*silly question* Skin care products?

Catsymoo said:

Hello. I was just wondering, do creams, flavoured lip balms, shower gels, etc. effect blood sugar in any way? I am TERRIBLE for food flavoured shower and lip balms. Well, I'm terrible for cosmetics and skin care in general, actually. I have chocolate waffle shower syrup that smells like you could eat it! I also have a big collection of candy flavoured lip glosses like vanilla coke, hersheys, etc. To my knowledge, they don't contain sugar, but I was just wondering if smellies/cosmetics go into your bloodstream at all? Since pretty much everything contains carbohydrates, even if it isn't edible lol.

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No they won't affect your blood sugars But with all stuff like that do make sure you wash your hands with proper soap and water before you test your blood sugar.
Do your melt in the summer? :lol:

You'll be fine using them - no sugar will work its way into your blood

This is an interesting question and I'm not too sure about the answer, but I do know that we do absorb through the skin.

I use a progesterone replacement skin cream rather than a tablet. And nicotine and HRT patches and steroid creams are also absorbed through the skin.

Also hasn't it been discovered that some skin care ingredients and shampoos can cause health problems in sensitive people and have had to be removed from creams and lotions etc.? Certain people like myself have developed allergies to things we put on our skin, hair dye etc so your question prompted me to do a Google search and I found this -

http://colinsbeautypages.co.uk/60-of-wh ... -absorbed/

and this ... which has an interesting paragraph about 'synthetic fragrances' having been shown to disrupt normal hormone function.

http://www.earthmamaangelbaby.com/mama- ... ch-gets-in

Now that's intriguing and has been well known for years - musk based perfumes and aftershaves in particular affect hormones of the wearers and those around them. I became 100% intolerant of perfumes, hair dyes, aftershaves, fabric softeners, air fresheners, scented candles, as I approached the menopause. I would have crazy mood swings for no apparent reason when I was around certain people who used perfumes and aftershaves heavily. There was a popular perfume called

Poison

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going around at the time and everyone seemed to be throwing it on themselves liberally and it made me go absolutely crazy with rage. And to me it really was poison.

So, as insulin is a hormone too, I'm wondering whether just the smell of your foody lip balms and shower gels might affect your BS not via the skin but via the olfactory system - the nose? We already know that using vanilla scented candles helps with weight loss as it kids the mind that it's already received something sweet. So it's not just the skin we need to think about when we consider what can affect us - it's ALL our senses too, like smell, sight and sound.

I think your question is very, very thought provoking and I'm convinced we'll discover in the future that we are not simply 'what we eat', we are a lot more than that. We are what we absorb through all our orifices (sorry to be a wee bit explicit) but we have 'gateways' through which things can enter our body, but we only tend to think of the mouth. But the nose, eyes, ears, vagina in women, skin are all orifices which can take in nutrients or irritants from the environment and they can be in the form of bacteria, sound, visual stimulants etc which all have an effect on our hormones and nervous system.

I personally cannot bear to watch violence on TV or in reality because as soon as I see it, I get shooting pains which go up my legs and arms and straight to my brain and I experience pain at different levels. That's loosely called

empathy

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and sometimes thought to be all in the mind. But it is actually a physical phenomena and not all in the mind.

I'm very careful about my food diet and I'm just as careful about my TV and reading diet, because over the years, I've learned what environmental stimuli affect me badly.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else has experienced this and thanks Catsymoo, for the

not so silly question

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:thumbup:

My advice is to always read the label and take great care what you put on your skin because it will get inside you.
How do I know that? Well, my prescribed pain relief patches are applied over the skin and the analgesic slowly seeps in.

Hobs said:

My advice is to always read the label and take great care what you put on your skin because it will get inside you.
How do I know that? Well, my prescribed pain relief patches are applied over the skin and the analgesic slowly seeps in.

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Yeeeeeeeees ... of course ... pain relief patches too. Are they a sort of slow release type of thing?

Would anything absorbed by the skin in such a way have to have a medical licence?

CarbsRok said:

Would anything absorbed by the skin in such a way have to have a medical licence?

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I think there's more regulation than there used to be, but not all skin products need a medical licence.

I know that the absorption of certain ingredients in some skin creams have been highlighted in certain illnesses and allergic reactions. And they were just your average, off the shelf skin creams. I mean you get skin creams that include Vitamin E in the ingredients as well as all sorts of other chemical type things so it has to be well known that absorption takes place.

I would never buy a shampoo or a cream or lotion that had more than about 5 ingredients in them. The more ****, the more likely to be a problem with chemical absorption I think. Have you seen some of the lists of ingredients on hair care and skin products, they take up the whole of the back of the bottle in some cases and there are about a hundred ingredients. When I came down with serious allergies and developed anaphylactic shock, my GP recommended that I stop colouring my hair because a lot of chemicals are absorbed by the scalp and find their way into our blood stream and possibly cross the blood/brain barrier. I'm now growing grey gracefully and it's not too bad so long as I get a good cut. I look like I've got silver streaks.

You might like to read this article,
The Impermeable Facts of Skin Penetration and Absorption.
http://personalcaretruth.com/2011/01/th ... bsorption/
"Medication patches require chemical engineering....................."
"Cosmetics are deigned to benefit the outer layer of skin, absorption would waste the effort.................."
There are several comments on the article that are worth reading too.

CarbsRok said:

Would anything absorbed by the skin in such a way have to have a medical licence?

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catherinecherub said:

"Medication patches require chemical engineering....................."

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Yes and yes, the Bu Trans slow release pain relief patches I have been wearing are a synthesised morphine that releases slowly and is absorbed into the blood through the skin, they are covered under the dangerous drugs act and I have to sign a special part of the prescription form when I collect them. Still not quite sure what I am signing, I did ask and was told "oh its because there covered under the dangerous drugs act" stating the obvious but not really answer my question I thought :roll:

I wouldnt think that any chemical that is known to be absorbed by the skin would be used in cosmetics but then I dont know what regulations cosmetics companies have to abide to they certainly like to include lots of additives that claim all sorts of things especially in products aimed at reducing the ageing process, but as Catherine says I think drugs that are used in slow release patches are engineered and designed to do that its not a natural process.

There was an interesting programme on TV recently about a group of young girls from the same school in the USA who all suddenly developed extremely severe and uncontrollable bodily tics, jerks, spasms and verbal shouts. They resembled all the symptoms of Tourettes Syndrome but what medics couldn't work out was why this group of around 10 girls developed the condition around the same time.

They did tests at the school, they looked at the environment, they tested each girl individually and the only thing they could come up with was 'an unrelated psychological trauma experienced by just one of the girls (her parents divorce) and which the remaining girls were coming out in sympathy with by developing these tics.'

That conclusion of course, was absolutely ludicrous as these girls were losing so much life due to their uncontrollable tics etc. They were exhausted, they'd stopped going out, stopped going to school, stopped having a life basically - and they said

Why, under those circumstances, would any of us want to mimic these symptoms?

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The parents were understandbly very unhappy with this conclusion and refused to let it rest. They were also determined to prove that this condition was neurological and not psychological. It all stank of a cover up of some sort so they continued to press for answers.

Eventually it was discovered that all the girls involved had on a particular day, used the school's playing field and guess what? Yep ... it had been treated the day before with some kind of pesticide or fertiliser and the girls had either/or ingested it by breathing in the vapour or via there skin by direct skin contact with the ground.

It was very sad because they'd suffered so much through the condition itself and then suffered even more from the attitudes of the medics who decided they were basically all suffering from some kind of mass psychological problem and their parents were distraught from dealing with it all. Eventually it was proved they had neurological damage and they were treated and began to make great improvements as a result. If their parents hadn't pushed the issue, they'd have gone down the mental health pathway and God knows where that would have ended for them.