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Oxidised ingredients cause skin damage
The Oxidation Problem
When oxidised oils and degraded actives land on your skin, your immune system recognises them as damaged and foreign. It responds the only way it knows how — with inflammation.
Your skin feels vaguely irritated after moisturising. A low-grade redness that never quite goes away. Breakouts that appear for no obvious reason.
Skin that feels sensitive to products it used to tolerate.
A barrier that always feels compromised no matter how much you apply.
This is your skin in a constant low-level state of alert — perpetually fighting what you're putting on it rather than healing.
The cruel irony is that inflammation is the root driver of almost every skin concern people are trying to fix — acne, rosacea, eczema, accelerated ageing, hyperpigmentation.
If your skincare is triggering an inflammatory response every time you use it, you are pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.
You will never fully win. The product creating the problem is the same one you're relying on to solve it.
Oxidised ingredients cause several types of damage when applied to skin
Free radical cascade — Oxidised oils and actives contain lipid peroxides and reactive aldehydes (like malondialdehyde and 4-hydroxynonenal). These don't just sit on the surface; they initiate chain reactions, stealing electrons from healthy lipids in the stratum corneum and cell membranes, propagating oxidative damage deeper into the skin.
Barrier disruption — The skin's lipid matrix relies on intact fatty acids. When you apply already-oxidised oils, the degraded fatty acid structures can't integrate properly into this matrix. Instead of reinforcing the barrier, they create gaps and dysfunction, increasing transepidermal water loss and sensitising the skin to irritants.
Inflammatory response — Lipid peroxidation products are recognised by the skin as danger signals. They activate NF-κB pathways and trigger pro-inflammatory cytokine release (IL-1α, IL-6, TNF-α), leading to chronic low-grade inflammation even without visible redness.
Protein and DNA damage — Reactive aldehydes form adducts with proteins (crosslinking collagen, damaging enzymes) and can cause oxidative DNA damage in keratinocytes and fibroblasts. This accelerates photoageing and impairs the skin's repair capacity.
Microbiome disruption — Oxidised lipids shift the skin's microbial ecology, potentially favouring pathogenic species over commensals.