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Naturalness of cosmetic components
Last reviewed: 08.07.2025
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The safest and most "natural" solvents are water and vegetable oils. However, if you use only them, a huge amount of biologically active substances will go to the dump. This is unreasonable and uneconomical. Therefore, more effective solvents are used, such as alcohols. In order for the extract to be more concentrated and in order to reduce the amount of solvent, various methods of solvent removal are used (evaporate the water, distill off the alcohol, etc.). Currently, the most popular solvent is propylene glycol, which can simply be included in the recipe. Another extraction method that is gaining popularity is supercritical extraction with carbon dioxide. Extraction is performed with liquid carbon dioxide, which then turns into carbon dioxide and evaporates, leaving the isolated substances without any solvent impurities (the so-called dry plant extracts).
Not taking into account that plant extracts used in cosmetics are not always free of pesticides and herbicides. Of course, it is best if plants for cosmetics are collected in ecologically clean (not polluted by industrial enterprises) areas. However, there are fewer and fewer such areas, and it is not so easy to collect plants there. Therefore, gradually the most popular plants used for the production of cosmetics and food additives are resettled to plantations. For example, in France, where there is an overproduction of agricultural products, many farmers switch to growing medicinal plants. Of course, according to the conditions, they must grow crops without the use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. But this rule is not always followed. In addition, plants growing in the suburbs of large cities can accumulate harmful substances contained in car exhaust, industrial emissions, etc. Therefore, the most responsible manufacturers of raw materials for cosmetics have their own laboratories, where they carefully check the quality of all plant extracts and, if necessary, carry out their additional purification.
Even extracts obtained from ecologically clean plants must be tested to ensure that active components have not been lost during the extraction process. The most valuable are standardized plant extracts that contain the most important active components at least at the established level.
Testing raw materials slows down production and makes them more expensive, so the price of raw materials ultimately increases. This means that only a few companies (not necessarily large ones, but stable and prosperous ones) can organize such testing. Accordingly, we can expect that these expensive raw materials will be purchased either by the same stable and prosperous cosmetic companies, or by those companies for which the quality of cosmetics is a priority (for example, companies producing professional cosmetics).