Name: Age Adapting CBD Serum
Brand: Flora + Bast

What's inside

Ingredients Explained

Cleansing, Surfactant

Sulfated Coconut Oil is a coconut oil that's been reacted with sulfuric acid and then neutralized to stick sulfate groups onto the fatty acids. It's officially listed as a cleansing agent and surfactant.

The practical effect is that a normally water-hating oil becomes water-dispersible. This makes it behave like a mild anionic (negatively charged) detergent and self-emulsifier rather than like a modern foaming sulfate such as SLS.

There's no specific concentration data for this ingredient but the wider alkyl-sulfate family is reported in cosmetics at roughly 0.1-29%.

As for fungal acne, this ingredient may not be safe. It keeps coconut's C12-18 fatty acid backbone that the Malassezia yeast can potentially feed on.

A genuine allergy to this ingredient is uncommon; a double-blind patch-test study of eleven coconut-derived surfactants plus coconut oil + lauric acid found that most reactions in cocamidopropyl-betaine-allergic patients weren't reproducible and were only doubtful.

The only downside is ordinary surfactant behavior: possible dryness, stinging or eye irritation if a formula is unbalanced.

This ingredient shows up on a lot of "pore-clogging" lists but there's no real evidence behind that. It doesn't even have a comedogenic rating from an actual study; the numbers you'll find online come from blogs citing other blogs.

Ratings for other ingredients mostly come from a 1980s rabbit ear test. This test doesn't translate well to human skin or to real products because the ingredient sits at a much lower percentage.

Some people still find it breaks them out. So if that's you, definitely trust your skin.

Learn more about Sulfated Coconut Oil

Cannabis Sativa Extract

Antimicrobial, Antioxidant, Skin Protecting

Cannabis Sativa Extract is an antioxidant.

Cannabis Sativa Seed Oil

Emollient, Skin Conditioning

Cannabis Sativa Seed Oil is the fixed oil expressed from the seeds of the Cannabis sativa plant. This is also known as hemp oil.

Hemp oil is an emollient and nourishes the skin. It contains many fatty acids such as linoleic acid, amino acids, phospholipids, and vitamin E.

The difference between hemp and cannabis is their psychoactive component. Hemp has low amounts of THC.

Learn more about Cannabis Sativa Seed Oil

Reviews