How We Can Tell If Makeup Breaks Your Collagen

Ever wonder what makes your skin wrinkle, sag, and get looser as you age?

It’s the structure of collagen and elastin in your skin. These proteins are the building blocks that make up your skin and make it look good.

As you age, come into contact with chemicals, and expose yourself to the sun, you break the bonds between your collagen and elastin proteins. When these bonds break, your skin loses its structure, and its appearance will change.

It’s insane that most makeup products have ingredients that break down your collagen faster. Knowing what’s safe to put on your skin will age your skin significantly slower.

Is this what makes the difference between clean makeup and dirty makeup? There's a lot of factors that play into this, but we don't think clean beauty should destroy the building blocks that make up healthy skin.

What We Found So Far

We’ve studied 6 different makeup ingredients so far - sodium lauryl sulfate, fragrance, phenoxyethanol, alcohol, and niacin.

This is what we’ve found.

1% of sodium lauryl sulfate caused 69% collagen degradation.

1.2% concentration of fragrance caused 5% collagen degradation.

Up to 1% concentration of phenoxyethanol didn't cause noticeable collagen degradation.

Up to 10% concentration of alcohol didn't cause noticeable collagen degradation.

Increasing the concentration of niacin caused glow to decrease.

Woah! Why did niacin make the collagen glow less? Niacin is a form of vitamin B that helps build new collagen proteins. While this likely isn't the cause of the glow decrease in the assay, this is a great ingredient to build new collagen. You’ll notice this is one of the ingredients in our Catfish Liquid Eyeliner.

Sulfates are doing an insane amount of damage, and you should think about avoiding them at all costs. Fragrance isn't doing as much damage, but you should still avoid it when possible.

Phenoxyethanol is okay in small concentrations, which is great considering it's in everything. Alcohol is also okay depending on how much is in the formula.

Keep in mind - this is how these ingredients affect your collagen, but they may have other effects. Stay tuned while we run more experiments to see how else they affect your skin and health.

The Experiment 

The Provanity Project researches the impact of popular makeup ingredients on your skin. For now, we’re going to focus on how much your collagen breaks down for each chemical.

In our lab, we perform something called an assay. We use a plate with 96 different wells to test what happens when different makeup ingredients come into contact with collagen.

The collagen we use is marked with a special fluorescent compound that tells us when the collagen breaks. Every time a bond is broken, it glows more. We measure how much each well glows to find out how much collagen breaks for each ingredient.

The first three rows of the plate are our standard, a benchmark that helps us understand what we're looking at. Enzymes are molecules that can make changes to other molecules. We use collagenase, an enzyme that breaks down collagen, to figure out how much the collagen will glow when it's completely broken down.

When 100% of the collagen breaks down, the curve will flatten out or dip because more glowing means more breakage. If all of the collagen is broken, it won't glow more as we add more collagenase.

We can use this maximum amount of glow to calculate what percentage of collagen breaks down for each ingredient.

We fill the rest of the wells with different concentrations of popular makeup ingredients and glowing collagen cells to see how much collagen breaks down.

What Should You Do Now?

How can you take this information and use it to keep your skin safe, healthy, and gorgeous?

Keep an eye out for the particularly bad stuff when you shop for beauty products. Look at the ingredient lists on your favorite makeup products, and you'll probably be surprised by what you find.

Provanity Cosmetics is committed to using the best information available to make the safest products possible. We’re also committed to improving the information available about makeup safety, because we know it can be a lot better. 

We’ll keep you updated on what we find, because we want to make sure you’re getting the best beauty products for your health.