Using a body scrub is great to polish your skin when the cold winter weather transformed your arms and legs into flaky sticks, or when summer is around the corner and you fancy showing a bit of smooth skin. Still, besides the commonly found plastic microbeads added as physical exfoliating agents (we wrote about them in our blog post about facial exfoliators), body products often contain other ingredients we suggest to avoid for the sake of your skin and health.
Ingredients in Scrubs to Avoid
The hardly pronounceable chemical Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate is a water-based preservative added to a variety of mainstream cosmetics, body lotions, and other body products. Originally finding its use in the paint and wood business, and is nowadays widely used in the beauty industry to protect products from microorganisms, even though this synthetic preservative is a known toxicant and allergen! It may cause itchy skin rashes in some people, lead to gastrointestinal and liver damage, and fertility issues [1].
Therefore, instead of risking health conditions, we strongly recommend avoiding peeling products that are laden with harmful ingredients like IPBC. As a natural, healthier, and safer alternative, we tried BOTANICALS’ Lemongrass & Ginger Body Polish. It is a certified organic scrub with zesty ingredients and some a bunch of skin-loving oils to both condition and cleanse! Hop over to our blog to read our review.
Another great body scrub we tried is LI’TYA’s Lemon Myrtle & Desert Salt Body Polish, which only contains two ingredients, mineral salt and lemon mrytle leaf, and can be used as both a peeling product and a cleansing bath salt. Read more about it here.
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