What is dimethicone and why you should not be using it on your skin and consuming it in your food and drinks.

Several weeks ago I was talking with a nurse practitioner who was telling me that she was shocked at the increase in skin issues she was seeing in babies and small children. She wanted my opinion as an organic skin care formulator.

So I will tell you what I basically told her in conversation.

It is probably related to the increase in dimethicone in skin care products including babies. Dimethicone suffocates the skin trapping debris and causing skin irritation. It actually takes very strong detergents to get it all off.

Dimethicone is Polydimethylsiloxane or silicone oil the same ingredient that was banned for use in breast implants.

After becoming banned the companies making silicon oil “Dimethicone” have been very clever in finding new uses for their product that still makes it way into our bodies if were not careful. It is being added to more and more food and drink products, mainly beer, processed foods, cooking oil and personal care products.

Have you ever wondered how restaurants can turn on their fryers and set the temperature at around 400 degrees Fahrenheit and leave them on for twelve hours a day for several weeks in a row without the oil breaking down.

The motor oil in your car cannot stand up to that kind of assault.

Silicone oil is added to the cooking oil to increase its heat resistance and extend the frying time.

Recently it was discovered that Polydimethylsiloxane (silicone) is used to manufacture Pizza Hut's cheese. That’s right the same silicone-based product banned in breast implants added to cheese!

But you can’t just blame Pizza Hut for adding toxic inorganic ingredients to their food-all fast food companies are doing it in various ways. Virtually all fermentation products like beer and wine use silicone oil as an anti foaming ingredient.

Most sunscreens even the organic ones have this listed as one of their active ingredients. I even saw one on the internet advertised as one you can you eat. Not something you should eat in my opinion or rub into your skin. And it certainly is not something you should call natural and organic. I’ll explain

Dimethicone’s use in cosmetics is restricted in Europe because of its toxicity. Silicone emollients are occlusive - that is they coat the skin, trapping anything beneath it, and do not allow the skin to breathe (much like plastic wrap would do.) Recent studies have indicated that prolonged exposure of the skin to sweat, by occlusion, causes skin irritation. Some synthetic emollients are known tumor promoters and accumulate in the liver and lymph nodes.

The following ingredients are known tumor promoters when applied to the skin, Dimethicone, Dimethicone Copolyol, Cyclomethicone

These ingredients are also not bio-degradable causing harm to the environment.

I need to add right now that I like zinc oxide as a sun block (Its what we use in our natural organic sunscreen) but not mixed with silicone oil. Actually when you mix zinc with dimethicone you have an added toxicity.

When formulating our sunscreen I ran across a very obscure study on mouse cells with silicone oil and when zinc was added to the oil it caused the cells to mutate. What I found disturbing was that dimethicone and zinc mixed together had the potential to damage cells at the DNA level. I couldn’t make and sell a sunscreen with that in it. Much less call it organic.

[Zinc is a possible toxic contaminant of silicone oil in micro drop cultures of preimplantation mouse embryos. Human Reproduction, Vol. 10, No. 12, pp. 3248-3254, 1995 © 1995 European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology]

So dimethicone zinc oxide is not an ingredient you want to see in a natural organic sunscreen or any other product that could allow it to enter your body.

So why would you use this toxic ingredient in a personal care product? Especially one you were calling a natural and organic product.

It’s greasy without being greasy. It spreads easily because it is comparable to WD40 without the smell. That’s why you also see it in creams, shampoos, conditioners ECT.

People on the internet and a lot of the large brands usually don’t make their own products. They contract with a private label manufacture to make them for them. When you are just making the products for someone else your main concern is speed and price. So these manufacturers are adding silicone oil to the product because it’s less likely the machines will clog. A clogged machine can be very costly in a manufacturing environment. So it greases the product to slide through the machines faster and easier.

Most of these large scale private label manufactures won’t make a sunscreen like ours with just zinc oxide because it just doesn’t work well with their system and the standard formulations they are working with.

I hope that gives you a better understanding of dimethicone and why you will never see it added to any of our products. Manufacturing our own products gives Nature’s Skin and Body Food a big advantage to delivering you superior organic skin care that imparts extraordinary effects to your skin.

Wishing you Great Health and Ageless Beauty,