A frog’s tale

Back when I was a young and still very green frog, I was rather clueless about the world around me. I remember having to do my own shopping for the first time. I had just moved out of my parents’ home and was living in a big city in a tiny dorm room located on the campus of a big university. Starry eyed and full of dreams, I was eager to explore the multitude of choices I had to make every day.

One of those choices was picking skincare products. Shampoo, moisturizer, deodorant… There were so many to choose from, though my budget limited the choices somewhat. For some reason, the cheaper a product was, the more colourful and visually descriptive was its package. Oh, this one has berries on it. Yum. This one has some sort of flower on it. Pretty. Oh, I know this one – it is lavender! Comforting. This one has mosquitoes in it… A little frog comedy right here. 🙂

So often I found myself buying products based on a picture. If it was pretty, I bought it. If the product smelled good when I used, I reflected on my ability to make wise choices with an ever so slightly smug feeling of personal potential yielding tangible and, let’s face it, inevitable success. If I did not like the smell, I wrote it off to unfamiliarity with the depicted on the package representative of the Earth’s flora. No harm done, at least I learned something.

As I grew older, I gradually learned that judging skin care products by the smell and the picture on the bottle is an acceptable, but not an ideal approach. There is a huge difference between a product having the smell of a certain ingredient and a product actually containing one. Most importantly, different ingredients, be they natural compounds or synthetic chemicals, have a purpose and often, in the case of the latter, an immediately apparent function. As I look back at that young naïve frog that I was, rubbing all sorts of colourful liquids into my skin, I feel a little bit sad. That poor thing – paying for the privilege of testing unknown compounds on her own body. 🙁

In my blog I will share what I have learned about cosmetics ingredients over the years since. Naturally, my blog will be natural ingredient heavy. 🙂 However, if you would like to know my opinion about a particular ingredient, even an artificial one, let me know and I will pull up my text books and tap into the froggy grapevine just for you.

In the meantime, let’s get started…