The word gentle is touted around in the beauty industry and familiar to consumers. However the ingredients inside certain cosmetics may be anything but gentle to our skin.

The beauty industry creates products to help reduce the visible signs of ageing, like fine lines and wrinkles, by over cleansing, exfoliating and peeling our skin.

But this removes the microbiome we so badly need for good skin health and for the maintenance of our skin barrier. We heard about the human microbiome and its vital role in maintaining skin health in our previous guest episode with Leo Salvi of Kind to Biome, a firm developing rigorous, verifiable tests to assess the microbiome gentleness of cosmetics.

In this opinion episode, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier asks: "Isn't it time we see the industry formulating with a different and gentler agenda than antiageing and turning back the clock on our skin?" To learn more about this episode, all of the links that were mentioned and anything else, please visit the show notes on the Formula Botanica website.