7 Things You Can’t Determine from the Ingredient List

00:06 Trina Renea: Hello, hello. 

00:07 Rebecca Gadberry: Hello.

00:08 Trina Renea: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. How are you today?

00:12 Rebecca Gadberry: Oh, I'm fine. Thank you. How art thou?

00:15 Trina Renea: I'm so good. I'm so excited for today's episode. 

00:19 Rebecca Gadberry: Oh, are you really? 

00:22 Trina Renea: People listening to us are going to be like, "Wait, I got the wrong podcast. Who are these ladies?”

00:27 Rebecca Gadberry: No, it's just Trina and Rebecca being weird. 

00:29 Trina Renea: Yeah, it's just us again. 

00:30 Rebecca Gadberry: As usual. 

00:34 Trina Renea: Hello, Rebecca. 

00:34 Rebecca Gadberry: Hello, Trina. How art thou? Yes, I said that already. Yes. We've done that before. 

00:39 Trina Renea: We've done this already. All right. 

00:42 Rebecca Gadberry: We have an exciting episode. 

00:44 Trina Renea: Yes, and I'm freezing in the studio right now. 

00:46 Rebecca Gadberry: I know. They have the air conditioning on. You see, we can't have the air conditioning on in the studio. 

00:53 Trina Renea: Yes, because it can blow the noise into the room, so we have to ice it cold and then let it warm back up. 

00:59 Rebecca Gadberry: Right. And our hot little bodies and our hot little breath come out and heat the room up. So by the end of an episode we're too warm.

01:06 Trina Renea: Because we're hot. 

01:11 Rebecca Gadberry: So that's our big challenges for the day. You may be at home saying, "Well, if that's all they're going through, I'm having a good day." 

01:20 Trina Renea: Exactly.

01:22 Rebecca Gadberry: So we're going to talk about seven things you cannot get from reading an ingredient list. 

01:30 Trina Renea: Which is so interesting because you think that you can read everything on the back of your bottle. 

01:36 Rebecca Gadberry: You could read the words, but you can't know…

01:38 Trina Renea: Well, most people throw it away on a box and then they never see it anyway. 

01:41 Rebecca Gadberry: You know why it's on the outside of the box, or it's on the outside? 

01:44 Trina Renea: So that people cannot have them look at their ingredients on the jar. 

01:48 Rebecca Gadberry: No. It's according to an Act of Congress that passed, I think, it went into effect in the 1970s, called the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, also known as the FPLA. And the FPLA was passed because congress and people were worried about people getting exposed to allergens and not knowing if an allergen was in your food or your cosmetics or whatever. 

So, for foods and cosmetics, we have to put the ingredients on the outer package, not if there's a container inside a box, for instance, not on the inside of the box, because why is it needed on the container? You're going to be looking for it on the outside of the box, right? You're not going to be looking at the container until you get it home.

02:40 Trina Renea: Then you don't have to put all those ingredients on your tiny, little bottle that takes up a whole bunch of space. And you can't read anyways because it's too small. 

02:48 Rebecca Gadberry: Right, and that's part of the problem. But the issue is that it was an Act of Congress that was passed to make sure that we could tell, as consumers, what was in the product, if we might be allergic to it, and then avoid the allergen. 

When do you become allergic to an ingredient? When you're standing in the aisle looking at the product or when you're looking on a website? No. You get it after you have used the product. By then, if it's on the outer package, you throw the outer package away and then you don't know what's in it. 

Thankfully, the internet solves a lot of those old problems because most companies have their ingredient lists on their websites. That takes away a lot of the issue. 

03:36 Trina Renea: So, if you have it on your website, you don't have to put it on your jar? 

03:39 Rebecca Gadberry: No, it doesn't work that way. You still have to put it, but anyway…

A lot of people think of the ingredient list as God, as the Bible, as the Word. They think that you can tell anything by reading the ingredient list. 

03:56 Trina Renea: Well, we used to dissect those in your class and break them down. 

04:01 Rebecca Gadberry: We still do. 

04:03 Trina Renea: Yeah, but what are some of the— there's some tricky things that you…

04:06 Rebecca Gadberry: Can't tell from reading the ingredient list. One of my big gripes, and this seems to be, all of our sessions, our episodes right now seem to be about Rebecca's big gripes. So, we could just call them…

04:20 Trina Renea: But guess what? All these episodes are coming out on different days and months.

04:22 Rebecca Gadberry: Different days, yes. 

04:25 Trina Renea: So, it won't be all about Rebecca's gripes. 

04:28 Rebecca Gadberry: Anyway, all of the deep dives for the next few months or the last few months have been Rebecca's gripes, and that's okay, I guess. 

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that there are seven main things you can't determine from reading the ingredient list. I thought we'd talk today about what those are, because people think, “Oh, there's this ingredient in there. It must be comedogenic. The product must be comedogenic,” or, “There's this ingredient in there, it must be clogging my pores.” That's comedogenicity. “It must be suffocating my skin if it's got silicones in there,” or a number of other things. 

So, let's talk about what you cannot get from an ingredient list. First of all, the presence of an ingredient does not mean you know anything about that ingredient, except that an ingredient with that name is in the product. You don't know what quality that ingredient is. You don't know what purity that ingredient is. You don't even know necessarily if that ingredient is the same as the ingredient that you think is bad or good. 

05:41 Trina Renea: So let me give an example from my brain. If I go to buy cheese, there's a whole bunch of different kinds of cheese and you don't know what kind of cheese they're putting in, like is it organic? Is it from Europe? Is it from America? Is it cheddar? Is it Swiss? You don't know, because it just says ‘cheese’, let's say. 

06:05 Rebecca Gadberry: Right. Okay. I get where you're coming from. I don't know if I buy into the analogy, but let's use something that I do know. 

For instance, a surfactant like a cocamidopropyl betaine. That's a big, long word. And, by the way, for those of you who think big, long words mean dangerous and unnatural, etc., that's not true at all. There's a big, long word called glycerrhetinic acid, which is from licorice. Yes, it's a chemical, but everything is a chemical, but, say it with me, light and electricity. 

So glycerrhetinic acid can be taken from licorice, put into your product, and it's a soothing ingredient. It also helps to cut down on redness in the skin. That's a nice ingredient.

But let's go back to cocamidopropyl betaine. 

06:53 Trina Renea: Cocamidopropyl betaine.

06:54 Rebecca Gadberry: Cocamidopropyl betaine, and that is an ingredient that's a cleansing ingredient. It's a gentle ingredient, but there are various purity standards applied to this ingredient. So you can have a purity standard that has a lot of impurities in it that it's made to be used in mechanics. It's made to be used to clean floors. It's made to be used…

Okay? Not made to be used on the skin. That would read cocamidopropyl betaine just like the one that is made to be used on the skin.

07:29 Trina Renea: So you're hoping that the brand you're using is being forthright in using…

07:36 Rebecca Gadberry: Using a pure standard, a pure quality. 

07:38 Trina Renea: But you don't really know. 

07:40 Rebecca Gadberry: But you don't know. And these are called the grades of an ingredient. So there is the technical grade or the mechanic grade. There is the cosmetic grade. There's the drug grade. And then there's the food grade. 

In the cosmetic industry, we don't really use the technical grade or the mechanics grade, which is used in the world of working on engines and motors, things like that. The cosmetic grade is a very high purity standard, but the purest standard is the US Pharmacopoeia or the USP grade, which is also known as the drug grade. 

In drugs, it will say the name of the ingredient and then USP afterwards. In cosmetics, if we put USP in the ingredient list, we're making a drug claim. We're not allowed to put it there even though it may be the drug grade. 

Some companies say this is medical grade, and one of the things that they're implying is that they're using the drug grade in their products. 

08:42 Trina Renea: Wait, so you can say it's medical grade on the front of your label?

08:46 Rebecca Gadberry: No, you're not supposed to. This is usually described that way in marketing and things, but it's not usually on the container. 

08:57 Trina Renea: Okay. 

08:59 Rebecca Gadberry: So the ingredient grade is a purity standard. When we see, let's say, sodium lauryl sulfate, when we see sodium lauryl sulfate, there's over 2,000 different forms and grades of sodium lauryl sulfate. If somebody says, “I don't want sodium lauryl sulfate in my products,” what's the reason why? If it's because it's got impurities in it and it's really dangerous, well, that's the technical grade or the mechanical grade, not the grade that's made for cosmetics or drugs. And you can't tell from looking at the ingredient list. 

So when somebody says, “I don't want this in my product.” Why don't you want it in the product? 

09:38 Trina Renea: Because it's a bad word. 

09:39 Rebecca Gadberry: It's a bad word or it's got issues with it.

09:43 Trina Renea: Because the industry has put a bad word around that word. And so when they see it, they're like, “Oh, I'm supposed to stay away from that bad word.”

09:52 Rebecca Gadberry: Here's a really classic case in point, mineral oil. Back in the '60s, when we had not developed the standard as dominantly as we have now, mineral oil was classified as an irritant, as causing cancer, as being pore clogging, and that's a certain grade of mineral oil. It's the technical or the mechanics grade that's used to oil machinery or like sewing machines and things. We don't use that grade. That grade has carcinogens, irritants, and comedogenic side issues with it, or impurities, if you will. 

The cosmetic grade still has comedogenic impurities, but no carcinogens or cancer-causing impurities and no irritants.

The drug grade, the USP grade, mineral oil USP is completely pure and is non-comedogenic.

So, which one are you looking at in your product? You don't know. You can't tell from the ingredient list. 

So what do you do? You call the manufacturer or the brand or you send them an email and you ask them, “What grade are you using?” You don't say, “Are you using the USP grade?” Because they may say, “Yes, of course we are,” but they may not be. So, ask them an open-ended question, not a yes-or-no question. 

You also can't tell other impurities, like dioxin, the 1,4-dioxane. There are 1,4-dioxane impurities in a number of emulsifiers and surfactants, cleansing agents and ingredients that cause oil and water and creams and lotions to stick together. That's an impurity. It can be taken out. 

So things that have PEGs, P-E-Gs or P-P-Gs. Those can have the 1,4-dioxane, but they don't necessarily have them and you can't tell from the ingredient list. 

So, make sure that the brand that you're buying from do not have the impurities in there. It's, again, communication. 

12:07 Trina Renea: How in the world would you ever know?

12:09 Rebecca Gadberry: You need to ask the brand. You need to send them a question on the website. Most brands have websites these days.

You don't know the ingredients source. Ingredients that can come from animals or petroleum, glycerin, stearates, things like that, you can't tell from looking at the ingredient if it comes from an animal or a plant or the petroleum plant, as I like to say.

Most ingredients these days that are like glycerin or your stearates, some of your other emulsifiers are animal— I'm sorry, are plant derived, if they have a choice between plant, animal or petroleum. But check. You need to contact the company. You cannot pick something up and say, "Oh, this has glycerin, so it comes from petroleum. This has glycerin, it comes from an animal." Those are optional sources, but you don't know if that's the actual source or not. 

13:12 Trina Renea: Where do most brands, trustworthy brands…

13:20 Rebecca Gadberry: When you say trustworthy, okay, that's a judgment. What I deem trustworthy and what you deem trustworthy may be two different trustworthies. And a big company that has a lot of chemists to determine the quality of the ingredient and do the proper studies, I find them trustworthy. Little brands that don't have that capability, I find maybe not be trustworthy. They may be letting their ethics lead, which is very admirable, but they may not have the budget to follow up. So we need to ask, not make assumptions. 

I'm not saying small brands, don't trust them. I'm saying small brand or large brand, ask questions if you're concerned. You can't assume from reading the ingredient list that what you're looking at is what you think it is. So, you cannot determine an ingredient’s source. If you go online and it says the source could be this, you don't know if that's the actual source of that ingredient. You have no idea. 

This also applies to plant-derived materials, because ingredients with the same name don't behave the same, really applies to plant extracts, oils and essential oils. Because keep in mind that plants are chemical factories. They have a bunch of chemistry involved. If there are chemicals— let's say green tea. Great example.

Green tea has chemicals that can help to relieve the appearance of cellulite. Green tea has chemicals in it that can relieve redness. Green tea has chemicals in it that help to relieve irritation. They're not all the same chemicals. You might have a green tea…

And when you get an extract, a plant extract, it may have different chemistry from batch to batch from when you make— and that can be determined by where it's grown, the plant is grown, how it's grown, what time of day it's harvested, what kind of fertilizer they used, if they used any fertilizer, how much water it got. All of these are variables.

So when you take a plant extract and you make the extract, unless you do what's called a fingerprint analysis, you don't know what the chemistry is of that extract from batch to batch.

Now, in the old days, 30 years ago, we just went off of what we call physical standardization. In other words, we made sure that the physical nature or those elements that we could investigate, could make the same from batch to batch, we made sure that the color was always the same, we made sure the pH was, the amount of solids were. That's what we call physical standardization. 

The problem is, is that as the plant ages, those physicalities start to change too. The pH can change, the color can change. Remember in the old days, when a product that was "natural" would change in color, and companies would say, “That's because it's a plant and it's natural and it changes.” But we now know that when a plant, when something changes in color, its chemistry is changing as well. 

So we need to make sure that the chemistry is the same from batch to batch. That's called a chemical standardization and it's done via a machine called a gas chromatography machine, usually. It gives you what we call a fingerprint or a hill-and-valley reading in a graph of the chemicals that are in there at a great amount or a lesser amount. And we need to match the fingerprint from batch to batch. 

17:25 Trina Renea: Sorry to interrupt, but do you think that if you buy from the same company, you're more likely to get a better batch fingerprint?

17:35 Rebecca Gadberry: Not necessarily, because the company it's not a judgment that you make by the company in general. “This company, oh, I like this company, I like that company.” Why do you like them? Are they doing the fingerprint analysis? How do they know that that green tea is the same every time they get the batch? If they can't answer you, they may not know. 

If they say something like, "We don't use chemicals,” and they use a lot of plant extracts, they are not doing a fingerprint analysis. They don't know if that extract is the same from batch to batch, because they don't know that there's chemicals involved in the plant. Does that make sense? 

18:15 Trina Renea: Yes. 

18:16 Rebecca Gadberry: In the plant extract. So, when we take green tea, do we know if the chemistry is the same from batch to batch? If not, you can't tell from reading the ingredient list. Remember what this episode is about. Things you can't tell from reading the ingredient list. 

If you have a product that works on cellulite and helps with redness and is an anti-irritant, is that one extract or is that three different versions looking for that one chemical in the plant extract to do that job? They'll all read as green tea. 

Sometimes you may see on an ingredient list an ingredient listed three times because they're using it in three different versions based upon the chemistry that's in each extract. 

19:10 Trina Renea: And so, do they have to put that ingredient three different times? 

19:13 Rebecca Gadberry: No, they don't.

19:13 Trina Renea: They could just put it once. 

19:14 Rebecca Gadberry: They don't know that they don't have to. They don't, according to regulations. 

Another one is algae. There's over 2,000 or 3,000 different algae available to us to use in skincare. You might see algae extract, algae extract, algae extract, and it's all different algae. 

What the regulations allow us to do now is state which specific algae we're using. It could be chlorella vulgaris and red algae and whatever. 

19:47 Trina Renea: Laminaria. 

19:48 Rebecca Gadberry: Laminaria digitata. It could be all different algae extracts. The old days, it just said algae extract. “Oh, it's got algae extract in it. That means it has iodine, I can't use it.” That's not necessarily true. Not all algae extracts contain iodine. 

So, you can't tell what the allergens are really in the product, especially when you're dealing with plant extracts. There's a lot of issues here. 

We also can't tell from looking at certain plant materials that say, let's say sage oil, is that a fixed oil or is that an essential oil? A fixed oil has different chemistry in it than an essential oil, which evaporates and gives you scent. According to the regulations, we just say oil. We're not allowed to say essential oil. So you don't know if it's an essential oil or a different kind of chemistry that's more for the barrier of your skin than it is for the scent, if you will.

So there's a lot of those issues. You can't tell from the ingredient list if the ingredient was derived sustainably. You don't know if that palm that you're using was derived in a sustainable manner or in a manner that clear cuts all the trees.

Now, there is an organization that you can look for, and I forget the name of it, unfortunately, but it's like the responsible palm oil, RPO, I think it is. I'm not sure. But not everybody uses that. It doesn't mean that it's not made sustainably. 

21:47 Trina Renea: Another thing about palm oil that I learned from somebody we had on the show, was that, I think it's palm oil, that all the oils that you see are sitting in a palm oil. If they say something else, they're in a palm oil base. 

22:02 Rebecca Gadberry: It can be, yeah. It can be, and you don't know that. Although, if it's in a palm oil base, you're supposed to list the palm oil and the other oil that's in there separately. It may be one ingredient, but you have to list both ingredients. So you don't know if it's sustainably-derived or not. You don't know what part of the world it comes from. It's not going to tell you the origin.

22:32 Trina Renea: Sometimes they'll say French oil, like it will say where they got it from. 

22:37 Rebecca Gadberry: Right. And, hopefully, that is where they got it from. But another way to get around that is it is found in France or it's found in Brazil. That doesn't mean that it's from Brazil or from France or from South Africa. 

22:54 Trina Renea: Tricky word. 

22:55 Rebecca Gadberry: It means that it's found there. You don't know if the ingredient is made according to the rules of green chemistry. That is that cradle-to-cradle technology that we talk about, that makes sure that we don't use petroleum-derived ingredients, that we have a way to sustainably produce the ingredient, that we have a way to get rid of the ingredient once we've used the product. 

Green chemistry are principles that we're moving towards in the cosmetic industry. It is not the same thing as green marketing, which is something completely different.

23:36 Trina Renea: We have a whole episode on green chemistry with Gay Timmons. 

23:38 Rebecca Gadberry: Right, with Gay. So if you wonder about green chemistry, listen to that episode. 

You can't tell the ingredient percentage. If an ingredient is at the very beginning of the ingredient list, that doesn't mean that it's in there at very great amounts. It means that, especially if it's in there at descending order of predominance, if there's a number of ingredients in there, that 1% could hit the second or third ingredients if there's a number of ingredients in there. 

And after 1%, you can list it in whatever order you want, so you can't really tell. You can look at it and kind of judge it, and if you know what certain ingredients are in there at, like preservatives that are in there at less than half a percent, anything that comes after the preservative is going to be at less amount if they're listing according to descending order of predominance. 

There's another way to list and that's descending order predominance down to 1%. If you do that, then everything could be listed in whatever order you want to after you hit 1%. And it's hard to tell what's going on, unless you know ingredient chemistry, unless you're a formulator. 

Now, when I teach this at UCLA, I teach basically in the middle of the ingredient list, you're going to hit about 1%, if there's like 10 or 15 ingredients. If there's more, you're going to hit 1% further up in the ingredient list. So it may look like there's a lot in there and there isn't. 

Now, does that mean anything? Like hyaluronic acid, you don't want to see above 1% in a product because it can dehydrate the skin. You don’t want to see your emulsifiers up there at the very beginning. You want to see them lower down in the list. Your peptides are going to be towards the middle of the ingredient list or less. 

So, it depends upon the formula, and you cannot tell. 

You also can't tell what type of fragrance is in the product. It may say ‘fragrance’, but it may be natural components, a bunch of natural chemicals that are blended together in the lab that give it the fragrance, but you can't say natural fragrance. You can only list it as fragrance. So you don't know what kind of a fragrance, whether it's a synthetic fragrance, what the dilutants are in it, or anything else that is in that fragrance, you have no idea. So the mere presence of fragrance does not mean that the fragrance good or bad. 

26:15 Trina Renea: And you can't say good fragrance. 

26:17 Rebecca Gadberry: No, you can't. 

26:18 Trina Renea: Bad fragrance. 

26:19 Rebecca Gadberry: No, you can't. Those are just seven things that you cannot tell from reading an ingredient list. 

26:24 Trina Renea: I think that was eight. 

26:28 Rebecca Gadberry: Was it? Oh, that is eight. You're right. See, it says at the top where we describe the episode, it says seven, but we actually talked about eight. 

26:36 Trina Renea: We gave you a bonus. 

26:37 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes. You got a bonus question, or a bonus thing you can't tell. So, if you're an ingredient list reader, get over yourself, because even I can't tell a lot of times from reading an ingredient list. I have to dig deeper. 

And so if you think that this product is good…

26:52 Trina Renea: That really sucks that we have to go that deep. 

26:55 Rebecca Gadberry: I know, but we're dealing with chemistry. And we're dealing with commercial products or commercial ingredients. 

27:01 Trina Renea: But how often can a person who is not in the industry call up a company and get on the phone with the chemist to ask these questions?

27:10 Rebecca Gadberry: You don't. You send a question out and that's the responsibility of the company to find out. A lot of companies have social media managers now that are in charge of answering those kinds of questions. 

27:23 Trina Renea: Hopefully, they answer them truthfully. 

27:26 Rebecca Gadberry: Right. And the people that I know do their best to answer the questions. And you can't tell from whether a company is big or small or whether you trust it or not whether…

27:37 Trina Renea: And how much you pay for your product or not?

27:39 Rebecca Gadberry: No, you definitely can't tell from the price. 

There's a product that I saw at Bloomingdale's two years ago that's a hyaluronic acid serum that was $150. It was hyaluronic acid and water and the preservative. It should have been $10, $12, but because it was being sold in that special area, Bloomingdale's, people wanted to pay more money for it because it works better.

28:09 Trina Renea: Because we're paying more. 

28:10 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, the hyaluronic acid wasn't any better or worse, and you should only use it at 1%. So if it's in there at more, it's not doing the benefit for your skin that you'd think it is. 

28:20 Trina Renea: Well, if there's water, hyaluronic, and a preservative, how much percent could it be in a whole bottle?

28:26 Rebecca Gadberry: Hopefully, it's 1%. 

28:28 Trina Renea: And then what's the rest of the…

28:30 Rebecca Gadberry: Water. If you're using hyaluronic acid, you should be using something else besides hyaluronic acid to trap the hyaluronic acid onto the skin surface. Anyway, we've talked about that with hyaluronic acid. 

28:45 Trina Renea: Yes, we have done that. 

28:45 Rebecca Gadberry: So listen to that episode. Yes. 

28:48 Trina Renea: All right. Well, that was very interesting and also frustrating to me because I'm like, well, basically…

28:57 Rebecca Gadberry: We want answers. We want it to be simple. 

29:00 Trina Renea: And we want to know that what we're using is safe for the environment and our skin and our bodies. 

29:06 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay, so instead of reading the ingredient list, ask the brand how they prove the product is safe. That's going to tell you. Not reading the ingredient list, not going to a doctor and having them tell you what they think, because doctors are not chemists.

29:21 Trina Renea: No, and they didn't even study ingredients in school. 

29:24 Rebecca Gadberry: No, they didn't. And very few of them had more than a year of chemistry, and that applied to medicine. So, not to diss doctors. I love doctors, I rely on doctors, but not for my ingredient list in my products. 

29:43 Trina Renea: All right. We do have some doctors these days who have taken upon themselves to learn this. 

29:48 Rebecca Gadberry: Fabulous, like Dr. Vicki and Dr. Wang. 

29:52 Trina Renea: Yeah, to learn about ingredients and what they do on the skin. But they definitely don't learn it in school and most of them don't know, but there are some that want to start a product line and they learn.

30:07 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. 

30:09 Trina Renea: So, all right.

30:10 Rebecca Gadberry: I'm just saying you can't learn it just by looking at it. 

30:13 Trina Renea: At the ingredient list, yes. 

30:15 Rebecca Gadberry: I'd love it to be simple and straightforward and easy, but not everything is. 

30:21 Trina Renea: Yes, so more trust the brand and look into the brand itself. 

30:24 Rebecca Gadberry: Right. Ask the questions of the right person, the right people. 

30:27 Trina Renea: Yes. 

30:29 Rebecca Gadberry: Thank you. 

30:29 Trina Renea: Well, thank you. 

30:30 Rebecca Gadberry: Goodbye.

30:31 Trina Renea: It was lovely seeing you all or hearing you all. 

30:33 Rebecca Gadberry: Ta-ta. 

30:34 Trina Renea: Goodbye. 

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