Is perfume bad for your skin ? Sorry, but the answer is unfortunately yes. Perfume in skin care is almost impossible to avoid these days and that is a problem for many people. Perfume causes skin problems. Of course we prefer to use nice smelling products. The smell is also one of the first things you experience when you use a skin care product. Yet there are a number of reasons to purchase perfume-free beauty products, especially for babies, children and people with sensitive skin.
Perfume causes irritation
People with sensitive skin can react strongly to products that contain perfume. Think of itching, red skin or other forms of skin irritation. But also people who already suffer from skin problems can only make the problems worse by using perfume. For example, do you suffer from very dry skin or from acne? Then this can only get worse by using perfume.
Perfume causes skin aging
Even if you don't suffer from skin problems or hypersensitivity at all; perfume is bad for your skin. It breaks down the collagen in the skin. As a result, you get wrinkles earlier and your skin becomes weaker. The skin ages faster, but you don't see this result immediately. This is a slow process. Many products contain perfume, such as cleaning, toners, serum and creams. You can find perfume everywhere. So check the ingredients list for 'perfume' and 'fragrance'.
Essential oils instead of perfume
Both natural and non-natural beauty brands use (instead of, or in combination with) essential oils as a fragrant ingredient. Think of jasmine, lavender, bergamot, lemon, neroli and many more other scents. Here is a list with an overview of essential oils . However, these are unfortunately not much better than perfume, despite being natural. They give a wonderful scent, but on the skin they are often too aggressive and can cause irritation because they are concentrated. Especially if you switch to natural skin care for this reason, and therefore expect relief, you can unfortunately still be surprised by skin irritation. Watch out especially for:
- bergamot
- citrus extracts (excluding citric acid)
- eucalyptus
- lavender
- mint
- tea tree
- yang ylang
Conscious choice
Perfume, bad for your skin … Unfortunately yes. We have made a conscious but difficult choice not to use synthetic perfume or irritating essential oils in our products.
At SMPL we have chosen to make products that are suitable for everyone, including sensitive skin. Do you still smell a mild odor on our products? That is the natural vanilla aroma: one of the few scents that is completely hypoallergenic. Vanilla aroma does not contain farnesol, limonene, linalool or other substances that can irritate the skin, as can be the case with many essential oils.