin, we do know they will not provide any nourishment.

Sometimes it's difficult to find out if an ingredient name is a synthetic chemical.

Depending on the ingredient naming convention, even natural ingredients can appear as long chemical names.

Using one of the more popular search engines will easily find most ingredient names.

We've endeavoured to include the most commonly used chemicals in skincare. However, due to the many ingredients used in skincare products, the list is far from exhaustive.

natural, pure?

When the natural ingredients for products labelled "pure" or "natural" are only found at the bottom of a list of many synthetic chemicals, you can be certain that the words "pure" and "natural" are marketing hype.

In this case, the benefits of the tiny amounts of natural ingredients, are outweighed by the many chemical additives found in much greater proportions.

For example: An apricot skin care cream will almost certainly have a synthetic apricot fragrance and colour.

Consumers can be fooled into believing the product is so full of apricots that it must assume the colour and fragrance of apricots. The actual apricot content (usually apricot kernel oil) is in reality, likely to be a very small proportion of the total ingredients.