tutorial

What the heck is occlusion? This is the way we prevent transepidermal water loss (TEWL) from our skin. (From Wikipedia: TEWL is defined as the measurement of the quantity of water that passes from inside a body through the epidermal layer – skin – to the surrounding atmosphere via diffusion and evaporation processes.) We want...

Isn’t this a beautiful molecule? It’s castor oil! This is a triglyceride – three fatty acids connected to a backbone of glycerol (glycerin) – the 3 oxygen atoms at the top. The zig zaggy lines indicate a carbon molecule and the OH are the hydroxyl groups we saw in yesterday’s post. Finally, the double lines...

If you’d like to know more about humectants, check out the humectants section of the blog where I go into far more detail than you see in this one post!  Everybody doesn’t like something, but everyone likes humectants – if they know what they are! Check out this lovely urea molecule – carbon (grey), nitrogen...

I have a whole series of ingredients planned out for the next few weeks…but then I realized that I’d left out two important things…how our skin works and what it needs! So please join me for the next four days as I take a closer look at your skin, and the three things it needs...