Green Tea Product Warning!
Beauty Skin Care To Avoid

Why green tea product is not always healthy. Five skin care products you must avoid using.

Look down the skin care aisle of your local drugstore, and you’ll see that green tea is ubiquitous. It offers a host of benefits when applied to the skin.

For example, it reduces irritation, protects skin from sun damage, rejuvenates skin cells, and may even prevent skin cancer. It also smells excellent, making green tea extract a popular ingredient in many fragrances and body sprays.

However, just because green tea is beneficial does not mean that they are good for you. In fact, some of them could be hazardous to your health! With so many products on the market today, the only way to protect yourself is to read the labels.

To help you get started, I have compiled a list of the worst offenders using information from Skin Deep, a database of skin care products and ingredients operated by the Environmental Working Group. Here are the five green tea products to stay away from!

Green Tea Product #1:
Denise Austin - Green Tea Moisturizing Facial Cleanser

Denise Austin's website states that this cleanser "contains a special green tea super-antioxidant that removes potentially harmful pollutants left on your skin from the air or the environment." Yes, green tea is an incredible antioxidant-but it can it remove all of the potentially harmful ingredients in this cleanser?

On a scale of 0-10, with "0" indicating a product with no known hazards and  “10" indicating the most hazardous products on the market, this product scored a "9."

According to the database, some individual ingredients in this cleanser have been linked to cancer, reproductive toxicity, allergies, and organ toxicity. Ingredients of particular concern include salicylic acid, an unidentified fragrance, parabens, diazolidinyl urea, and ceteareth-20.

The bottom line? You may need another cleanser to get this cleanser off your face!

Green Tea Product #2:
L`Occitane - Green Tea with Mint Leaf Light Body Gel

This body gel has a cool green tea and mint fragrance that is supposed to make you feel more awake and energized. That may be so, but reading through the other ingredients is about as energizing as sitting through high school chemistry class.

This product also scores 9 out of 10 on Skin Deep's hazard score, due to ingredients that have been linked to cancer, developmental and reproductive toxicity, allergies and other concerns.

One of the chief culprits in this brew is the sunscreen octinoxate, which has been shown in lab animals to have estrogen-like effects. Also, some studies have suggested that it can interfere with the production of thyroid hormone and the transmission of signals inside the brain.

Green Tea Product #3:
June Jacobs - Green Tea Serum Ampoules

According to skinelite.com, these ampoules contain a youth serum which "combats intrinsic aging (human aging) and extrinsic aging (sun-damage, pollution and smoking)."

However, reading through the list of potential problems that ingredients in the serum have been connected with might actually speed up the aging process instead of slowing it down.

For example, some of the ingredients have been linked to cancer, developmental and reproductive toxicity, allergies and neurotoxicity. These ingredients led Skin Deep to rate this product as 8 out of 10.

Green Tea Product #4:
Elizabeth Arden - Intense Eau de Parfum Natural Spray and Green Tea Scent Spray

Oooh...it's "natural!" That means healthy and safe, right? Wrong. This Eau de Parfum does actually contain green tea extract, but the other ingredients listed on the packaging led to this perfume being rated a 9 out of 10.

Some of the contents of this spray bottle have been linked to cancer, developmental or reproductive toxicity, and allergies, among other potential health concerns. The chief culprits appear to be "fragrance," BHT, oxinoxate, and propylene glycol, which enhances your skin’s ability to soak up all of the other ingredients in this product.

The Green Tea Scent Spray is the companion body spray for the Eau de Parfum. It is basically a watered-down version of the same product with the same hazards.

Green Tea Product #5:
Elizabeth Arden - Refreshing Body lotion

This body lotion scored 8 out of 10.

We will give it some credit for having green tea on the ingredients list. However, the green tea is listed after the synthetic fragrance, so there’s more synthetic fragrance in this body spray than there is green tea. It is also listed after the triethanolamine, a chemical that may cause problems such as cancer, allergic reactions, and organ system toxicity. Isn't that refreshing?

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