Expired Products – The Holistic Skin

Pay attention to the shelf life of your products

“12 M” means the product expires after 12 months.

We all have those forgotten products collecting under the bathroom sink. Some of them have been there for months or even years! Are they still safe to use?

Your skincare products should have a picture like the one above posted on the packaging, usually at the bottom or the back. This is how you know how long the product will keep after it was manufactured. “12 M” is twelve months and so forth.

REVELENT ANTICDOTE:

Years ago, before I had my organic skincare awakening, I was using this luxurious eye cream. The results were amazing, it made me feel pretty… celebrities used the same one…but… that stuff sold for over a hundred dollars for just half an ounce! I used it sparingly, trying to make every dab of the product count. We moved into a new house and I could not find the eye cream after we unpacked. Months went by and eventually, I found it in a box in the back of a closet.

I opened it up and to my utter joy, I found that it was nearly full! Reluctantly, I flipped it over and was crushed when I read that it had expired 12 months after production. I knew it had been at least a year since I had purchased it in the store, and who knows how long it had been on a shelf or sat at a factory somewhere before I had even purchased it. When I examined the product, I noticed that the color was a bit darker than I had remembered. Also, the smell of it seemed less fragrant and more “chemical”. That cream was SO expensive and I still had SO much of it! It would be a shame to waste it, right? So of course, knowing full well I was supposed to throw that stuff out, applied it to my under eye and lid area.

Within minutes, by entire eye area was swollen, red, inflamed and I was burning and crying. The skin around the eye is one of the most sensitive skins on the body and mine had always been especially sensitive. Oh, it was bad! Cucumbers, aloe, ice and I still looked like I had two swollen black eyes. Moral of the story – throw that stuff out!

It is a good idea to routinely go through and discard any products that have reached their expiration. The reality is that those expired products will either be ineffective, prove harmful by causing irritation, or introduce bacteria into the skin cells.

Whether organic or not, skincare products contain “active” ingredients that cause the change in the skin. Organic product lines do not have a shelf life of more than a year due to the lack of harmful preservatives keeping them fresh. Professional lines have more active ingredients at a stronger concentration than drug store brands, however, both need to be tossed eventually. Over time, these ingredients will lose their “activity” and will no longer be capable of making the same change in the skin, rendering them useless.

A product that is dispensed from a pump usually lasts longer than a jarred product, simply because you are not dipping your fingers into the remaining product and introducing bacteria. Bacteria will attack the other ingredients and speed up the breakdown of the product. Once the product has broken down, the bacteria will grow inside the jar, causing the formulas, oils, dyes, fragrances and other ingredients to separate. This will all have undesirable effects if applied to the skin. You could have an allergic reaction to the expired, chemically altered ingredients or even a chemical burn. At the very least, the product is completely ineffective, you wasted your time and now your skin is clogged from the separated oils having been massaged into it.

Luckily, my eye cream experience only left me red and puffy for a couple of days or so, but it could have been much more serious with longer lasting effects. Just make sure you are regularly checking and purging your skincare products. Just as you would not eat expired foods or take expired medications, you definitely do not want to be rubbing expired skincare products mold or bacteria into the body’s largest organ!