If you’re interested in beauty and skincare, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard about cold-pressed serums and facial oils. Fruits or seeds are ground using stainless steel presses to extract these oils. This is a time-consuming process, but the ingredients extracted in this manner have numerous benefits. They are highly potent since they are derived directly from botanical sources, and there is no high heat involved in the process. Heat can degrade certain compounds causing them to lose some of their benefits.
Cold-pressed serums contain more natural ingredients and fewer fillers like emulsifiers, stabilizers, and thickeners. However, even though the ingredients are predominantly natural, the product will still require a small amount of preservative to avoid contamination. Several brands have recognized the benefits of these ingredients and are now rolling out cold-pressed products.
What Are The Differences Between Commercial Serums And Cold-Pressed Serums?
Many commercial, low-end serums contain refined oils. These are extracted using a process that involves heat and or hexane, which produces more oil than cold-pressing. Refined oils are much cheaper than cold-pressed oils and have a longer shelf life. This is due to the fact that the refining process filters out any harmful contaminants and deodorizes the oil. However, this process also removes several beneficial nutrients and degrades it.
On the other hand, the cold pressing process involves extracting oil by grinding and pressing seeds, nuts or fruits at a temperature not exceeding 120 degrees F. As a result, the active compounds stay potent, retaining their nutrients and aroma. Cold-pressed intricate serums are nutrient dense and highly beneficial for your skin, but they are also more expensive. These formulas are delicate and need to be stored in dark bottles, protected from the degrading effects of light and heat.
Efficacy of Cold-Pressed Serums
Since more of the raw extracts are present in the product when it is cold-pressed, you’re bound to get more skin-enhancing benefits. Urvashi Singh Hutt, founder of Aphorism Skincare, lets us know why.
“When we think of good skincare that delivers the words/ingredients that come to mind are antioxidants, polyphenols, phenolics, omegas, essential fatty acids and vitamins and minerals. We know these are the secrets to wonderful glowing radiant skin (and generally speaking health). We also increasingly know that natural compounds in their composite state are far more potent and better assimilated by the human body than stand alone isolated compounds. Most of these compounds when they exist in their integral form (ie as in a plant source -oil, seed, pulp etc), are easily and destroyed by heat and chemicals.
Additionally they maybe bleached and deodorized. All of these processes serve to completely destroy all the compounds that we actually seek when we look for high end natural skincare.
Conventional skincare [brands] often claim a lot of the above mentioned nutrients as ingredients, but don’t necessarily deliver benefits to the skin as these stand alone ingredients that are neither composite nor bioactive. So if you are looking for high performance natural skincare, that delivers results, cold-pressed is really the way to go.”
While you may be deciding between a $15 serum and a $60 serum, you might want to go with the cheaper price tag. But with a lower price tag comes fewer benefits. You should start asking yourself which serum would benefit you more? It’s almost always going to be the cold-pressed serum with bioactive, natural ingredients.
