"Natural" does not mean gentle
Essential oils, lemon and baking soda: three home remedies we see often, which often cause the damage they were meant to fix.
The word “natural” has no legal definition in cosmetics, and says nothing about how well the skin tolerates an ingredient. Nettle is natural. So is bee venom.
The three we see most
Lemon on the face. Citric acid at a very low pH, applied without buffering, causes irritation and, in the sun, light-induced pigmentation that then takes months to fade.
Baking soda as a scrub. It sits at pH 9 against the skin’s 5.5: it raises cutaneous pH and disturbs the barrier and the microbiome.
Neat essential oils. They are among the most common contact sensitisers. Diluted and formulated they can make sense; neat on the skin, almost never.
How to read a label
Ingredient order matters: the first five make up most of the product. If the plant extract the product is named after appears second to last, it is doing very little.
None of this is an invitation to distrust botanicals. It is an invitation to judge the formula rather than the story on the packaging.
