One of the most competitive and fastest moving industries in the world is the skin care business. The Internet has spawned many opportunities for smaller businesses to sell their goods as they can avoid having to pay large costs for things like shop fronts and transportation to different areas of distribution.The downside of this of course is that almost anyone can set up shop online and there is very little standard control, which goes some way to explain why Norwegian experts discovered that 50% of the online offering where actually bad for you.
Over 400 products were sampled from a cross section of sellers across the net and included everything from supermarket brands, foreign products and even exclusive professional offerings. There were both facial care and also hand care products sampled, and they were all tested extensively on various types of skin and measured on their effectiveness, ease of use and side effects. A control group were given a very basic cream that had no active ingredients.
The results were a little alarming and should be an eye opener for anyone looking to buy this type of product. Firstly the study found that around 70% of the products did not give any benefits to the user, and what is more, over 50% of the products had negative side effects. There were many side-effects recorded in the study but some of the worst were skin peeling, spots, blistering, server itching and dryness.
Another finding, which may not come as so much of a surprise, was that those products at the top of the price range benefited the skin most. In fact the products that cost in the top 20% of the list all showed positive effects and had no side effects. The overruling advice from this research has to be to do your research and only buy the highest quality skin care products you can. Further more, only get you skin care products from places you can trust and who have been trading for a long time such as this London spa. Secondly, if you are new to using a certain product make sure you test on it on small area of skin on the arm first to see how it reacts, before you apply to the face or on large areas of skin.
