Aveeno Positively Ageless Lifting and Firming Night Cream Review

If you're really after natural skincare, you should be tossing your Aveeno in the rubbish bin.   Aveeno's extremely successful marketing of its products as "natural" is just that - marketing.  The primary ingredients in, for example, the Positively Ageless Lifting & Firming Night Cream are, after water and glycerin:

Dimethicone, Tetrahydroxypropyl Ethylenediamine, Cetyl Alcohol, Butylene Glycol, Pentaerythrityl Tetraethylhexanoate, Cyclohexasiloxane, and Polyacrylamide.

Most of these are decidedly not natural; they are synthetic chemicals, several of them not especially good for living things.  Dimethicone is a silicone based polymer: yes, silicone, just like the caulk.  Silicone is generally of low reactivity, but, as the unfortunate debacle with leaking silicone breast implants demonstrated, may not be all kittens and cupcakes when introduced directly into the bloodstream.

Equally worrisome is Polyacrylamide.  This polymer downcycles to acrylamide, a troublesome little molecule that is, among other things, a nerve toxin and carcinogen.  What's worse, "residual" unpolymerized acrylamide is always present in varying amounts in Polyacrylamide. 

As a chemist, I'm consistently surprised at what I see on ingredient lists.  But remember, the FDA performs almost no oversight on cosmetics, so in truth, it's all rather a gamble. Noticed that whole "zero trans fat" trend in food products?  It's been known for over 20 years that hydrogenated oils are profoundly toxic; junk food lobbyists kept the FDA from acting for over two decades.  Think someone's "minding the store"?  Think that since it's on the self, it must therefore be safe?  Think again.

That said, are chemical-laden face creams going to cause you to dramatically keel over dead in front of your mirror?  Well no.  But here's a word you can drop at your next cocktail party:  Bioaccumulation.  You're big sponges, darlings.  While most of the millions of substances (natural and synthetic) that we take on board (ingest, inhale, absorb through skin, etc) every day are processed out, many of them accumulate in the body.  And of those, there are some which will, inevitably, cause trouble.  And when "trouble" in biological terms means "cancer" or "Parkinson's", etc., perhaps it would be best to err on the side of caution:
 

Shop organic when possible;

Avoid plastics and other off-gassers in the home as much as is practical;

and, when it comes to lotions and the like:

If you wouldn't _eat it_, don't put it on your skin.