There is a certain kind of beauty language that is designed to make people exhale before they even understand what they are buying. Organic. Wildcrafted. Skin-loving. Plant-based. Gentle. Clean. Stack enough of those words together and almost anything can start to sound pure. That is the trick.
The problem is that these words often function less like honest descriptions and more like emotional styling. “Organic” becomes a feeling instead of a certification. “Wildcrafted” becomes a romantic haze instead of a documented sourcing practice. “Natural” becomes a blanket thrown over industrial refining, commodity agriculture, mining dust, and factory fillers. By the time you even reach the ingredient list, the story has already been softened for you.
This post is not really about hating individual ingredients for the sake of it. It is about refusing to stop at the label. It is about asking what happens when those beautiful words are followed all the way back to the field, the refinery, the mine, the processing plant, and the factory drum. Because once you do that, some of the “cleanest” products in beauty start to look a lot less innocent.
titanium dioxide + mica
For some, mica is an irritant. I have wondered myself if it is not the mica itself but the large quantity of mica that is irritating. It seems similar to deodorants made with baking soda. It is not that someone is allergic to baking soda, but the amount of baking soda in a single deodorant that is irritating to delicate underarm skin. When you place mica under a microscope it is similar to very sharp shards of glass. This is one reason why those with sensitive skin need to avoid it. There is also the possibility that the mica can be coated with many different chemicals and it can be the chemical that is harmful to someone’s skin. Here is more on how mica can be a formula in itself.
Now let’s move on to titanium dioxide. Like mica, it is found in all the conventional makeup formulas and just like mica, is usually one of the first five ingredients. The #1 reason I do not use titanium dioxide in my makeup line, even in small amounts, is because it is a known carcinogen. #2 is that it is not a natural ingredient, it is a manufactured ingredient. Anything you apply to your skin ends up in your bloodstream within thirty minutes. It doesn’t matter if it is the most healthy superfood or the most poisonous toxin. Your skin is your largest organ. It breathes and it absorbs everything. I do not want a known carcinogen flowing through my veins. #3 Titanium dioxide is not photo-stable. This means that when you apply it and then go out into the sunlight the TD creates free radicals which in turn attack and ravage our skin cells. This leads to premature aging of skin and it also leads to frustrating skin conditions. I have found that when clients slowly switch over to my products, their skin conditions begin to heal because their skin is not under attack on a daily basis. They are only applying soothing, nourishing, healing ingredients which gives their skin a chance to rest and replenish itself. Even though titanium dioxide does appear in ingredient lists of products which claim to be all natural and organic, it is not a natural ingredient and it is not photo-stable so whatever makeup you choose, I highly recommend that you do your own research.
Petroleum vs Plant Glycerin
Glycerin isn’t natural—it’s industrial crude disguised as natural. Even natural shampoos and conditioners list it #2. Sadly, 300 kids died from ‘vegetable glycerin’ that was secretly industrial antifreeze. DEG (diethylene glycol) can contaminate any glycerin during processing—yes, even “coconut glycerin” from adulterated supply chains.
Microbiome Impact
Glycerin pulls moisture—great in humid air, but in not so ideal climates like canadian winters, it reverses and dehydrates deeper layers, stressing the stratum corneum and shifting microbial diversity toward irritation-promoting strains. Polyglycerin, being a larger polymer chain, creates a subtle film that can trap debris and alter pH, indirectly favoring pathogens over beneficials.
How Contamination Happens
Industrial shortcut: Cheap Chinese suppliers cut glycerin with DEG (industrial antifreeze) to increase volume/profit
No visual difference: Both clear, sweet, viscous liquids
Historical poisonings: 2007 Panama (100+ kids died), 2023 India syrups—DEG-spiked coconut/veggie glycerin killed hundreds
Petroleum vs Plant Glycerin
Unreliable labels (even “100% coconut” can be fake):
100% gum-free + synthetic emulsifier-free formulas
I have always loved and appreciated the opportunity to work with raw ingredients since I started my line. It’s like working with dirt. With raw clays, herbs, superfoods, and minerals you get a mood boost. Some ingredients though, I questioned, and I wanted to dig deeper on their origins and how they were manufactured. As I have delved more into skincare and haircare in the last few years, I have wanted to find alternatives to a few ingredients that didn’t resonate with me. Often if the texture is really sticky, or a texture that I do not find appealing for the scalp and body as a whole. It has also made that particular ingredient more of a red flag to me when it comes to it being in a food product. It seems synergistic that if an ingredient is not good for our gut microbiome or if an ingredient can possibly cross the blood brain barrier, it is not going to be great for your skin microbiome either.
How emulsifiers can affect the bbb
“Emulsifier” is a broad functional category—not one chemical. The mechanism depends completely on the specific ingredient, dose, exposure route, formulation, and the substance being carried.
1. They can change membrane behavior
Surfactants have a water-compatible end and an oil-compatible end. At sufficiently high concentrations, some can insert into cell membranes and change lipid organization or membrane fluidity. This may alter how readily certain molecules move across or through endothelial cells—but it can also be a sign of irritation or barrier disruption rather than a desirable normal process. Surfactants are used as chemical permeation enhancers precisely because they can fluidize lipid membranes.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih
2. They may affect tight junctions
In certain experimental conditions, surfactants can influence the “seals” between BBB cells. If tight junction integrity weakens, permeability can rise temporarily. For instance, an EMA review cites a rat experiment in which intravenous polysorbate 80 at 20 mg/kg markedly increased BBB permeability to sucrose. This is a controlled pharmaceutical/toxicology context, not evidence that normal dietary exposure opens the BBB in people.
3. They can help a drug carrier reach the brain
Polysorbate 80 is frequently placed on the surface of nanoparticles in brain-drug research. It does not necessarily mean the free emulsifier is entering the brain in meaningful amounts. Rather, the coating can change how particles interact with blood proteins and BBB cells, potentially helping the carrier and its drug cargo move toward or through the barrier. The exact mechanism remains debated, and outcomes vary with the drug, particle, surfactant composition, and dose.
4. Indirect gut–brain effects are being studied
With emulsifiers, one proposed pathway is not direct brain entry at all:
A 2024 study found that long-term polysorbate 80 exposure was associated with gut-microbiota disruption, intestinal- and blood–brain-barrier disruption, neuroinflammation, and worse cognitive outcomes in an aging model.
vitamin e: the soy and solvent story
You know that comforting “vitamin E” line brands love to highlight, usually wrapped in language about “antioxidants” and “skin-loving nutrients”? Behind that feel‑good halo is a supply chain most marketing teams never mention. The vast majority of cosmetic vitamin E — those “natural mixed tocopherols” — are stripped out of mass‑produced vegetable oils, with soybean oil as the primary source in North America. Soy is one of the most heavily genetically modified crops on the planet, so unless a brand is very clear about non‑GMO sourcing, that “clean” serum’s vitamin E is likely riding in on GM soy, processed with industrial solvents like hexane that never make it onto the label.
Even companies who position themselves as gentle and gluten‑free quietly acknowledge that their tocopherol comes from highly refined soy distillates — the proteins are removed, but the GM crop and petrochemical extraction story remains. Once you trace ingredients back to the field and the refinery instead of stopping at the INCI name, “vitamin E” stops looking like a simple good‑for‑you add‑on and starts looking like a marketing veil over GMO agriculture and oil‑industry chemistry.
what i use instead
Instead of leaning on “natural mixed tocopherols” stripped out of GM soy, I use tocotrienols from the annatto plant. Annatto‑derived tocotrienols bring their own antioxidant story without dragging along the usual soy, hexane, and refinery baggage, and they pair beautifully with whole, cold‑pressed plant oils. That gives me a completely different kind of “E”: one that still supports the skin, but comes from a plant and a processing trail I’m actually comfortable naming on the label.
kaolin clay: literally dirty
Kaolin clay gets sold to us as “gentle” and “detoxifying,” a kind of white, chalky hug for the pores. Zoom out from the jar, though, and a very different picture appears: kaolin is a mined industrial mineral, pulled out of the ground, then dried, sliced, fired, and pulverized in plants that look a lot more like cement facilities than wellness spaces.
Along that chain, workers are breathing fine kaolin and silica dust at levels high enough to be linked with pneumoconiosis, kaolinosis, and measurable lung‑function changes in mining and processing jobs. Environmental and occupational reports describe kaolin operations with elevated dust loads and “nuisance” particulates that regularly exceed recommended limits, raising ongoing questions about long‑term respiratory hazards for the people who actually make this “pure” ingredient possible. On skin, over‑use can still strip and over‑dry already fragile barriers; upstream, communities and landscapes are absorbing the real cost of all that “gentle” clay while consumers are told it is the safest, cleanest thing you could possibly put on your face.
what i use instead
Avoiding kaolin does not mean rejecting every powder on earth. It means being far more selective about where clays actually come from. Instead of pulling from big industrial kaolin supply chains, I work with what I think of as ancient clays: finely milled diatomaceous earth, and a sacred clay sourced from Crater Lake in Oregon, one of the deepest bodies of water on the continent. Those materials feel more like earth‑based allies than industrial fillers — they give gentle absorbency and texture without plugging my formulas into the exact mining and dust systems I’m questioning here.
vegan waxes: the plant‑based illusion
“Vegan waxes” sound wholesome on a label — carnauba, candelilla, rice bran — as if a leaf simply offered up a silky cosmetic ingredient. But getting a hard, high‑melting‑point plant wax into a smooth, glassy balm or stick is not some magical back‑to‑nature ritual. It is industrial processing.
These waxes are often pushed through heavy refining, strong acids such as sulfuric acid, high heat, and standardizing steps before they ever become the glossy “clean” products sold to consumers. And that should stop people in their tracks: who wants sulfuric acid anywhere in the processing story of a product going on their face, and then pays luxury prices for it?
The romance falls apart again when you follow the supply chain all the way to the ground. Carnauba and candelilla in particular has long been shadowed by reports of exploitative labour, unsafe field conditions, and poverty‑wage harvesting systems in the regions where the plant is sourced. Workers cut, carry, and process in brutal heat so those leaves can eventually be marched through chemistry and turned into “gentle plant‑based wax” in a premium product. By the time that wax lands in a pretty jar, the harshest parts of the story have already been edited out.
There is also a blunt economic reason waxes are everywhere: they are cheap structural fillers. At factory scale they can cost only pennies per ounce, which means they thicken, stabilise, and bulk out formulas while protecting profit margins. That is why words like organic, wildcrafted, and plant‑based can start to feel less like real sourcing information and more like camouflage. Pastoral language gets draped over some of the least expensive backbone ingredients in the batch, and suddenly a wax‑heavy formula becomes a sixty-dollar formula.
what i use instead
I don’t replace beeswax with a different “ethical” wax and call it solved — I don’t use waxes at all. In my own formulas, wax has never been essential to makeup; it has been a cheap, heavy filler that makes products behave more like candles than skincare. It makes textures stickier, duller, more suffocating, and after a few months it loves to punish both maker and wearer: soft balms turning into hard, crumbly cement as the wax phase reacts to climate and humidity swings.
Instead of forcing wax into my work because the industry expects every balm to have it, I build structure from oils, butters, clays, and resins that stay silky, flexible, and breathable over time. I would rather have a balm that melts a little faster and feels alive on the face than a wax brick dressed up as “clean.”
the part my clients played
One of the things I am most protective of in this line is that it didn’t grow out of a lab or a marketing meeting; it grew out of conversations. I didn’t go hunting for the dark side of vitamin E on my own — a client came to me and asked where it was sourced from. I didn’t dig into how kaolin clay is mined and processed until another client said, “please don’t use that on my face,” and told me why.
The best ideas I’ve ever had for these formulas have come from the people wearing them, not from trend reports. My clients are still teaching me every day what needs to be said out loud and what needs to be left out of a jar altogether. If I’m sharing this now, it’s because they asked the hard questions first and I decided to actually listen.
That is also part of “clean” for me: not pretending I always knew better, but letting my community correct me, redirect me, and pull me deeper into the kind of transparency they deserve.
what “clean” doesn’t mean to me
“Clean” doesn’t mean a business model built around shaving costs to the bone and then decorating what’s left with pretty language. When the backbone of a formula is made from some of the cheapest structural ingredients on the commodity market — waxes that cost pennies per ounce at scale, clays pulled from industrial mining streams, anonymous soy distillates sold by the drum — you can’t convincingly tell me the priority was the health of the skin, the land, or the people in the middle. That is a margin strategy, not a purity strategy. Both things can’t be true at the same time: you don’t get to center “clean” as your core value and quietly center cost‑cutting in your raw‑material choices.
what “clean” actually means to me
After seeing behind the label a few times, it becomes hard to hear the word “clean” without asking: clean for who? Removing a few scary‑sounding ingredients and replacing them with prettier language does not make a product honest if the antioxidants still ride in on GM soy, the clays still come from dust‑heavy industrial sites, and the “vegan waxes” still pass through acid‑heavy processing and hidden labour systems. That is not transparency. It is a costume change.
For me, “clean” is not a marketing category. It is a relationship with the supply chain. It means being able to say where the E family came from, where the clay came from, and why there is no wax in the formula at all. It means accepting that texture, glide, and feel might be a little different from what conventional beauty has trained people to expect if that difference allows the story from field, mine, lake, or seed to jar to stay honest.
That is the version of “clean” I want to defend: not spotless, not perfect, but transparent enough that nobody has to squint to figure out what they are really putting on their face.
