A question from Susan who is suffering from sensitive skin that hasn’t yet been tracked down to a specific cause.
My face seems to have become very sensitive to everything creams & makeup I have lost count of the products I have used & the money I have wasted. I asked the doctor what was the most common thing that is put into products that can cause a reaction that’s how I came across your blog, which has now send my head into a tailspin as you say that natural is not always the answer. I am awaiting patch testing to see what is causing reactions but I’m desperate for a moisturiser for my face at the moment all that I can use is a steroid ointment which is very greasy & can only use once a day. I was hoping you could recommend any products I could look at to use or any websites that will help.
I subscribe to the FDA’s mailing list where they detail problems with products. There is usually something going wrong somewhere so alerts come through most days, and getting several on the same day is not unusual. It is pretty rare for cosmetics to trigger off the alarm bells. I am sure that people in the cosmetic business are just as error prone as those in any other walk of life, but it just happens that by the standards of consumer products cosmetics are pretty safe. Nobody knowingly uses hazardous ingredients in cosmetics – there is simply no reason to do so. And the skin is a pretty good barrier anyway so you would be unlikely to come to any harm in the unlikely event of anything accidentally ending up in a cosmetic anyway. 
As a keen environmentalist I often find myself face palming when a cosmetic company picks up on a green issue. They often home in on things that aren’t particularly relevant and propose solutions that are questionable. But I think the recent interest in the risks posed by microbeads is one where there is a real problem. 
