What's Really Inside Your Skin Care?

When you turn over a jar of skin cream, the ingredient list can look very different from the front of the package.

The front might say calendula, shea butter and apricot oil. The back contains those familiar ingredients, but also names like cetearyl alcohol, polysorbate 60 and a preservative system.

So what are all those other ingredients doing there?

The answer is surprisingly simple: they have jobs to do.

A cream is more than oil and water

Oil and water naturally separate.

To turn them into the smooth cream you actually want to put on your skin, a formula needs an emulsifying system. Other ingredients help control thickness, improve application and keep the emulsion stable.

They may not make exciting botanical artwork for a label, but they are part of what makes a cream a cream.

Why we love botanical oils

This does not make the botanicals any less important.

Plant oils and butters bring their own characteristics to a formula. Apricot kernel oil gives us a lightweight emollient base. Shea butter contributes richness. Beeswax provides structure in our balms.

Calendula and chamomile give us another opportunity.

For selected BennyBee formulas, we infuse dried botanicals into oils in small batches. The process takes time, but it allows those botanicals to become part of the oil we are actually formulating with.

What about preservatives?

This is one of the most misunderstood parts of skin care.

A lip balm made entirely from oils, butters and waxes is very different from a cream containing water. Water creates an environment where microorganisms can grow.

For that reason, properly formulated water-based cosmetics need an effective preservation strategy. At BennyBee, we do not remove a necessary preservative simply because "preservative-free" sounds attractive on a package.

Product safety matters more than a marketing phrase.

The better question is not whether an ingredient name sounds natural. It is why that ingredient belongs in the formula.

Natural is not a synonym for safe

We love natural ingredients. BennyBee would not look or feel like BennyBee without beeswax, shea butter, plant oils, calendula, chamomile and honey.

But nature contains incredibly gentle substances and incredibly dangerous ones. The same is true of manufactured ingredients.

So we do not think the useful question is: "Is this ingredient natural?"

A better question is: "Why is this ingredient in the formula?"

That is the question we try to answer.

Nothing there just for the label

Our goal is not to create the longest ingredient list or the shortest one. It is to create formulas where the ingredients make sense together.

Some moisturize. Some condition. Some provide structure. Some create texture. Some protect the formula.

And when we feature an ingredient like calendula, Manuka Honey or shea butter, we want customers to be able to learn what makes it interesting, not simply see its name printed on the front of a jar.

That is why we are building our ingredient library: so you can explore what we use, where it comes from, and what role it plays in BennyBee products.

Further reading

• Explore Our Ingredients
• Read Our Ingredient Promise