When I set about designing the products for 7 Day Glow's amazing skin care line I immediately knew I wanted to develop an oil based skin care line. I wanted healthy, naturally preserved, no-filler formulations that provided real value in terms of health and impact.

Every water based formulation requires two things that can interrupt your skin health: Preservative and Emulsifier.

Oil based skin care contains little to none of these two things. Oil based skin care is largely free of fillers - ingredients that are only there to make the product look and feel a certain way but that have no benefit, and often even harm the skin. 7 Day Glow was designed to prevent those pitfalls.

Preservatives can be synthetic or natural, but all preservatives, even the most gentle, disrupt the microbiome of your skin. This is because current preservative systems not only target the bad bacteria that can make your lotion go rancid, but they also attack all bacteria and fungi that inhabit the skin.

The importance of a healthy skin microbiome has become increasingly appreciated as research mounts. It has implications for skin allergies, psoriasis, eczema, and general dryness, which speeds up aging.

Using a preservative on the skin on a daily basis will always disrupt the skin’s microbiome, and in the long term dry it out, possibly leading to worse skin problems.

Emulsifier is the ingredient that makes it possible for the oil and the water in your water based creme to hold together. Emulsifiers can be synthetic or natural.

Emulsifiers themselves typically do not cause skin problems. The problem arises when the emulsifier makes it possible for other skin irritants to penetrate into the skin.

Emulsifiers disrupt the skin microbiome by penetrating through the skin barrier and disrupting the ability of the skin’s layers to hold onto moisture.

If you feel like you can never use enough creme, and your face is always dry, then you may have what is called the ‘wash out' effect. When you have emulsifier on your skin, it reduces or eliminates your skin barriers ability to hold in moisture. When you wash your face, the emulsifier actually washes away the moisture in your skin, even in the deepest layers that are not meant to be able to be penetrated.

Nutrients are meant to be absorbed into the skin at a natural rate. Emulsifiers, even naturally derived emulsifiers, speed that up and disrupt that process, particularly in people who have sensitive skin.

Emulsifiers should only ever be used in a situation where you actually want to remove oil from your face, such as in a cleanser. The 7 day Glow cleanser contains a small amount of polyglyceral oleate, a gentle emulsifier that helps to clear an overly-oily face, without drying it out.

~ Alyssa Van Doorn, 7 Day Glow Founder/Formulator

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