The Great Skincare Swindle

How many cosmetic and cleaning products are you using on yourself? Do you know what they all do? We're becoming increasingly aware of what we put into our bodies, but not really thinking about what we put onto them.

The billion-squillion dollar cosmetics and skincare industry is genius. It offers a panacea to youthfulness and beauty and we throw our money at it, slathering our faces and bodies in beautiful smelling chemicals, without a clue what they do. This isn't new - from the Ancient Egyptians onwards we've been slapping on dubious products - lead, arsenic and belladonna have all been used in the pursuit of beauty.

I looked at the products I use on a normal day, and I recalled what I used 10 years ago, when I was 30 years old, and 10 years before that. It doesn't look like I use that many things, until you think about the fact that I'm putting all those things on my skin every day. And this is without the moisturisers, foot scrubs, face masks, hair dye and foundations I might want to use occasionally, when I actually make an effort...

A typical day in the life of my bathroom cabinet when I was 20 (basically just kept clean), 30, and then 40.

I think I'm reasonably low maintenance, but I've gone from using four products a day to 16. At this rate of increase (doubling every 10 years) I will be using 64 different products every day when I'm 60!

What do we want from skincare and cosmetics?

Women are complex always-changing creatures, so I can only speak for me, now. At 40, I want to look pretty, smell nice and preserve my attractiveness for as long as possible. I also want to do these things within my means and without damaging myself or the planet.

What do these things actually do? I still remember the time I went into the Body Shop and a sales woman started telling me about the special particles in something or other - sales patter masquerading as science.

We know that make-up works, because we can see the results immediately. Applied correctly, it makes us more attractive. We know that soap, shampoo and deodorant make us less smelly. Conditioner makes hair softer and easier to brush. What about the other things? I have no idea if the moisturiser I put on my face is actually protecting it, or what it's supposed to be protecting it from - damage and dust from the outside world, or the effort of holding up my face for 40 years?

Nine steps to loveliness

I looked up what the beauty gurus recommend I should be doing to my face every day, now that I'm 40. I found The Ultimate Skincare Routine for your 40s (written by two people who make a living from selling and writing about beauty products). It's pretty typical - there's a lot of stuff like this out there. You're supposed to do all these steps twice a day, with variations for morning and evening. I've paraphrased them for you:

1. Cleanse - wash your face with chemicals
2. Cleanse again - with some different chemicals (in case you missed a bit)
3. Tone (rub some kind of alcohol on your face)
4. Exfoliate (scrub in case the cleansing wasn't good enough)
5. Antioxodise with serum - very concentrated moisturising stuff that no one seems able to explain
6. Retinol - helps regenerate old skin cells or something
7. Eye cream - because you're probably feeling a bit sore now
8. Moisturise - put back the grease that you just took out
9. Face oil (apparently different to moisturiser) - gives you something to cleanse off tomorrow

Do normal people really do all this every day? I do just three of these and it feels like a lot. When are you supposed to find time to do anything else? And it must cost a bomb!

There is so much written about skincare products, it's almost impossible to find any proper answers about what these things are - when you try, you are just deluged with articles claiming they are the best things ever without really having any explanation of what they do. Where 'research' has been done, it seems to involve giving a bunch of women a cream and asking them if they like it. I haven't yet found anything to say whether or not any of this stuff actually works.

Destroying the planet

Perhaps my biggest concern about all this consumerism is the toll it takes on the planet. There's the packaging for starters - a lot of plastic. Of course I recycle, but it would be a lot better if I didn't buy these things in the first place. If I want small bottles to carry around, then I buy large bottles and decant them into smaller reusable ones. I have switched to shampoo bars which cuts out plastic bottles and I use soap not shower gel, which is much more economical on packaging. But there's still a lot of plastic.

Then there's the products themselves. The ones with the exfoliating beads wash into our water supply and damage plants and animals (avoid them). Then there's animal testing. I Google cosmetics that don't test on animals before I buy, but invariably these brands aren't available on my small-town high street. I want to buy this stuff in a shop, not online, because that way I can try it on and see what I'm getting, and also save the ridiculous amount of packaging it's apparently necessary to post this stuff.

It's hard to find soap that doesn't contain palm oil. This stuff is an environmental disaster that has led to epic deforestation with species like chimpanzees losing their homes and therefore their lives. I don't want to kill chimps so I'm trying to find products without palm oil. It's almost impossible and made even more difficult because palm oil masquerades as other things on packaging (palm kernel, palmitate, palmate...)

All the mainstream brands of soap that I have found contain palm oil. I ventured into Lush (for the first time) to buy a bar of palm oil free soap. It cost me £6.70. That is ridiculous. I just want to wash my body without orphaning any chimps. Does that really involve paying nearly £7 for a bar of soap? What did we do before they invented palm oil?

Destroying my body

So I'm tripping along smearing moisturiser into my face and then I see something on Facebook about cosmetic products linking to cancer. Because what are these things made of? Chemicals. So we're smearing chemicals all over our faces and bodies. And thinking this is a good idea. Far from giving us the appearance of eternal youth, they may actually be hastening death.

If we follow the nine steps above that so many skincare gurus are telling us then we are smearing no fewer than none types of unknown chemical into our faces every day, probably more if we use different products in the morning and evening. On top of that there's the washing products - shower gel, shampoo, deodorant, and of course the make-up, made of more chemicals.

What the great skincare swindle means for all of us

To summarise, if you are a woman then you are probably spending a lot of your time and money smothering your face and body with chemicals that could not only damage you, but are very definitely damaging the world around you. I want to be beautiful. You want to be beautiful. But maybe we need to be more sensible about our pursuit of beauty. And apply a healthy squirt of scepticism to the skincare and cosmetics industry, before we hand over all our hard-earned money.

Lipstick to success

The real reason women spend so much time and effort getting ready is that we are more likely to succeed if we look attractive, whilst for men it makes little difference. So says an article in the Washington Post this week.

It's not what you've got...

The article is based on a research paper. It showed that:

• Pretty people (men and women) earn more money (no surprise) than not so pretty people
• Grooming has a bigger affect on women's salaries than men's
• Less attractive but more well-groomed women earned significantly more, on average, than attractive or very attractive women who weren’t considered well-groomed.

So it's not just what you've got - it's what you do with it. So long as what you do with it is expensive clothes and mascara. It's a sad finding. But it probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to most of us.

Bad Hair Day by Shena Tschofen via Flickr Creative Commons

I'm not the kind of girl who can't answer the door without three coats of mascara and a full manicure, but I do wear makeup, every day. I want to feel I go out of the door looking my best. As I put on my eyeliner before heading out to Tesco, I joke (to myself) that you never know who you're going to run into in the frozen veg aisle. Prince Charming could just be waiting for me to pick up my peas, and I want to look my best, as our eyes lock over the Mexican beanburgers, and our finger brush across the Quorn. But enough of my supermarket fantasies.

Creative self expression?

I think there probably are women whose main aim in life is to be beautiful and stylish, who love nothing more than shopping for new clothes and beauty products, and piling them all on. And there are some women who feel happiest in jeans and a fleece, with no interest in makeup, who don't want to be bothered with worrying about what to wear every day. Like most of my sisters, I'm somewhere between the two.

This research into the links between personal grooming and success poses the question, is the greater effort, in time and money, that women spend on their appearance a form of 'creative self expression' or is it something more sinister - that women work at looking attractive if they want to succeed, while men can just focus their efforts on the work?

A lot of women, myself included, really enjoy the act of getting ready for a night out, putting together an outfit and painting our faces to project a particular image of ourselves. Are we doing it because we want to feel good about ourselves, to look younger, to compete with other women, to look alluring to men, to look pretty, sexy, rich, smart, successful, or even a bit dumb?

Behind the lipstick

I've heard all sorts of theories about makeup, including that putting on lipstick makes our mouths look vulva-like and put men in mind of sex (as if men need reminding of sex). And I've written before about beauty product manufacturers blinding us with bad science, telling us we need more "particles" (seriously).

I think the truth our compunction to beautify ourselves is vastly more complicated, incorporating a range of social, cultural, personal and genetic factors. And what's true for one woman isn't necessarily true for all of us. The motivations behind these acts of personal grooming are complex. And wearing more or less make-up isn't the key to shattering the glass ceiling.

What would happen if we all threw away our lipstick and went to work with full facial nudity? For years I went to work slap-free so the thought doesn't bother me, but it's unthinkable that women as a group would do this, makeup is such a central part of feminine culture.

There's no panacea, and wearing more mascara certainly isn't the answer, as it's only likely to perpetuate the problem. Our challenge is to wear as much or as little as we want, and still succeed at whatever we want to succeed at. It would be good for female success to be about success, and not just looking pretty.

Read The real reason that so many women have to spend so much time getting ready.

The beauty of science

Being female and a little bit vain, from time to time I wander into shops selling things that purport to make me look younger, prettier and generally more alluring.

But when I'm browsing the shiny shiny bottles, trying to decide how much cash I can justifiably part with, and wondering if I'm too old for glitter (never), a shop assistant invariably pounces on my indecision.

She's just doing her job - trying to sell stuff - and I'm fine with that. Actually I could do with some help deciding which of these bottles is going to make me most attractive for least money.

But then she (it's always she) tries to blind me with science. And what had been a nice outing to pick up some moisturiser in my lunch hour makes me really wound up.

Here is some sciency sales patter to which I have recently been subjected:

• 'It has irridescent particles'
• 'It contains essential oils'
• 'It's made from stem cells'

Now, I'm no scientist, but I'm pretty sure that what's coming out of her mouth is utter drivel.

I'm not saying that shop assistants aren't capable of understanding science. I'm sure that's not true. As it happens, my grasp of science is appalling. But the sales people are being fed a load of meaningless lines and buzzwords about science and encouraged to come out with them to confuse us into thinking that their product is really great, not just because it smells nice, but because it's got stem cells in it - and that has to be good right?

Now the science bit - stem cell research

Stem cell research is really complicated. I tried to get my head round it for this blog. I failed. (Who'd have thought stem cell science was so hard that a former arts student couldn't master it in an evening?)

According to 'internationally acclaimed plastic surgeon and skincare expert Dr Marko Lens', "stem cells are pluripotent cells with high self-renewal capacity and multi-lineage differentiation ability." So that clears that up then.

In terms of humans and animals I think this sort of means they're the Doctor Who of the cell world. I know what I mean.

However, apparently (I added the word 'apparently' to remind you that I don't know what I'm talking about) the stem cells used in skincare are actually plant stem cells. Which apparently (again) means they are just some cells from the stem of a plant. Different use of the word stem. See what they did there?

So basically they suck a load of stuff out of, say, a dandelion stalk, and then try to make out that it's going to rejuvenate your skin because it's made from stem cells, and we all know that they're amazing. Except it's not those stem cells, it's just a bit of dead plant. Science bit over.

Skincare is a feminist issue

Women are being exploited. We are being blinded and confused with hokey science used to persuade us to spend money on these products.

I'm not saying we shouldn't buy them, but come on rude, nasty girls, we need to stop listening to this crap.

Next time someone tries to sell you a pot of moisturiser on the grounds that it contains 64 essential oils, 12 stem cells and a particle in a pear tree, call them out on it. Ask them, "what exactly do you mean by that?" Ask them what kind of stem cells. The chances are your grasp of science is no worse than theirs.

Confused scientists

In researching this blog I found an article about a proper scientist who tried and failed to understand skincare advertising science. It's really good. You can read it here: 'Baffled by the beauty adverts: so is a Nobel prizewinner'.