Check Your Skincare for This Ingredient

You do the things you are supposed to do. You drink the water. The bottle gets refilled so many times it basically lives on your desk. Somewhere along the line you were told good skin starts with hydration, so you took it seriously.

Which is why water at the top of a skincare label looks like a good sign. More of the thing that is meant to help...

So do me one favour. Pick up the moisturiser, cleanser or serum you are using right now and turn it over.

The first ingredient is water. Sometimes it’s noted as aqua, or aqua/eau, or “rosewater” to make it sound fancy. Still water. Ingredient lists run in order of how much is in there, most first, so that opening word is the biggest part of what you are holding. In a typical cream, water is 60 to 80 percent of it. In a lotion, up to 90. You bought a bottle that is mostly water.

You bought a bottle that is mostly water.

To be fair, the water is not just sitting there. It carries the water-based ingredients and gives a cream that light, spreadable feel. But it raises a fair question. If most of it is water, how much room is left for the ingredients you actually paid for? And what had to be added just to keep all that water in line?

Water is where things grow. We need it for life. So does everything else.

Water is also why skincare spoils and goes off.

Bacteria, mould and yeast need water to grow, and a water-based cream is a warm, damp place for them to do it. This is not a fringe theory. Formulators measure it, and a water-rich product sits right in the sweet spot for microbes. Leave it unprotected and it turns into something you would not want near your face.

So every water-based formula has to be defended from the inside. That job goes to the preservatives.

The preservatives are there for the water

Every water-based product needs preservatives to stop it spoiling. All that water has to survive months on a shelf, a hot delivery van and a steamy bathroom, and still be clean enough to put on your face at the end of it. Left alone, it would not manage that. So preservatives go in to hold the line.

Here’s why that should matter to you. A few of the most common preservatives have a real track record of causing trouble on the skin they sit on.

They are in the bottle to keep the water alive. They do nothing for your skin.

The clearest example is methylisothiazolinone, mercifully shortened to MI. It got popular in creams and wipes, and through the 2010s the reactions climbed so sharply that a major dermatology body named it Allergen of the Year. In one Australian patch-test clinic, positive reactions went from 3.5 percent to over 11 percent in three years. It became one of the most common causes of allergic contact dermatitis they saw. In plain terms: red, itchy skin, right where you put the product that was supposed to help.

This kind of allergy tends to be permanent.

Two things make that worse. First, this kind of allergy tends to be permanent. Once your skin decides it reacts to MI, it keeps reacting, for good. Second, MI rarely shows up alone. Formaldehyde-releasing preservatives, which do what the name says and drip formaldehyde into the product over time, are another known trigger and still sit in plenty of products today. Regulators cap how much of this is allowed, and the EU went all the way and banned MI from leave-on products after deciding there was no level they could call safe.

Add it up

You pay a premium price for a bottle that is mostly water. The ingredients you came for share whatever space is left. To keep the water safe, in goes a preservative system. To stop the oil and water separating, emulsifiers. To hold the pH steady, adjusters. A long list of helpers, most of them cleaning up after a problem the water created in the first place.

Then you pay to ship all that water to your door in a heavier bottle, and you cross your fingers that the preservative keeping it stable is one your skin gets along with.

None of this is a secret. It is all there on the label, in order, in tiny type. It just never gets explained.

We couldn’t buy this, so we made it

Élaument started with a diagnosis. When Belle was told she had Hashimoto’s, she started reading the label on everything she put on her skin. The more she read, the shorter she wanted the lists to be.

Funny thing about the four of us: we grew up in Tasmania, on some of the purest water in the world, and we made two products with not a drop of it in them. Clean or not, once water goes into a product it has to be preserved. So we skipped the water and everything that comes chasing after it.

Some of the purest water in the world. And not a drop of it in the bottle.

The Cleansing Oil is four ingredients: macadamia oil, castor oil, MCT, and rosemary extract. The Hydration Balm is nine, and every one of them is doing a job rather than propping up water. Both are made in Australia. Every ingredient is named and explained, because nothing on either list needs to hide behind confusing language or labels.

We chose the oils to mirror your skin’s own, which is why people tend to describe the feeling as soft and calm instead of tight or stripped. Fewer ingredients. Nothing in there whose only reason to exist is protecting water.

Cleansing Oil

Melts away the day without stripping your skin.

$70Shop →

Hydration Balm

Gives the barrier back the lipids it uses to hold water.

$85Shop →

Read the label. That was always the point.

You do not have to take my word for any of this. Turn over what you are using now, read the first few ingredients, then read ours. That gap is the whole argument.

Two products. Every ingredient earning its place, explained in plain words, and not one of them there to keep water alive.

Natural. Simple. Refined.