A very small selection of the 200+ products that were entered into this year’s FreeFrom Skincare Awards – and which we spent two very long, balm-filled and fragrant days judging last week. By the end of day two my right arm had been ‘polished’ (with the aid of salt, sugar and nut shells) to within an inch of its life, while my left arm was luxuriating in enough oils, serums, butters and elixirs to stock a beauty parlour! However, do not be fooled into thinking that we were just luxuriating in a free, luxury make-over – far from it. The judging process for the FreeFrom Skincare Awards does seriously make judging the FreeFrom Food Awards feel like a walk in the park.
First all the products are assessed by two of our expert judges to see whether they genuinely do exclude all of the allergens and synthetic ingredients excluded by out entry criteria. They also mark up the entry sheets with their own comments on the products.
Then we have the next judging session (the one that happened last week) when we have six judges (including some with sensitive or problem skins) in which we assess the products in the light of our assessors’ comments. (For the full judging panels see here on the awards site.) In these sessions we look carefully at the ingredients, the packaging and, above all, the labeling of the products – as important for freefrom skincare products as it is for freefrom food products.
Unfortunately, as yet, awareness of food allergens is quite low within the skincare community although allergens (nut oils, wheat etc) are widely used. This makes locating ‘safe’ skin care products really difficult if you have a serious allergy. We are very anxious therefore to raise awareness of food allergy within the skincare world – not because we want them to exclude food allergens from their products (many ‘allergens’ have very positive skincare benefits if you are not allergic to them), but so that they label them clearly and comprehensively in a way that enables food allergic people know where they stand.
(The jury is still out on whether many food allergens will actually cause reactions when applied topically, and whether the refining to which many of them are subject will have effectively destroyed their allergenicity, but, if you are very sensitive, you will probably – and wisely – not wish to take the risk. Comprehensive labeling is therefore essential if you are to make an informed decision. However…. this is not always as easy as it sounds as, although the actual ingredients may be fairly clear, the sources of some – vitamin E for example – may be quite unclear, and may not be known even by the manufacturer.)
However…. to return to the judging. At these sessions we also try the products (hence the scrubbed-raw and the pampered and buttered arms) to assess how easy they are to use, how well they go on, are absorbed etc. On the basis of all the above, we choose products to commend (very good, well made products which sit well within freefrom skincare, but not quite award winning), and products to shortlist.
The shortlisted products then go off to selected Beauty Bible testers for a month’s rigorous testing. The testers fill in comprehensive questionnaires covering the efficacy, ease of use and value for money of the products and we then use this information, along with our judges’ and assessors’ comments to choose the winners. So, watch this space – the winners will be announced at the Allergy and FreeFrom Show in June.
Meanwhile, go and take a look at those shortlisted and commended products – while I go and apply balm to my over-scrubbed right arm and exfoliate my well-oiled left arm….
Experience is vital to understanding
Many of you will have read about Clare’s predicament either here in my blog or on the FoodsMatter site. Clare suffers from almost total food intolerance – she is now reduced to about four foods, including venison and swede – that she can just about tolerate, has lost over four stone in weight and is seriously starting to believe that she may starve to death.
Yesterday her story was in the MailonLine – which has the mixed advantage that readers can comment on the story. The comments have now grown to well over 150 and are totally polarised between those who are very sympathetic and are offering well meaning advice or at least sympathy and those who appear to be going out of their way to be offensive.
‘I just love venison and am partial to a bit of Swede. Especially if she is blonde! What a load of tosh!’ – ‘Ah the infamous Bambi diet’ or ‘Who cares? she wants to think herself lucky she can afford venison. Grow up woman – eat what you want to but don’t expect me to loose sleep over your silliness or attention seeking behaviour. Get a life!’ are amongst the most innocuous. What a change in attitude there would be in any one of those commenters if they were struck down with Crohn’s Disease or coeliac disease, or, perish the thought, a serious food intolerance, and were all of a sudden struggling to find anything they could eat.
Which just made me think yet again – and very un-originally – that there really is no genuine understanding to be had unless you have been there yourself. John Scott had already commented that he had spent a good deal of time supporting Clare (who, under his guidance, is now dosing herself with helminths in an attempt to down-regulate her over active immune system) because he was one of the very few ‘who really understood how she was feeling’.
But I also remembered how I had embarrassed myself only last week by forgetting that the parent of a seriously allergic child can never relax their vigilance. Alexa of YesNo Bananas, whose two-year-old son Sid is anaphylactic to nuts, egg, wheat, sesame, chickpeas and green peas, came to have coffee. Because I knew that she was not allergic, only Sid, and because I was not really concentrating, I offered her a nut topped muffin. But the parent of a nut allergic child can never afford to have any dealings with nuts, because some of that nut could stick to their fingers or clothes, and thence get onto their child’s fingers and into their mouth.
I ‘know’ that because talking about and writing about allergy is what I do. But I because I have never had a seriously allergic child of my own, I have not ‘experienced’ what it is like to live with the threat of your child having a life threatening reaction at any moment, so caution and lateral thinking about allergies are not programmed into my DNA – if I am distracted, not focusing, not thinking, I can forget. A parent who has experienced it will never forget.