07 Apr What They Don’t Want You To Know About Retinol
Retinol in your beauty products causes reproductive toxicity? WHAT?!
Hey there! My name is Gina Nguyen, I am the mind behind damngina.co blog. Skincare has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager! My mom taught me to always take care of my skin at all costs. Some women like to splurge on clothes, purses, perfume, and makeup. I like to splurge on skincare!
Our skin is our largest organ and we seldom stop to think about the things we are doing to nurture that organ. Did you know skin absorbs 64% of products it comes in contact with?
Now that I am getting a little older, I’ve been noticing some more fine lines and wrinkles on my face that I want to prevent from getting worse. While on my search for anti-aging products, I came across tons of products that contained the ingredient Retinol. It’s the GOLDEN ingredient in all anti-aging skincare products.
How Retinol Harms Your Body
What they’re not telling you about retinol is that it is extremely harmful to our bodies! Retinol has been found to cause reproductive toxicity, developmental toxicity, and has been linked to infertility.
Another negative side affect of using retinol is that it causes the skin to be more sensitive to UV rays. Basically, if you use retinol and go outside, you are asking for sun damage. Retinol and other forms of Vitamin A rank between a 6-9 out of 10 on EWG’s Skin Deep database (10 is the worst!).
If something was harmful to our bodies, why would companies put them in our products?! Well, let me tell you, sister! The US Congress has not passed a bill regulating personal care products since 1938. Yep, over 80 years!!! The personal care industry is self regulated and a lot of companies get away with using cheap ingredients that are known to be harmful to our bodies.
Did you know that the FDA does not even have authority to recall a product even if it has been found to cause harm? Isn’t that wild?! Safety should be an expectation, not a privilege.
The best things we can do for ourselves is to follow EWG and check ingredients on all of our personal care products and do research on all “Clean Beauty” brands. There are some brands that are “greenwashing” their products, meaning, they are using clean beauty buzzwords to market their product even though some of their ingredients are still toxic.
Educate yourself on product ingredients and remember… you are what you eat and what you put on your body. Once you know better, you do better.
XO, Gina Nguyen
