As you may have garnered from sex ed, hormones can be terrifying. The same way a Fabergé egg could be: incredibly delicate and easily unbalanced. Oh, and they’re responsible for the function of some very significant aspects of your body, like your metabolism, all thing sexual health, hair growth, mood, and brain function. Especially if you’re a woman, they can majorly eff with things like your skin and whether you fit into your clothing on any given day. Fun, right? Even more fun is the fact that we antagonize our hormones in more than just the obvious ways—we do it in ways that you’d never suspect. Namely, the holy-grail products lurking in your skin-care cabinet. As Gwyneth has expounded on extensively since launching her skin-care brand under the Goop umbrella, the products we put on our faces religiously are largely unregulated. To help us make sense of it all (and dial down the panic button slightly), we hopped on the phone with Adina Grigore, founder of Brooklyn-based S.W. Basics, who literally wrote the book (titled Skin Cleanse) on omitting toxic ingredients from your skin-care routine. Advertisement

How skin care disrupts your hormones and your body’s natural process: “The way I try to express it to people is that everything that isn’t 100 percent from nature is unrecognizable to your body. That might sound super basic, but it’s a really good way to get people to see that. When it’s synthesized, which means it’s been slightly—even in some ways—very lightly tweaked, your body, even if it originally came from somewhere natural, just does not know what it is. What that means is you do not have the natural processes to break it down and handle it correctly.” Got it...but what does that actually mean?: “In the best case scenario, what that means is nutrients. The way that nutrients work both in your body and on your skin is that they literally feed you. Your body will break it down and it will make you live better and feel better. With synthetics, that next step is a reaction—one that’s not necessarily bad, but you’re just kind of not getting anything from it. These synthetic chemicals are harmless—they’re not doing anything wrong, but they’re not doing anything good for you either. When you keep going down the spectrum, this is the area that kind of makes people get a little bit frustrated with conversations around ingredients. These are ingredients that are not just synthetic, but they actually become dangerous to your body in the sense that they disrupt your endocrine system. They disrupt the way that your hormones are able to stay balanced and take care of you. Your body’s natural processes tend to break down because it’s like they’re being attacked.” How disrupted hormones manifest physically (and eff up your complexion): “The top thing people probably don’t notice is irritated skin. When people are like, ‘I have eczema’ or ‘I have psoriasis,’ I think what people tend to do is go, Oh, that’s what I’m like, and I’m trying to find products that solve that problem. That’s already your body not being able to process what is being put on it correctly. Eczema is not something that you naturally have, it’s something that’s going wrong inside your body and manifesting physically.”