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.

Make up and feminism

My daughter is at the phase of development where every day she learns new words. It's a lot of fun. Last weekend added 'tiara' and 'make up' her vocabulary - essential terms in our all-female household.

But am I compromising my feminism by letting a toddler learn about make up?

The curse of cosmetics

There is nothing unfeminist about make up. It's the attitude with which you use it that counts.

Make up becomes unfeminist when we are trapped by it:

• Can't leave the house without it
• Think it masks our natural ugliness, rather than enhancing our natural beauty
• Feel obliged to pay high prices for products before we can be seen by the outside world

It would be a better world if our appearances didn't matter. If what was on the inside was genuinely all that counted. The fashion industry would disappear overnight. Stylists, hairdressers and Maxfactor would all go out of business. we'd probably all be a lot happier. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon. And so we have make up. 

Growing up with make up

I'm a single parent with an only child. My daughter and I live, by necessity, an intimate life. She plays in the bathroom while I shower, she pats my knees while I sit on the toilet, she potters about the bedroom as I get dressed and she jabbers to herself in the mirror as I put on my make up. I think this is pretty normal.

Once she found one of my make-up brushes and expertly brushed her cheek with it. It felt a little wrong, and gave me a pang of guilt that she knew what to do so young.

But is putting on a bit of bronzer that different to putting on a bra? (This is a philosophical question, as obviously they are completely different, unless you put bronzer on your nipples before you go to work).

I can't lock my daughter out from any of these things - she always needs to be near me so I can watch her, and I think it's good for her to see what I do to get ready. This is how we learn. If I don't want her to understand about cosmetics from a very young age, the only way is to stop wearing them myself. I'm not about to do that.

As a grown woman, it's my right to choose to wear make up if I want to, and I do. I wear a minimal amount in my everyday life. But if I'm lucky enough to be going out for the evening I bring out the full works (It's a single mum thing. Trust me. We don't get out much). And I enjoy it. I enjoy buying it, I enjoy putting it on.

Stand up for make up

I don't want my daughter to grow up thinking it's shameful to go to Tesco's without mascara. Or even the pub.

My responsibility is not to keep these things from her, but to teach her to approach the feminine slalom of make up, jewellery and clothes, as stuff that you can have fun with, choices you can make.

So I'm standing up for make up. For our right to wear it, and for our right to not wear it. For our right to do whatever we please. And to teach our children the same.

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'.