What's in your skincare product?

Beware the additives

There are a huge number of anti-ageing products on the market, but for the consumer understanding the ingredients used in them and those ingredients' effect on the skin can be baffling.

It is often difficult to work out which ingredients in a product are active, i.e. benefit your skin, or what percentage of the product consists of active ingredients, as opposed to additives.

Additives have been used in skincare products for years: best known are preservatives such as parabens and phenoxyethanol. Others include stabilisers to help products maintain their chemical composition and solvents to dissolve ingredients in creams. Increasingly, these additives have been recognised as a major cause of unpleasant side-effects, including hormone disruption, redness, itching and skin irritation.

With lumos, you can be sure of what is being used in our serums. We put a list of all our ingredients on the front of our bottles and explain what role each of them plays. And all of those ingredients are active, so you can be sure that they are working together to improve the quality of your skin.