O’Keeffe’s Healthy Feet Foot Cream ingredients (Explained) (2024)

Read more on how to read an ingredient list >>

Alcohol Free

Fragrance and Essential Oil Free

Skin-identical ingredient: Glycerin

Soothing: Allantoin

Other Ingredients

Water

Good old water, aka H2O. The most common skincare ingredient of all. You can usually find it right in the very first spot of the ingredient list, meaning it’s the biggest thing out of all the stuff that makes up the product.

It’s mainly a solvent for ingredients that do not like to dissolve in oils but rather in water.

Glycerin - superstar

Also-called: Glycerol | What-it-does: skin-identical ingredient, moisturizer/humectant | Irritancy: 0 | Comedogenicity: 0

• A natural moisturizer that’s also in our skin
• A super common, safe, effective and cheap molecule used for more than 50 years
• Not only a simple moisturizer but knows much more: keeps the skin lipids between our skin cells in a healthy (liquid crystal) state, protects against irritation, helps to restore barrier
• Effective from as low as 3% with even more benefits for dry skin at higher concentrations up to 20-40%
• High-glycerin moisturizers are awesome for treating severely dry skin

Read all the geeky details about Glycerin here >>

Stearic Acid

What-it-does: emollient, viscosity controlling | Irritancy: 0 | Comedogenicity: 2-3

Isopropyl Myristate

What-it-does: emollient, perfuming | Irritancy: 3 | Comedogenicity: 3-5

A clear, colorless oil-like liquid that makes the skin feel smooth and nice (aka emollient) and it does so without it being greasy.

What's more, it can evenreduce the heavy, greasy feel in products with high oil content.It's also fast-spreading meaning that it gives the formulaa good, nice slip. Itabsorbs quickly into the skin and helps other ingredients to penetrate quicker and deeper.

Thanks to all this, it's one of the most commonly used emollients out there. There is just one little drawback:it has ahigh comedogenicindex (5 out of 5...), so it might clog poresif you're prone to it.

Ceteareth-20

What-it-does: emulsifying, surfactant/cleansing | Irritancy: 3 | Comedogenicity: 2

A common functional ingredient that helps to keep the oil-loving and water-loving ingredients together (emulsifier), stabilizes and thickens the products.

Chemically speaking, it is ethoxylated Cetearyl alcohol, meaning that some ethylene oxide is added to the fatty alcohol to increase the water-soluble part in the molecule. The result is thatthe mainly oil soluble, emollient fatty alcohol is converted to an emulsifier molecule that keeps oil and water mixedin creams. The numberin the name ofCeteareth emulsifiers refersto the average number of ethylene oxide molecules added and 20 makes a good emulsifier.

Cetyl Alcohol

What-it-does: emollient, viscosity controlling, emulsion stabilising | Irritancy: 2 | Comedogenicity: 2

Cetearyl Alcohol

What-it-does: emollient, viscosity controlling, emulsifying, emulsion stabilising, surfactant/cleansing | Irritancy: 1 | Comedogenicity: 2

An extremely common multitasker ingredient that gives your skin a nice soft feel (emollient) and gives body to creams and lotions. It also helps to stabilize oil-water mixes (emulsions), though it does not function as an emulsifier in itself. Its typical use level in most cream type formulas is 2-3%.

It’s a so-called fatty alcohol, a mix of cetyl and stearyl alcohol, other two emollient fatty alcohols. Though chemically speaking, it is alcohol (as in, it has an -OH group in its molecule), its properties are totally different from the properties of low molecular weight or drying alcohols such as denat. alcohol. Fatty alcohols have a long oil-soluble (and thus emollient) tailpart that makes them absolutelynon-drying and non-irritating and are totally ok for the skin.

Aluminum Starch Octenylsuccinate

What-it-does: viscosity controlling, absorbent/mattifier

Sodium Hydroxide

The unfancy name for it is lye. It’s a solid white stuff that’s very alkaline and used in small amounts to adjust the pH of the product and make it just right.

For example, in case of AHA or BHA exfoliants, the right pH is super-duper important, and pH adjusters like sodium hydroxide are needed.

Acrylates/​C10-30 Alkyl Acrylate Crosspolymer

What-it-does: viscosity controlling, emulsion stabilising

Though its long name does not reveal it, this polymer molecule (big molecule from repeated subunits or monomers) is a relative to the super common, water-loving thickener, Carbomer. Both of them are big molecules that contain acrylic acid units, butAcrylates/C10-30 Alkyl Acrylate Crosspolymer also contains some other monomers that are hydrophobic, i.e. water-hating.

This means that our molecule is part water- and part oil-loving, so it not only works as a thickener but also as an emulsion stabilizer. It is very common in gel-type formulas that also contain an oil-phase as well as in cleansers as it also works with most cleansing agents (unlike a lot of other thickeners).

Paraffin

What-it-does: viscosity controlling, perfuming

Allantoin - goodie

Super common soothing ingredient. It can be found naturally in the roots & leaves of the comfrey plant, but more often than not what's in the cosmeticproductsis produced synthetically.

It's not only soothing but it' also skin-softening and protecting and can promote wound healing.

Dimethicone

Probably themost common silicone of all. It is a polymer (created from repeating subunits) molecule and has different molecular weight and thus different viscosity versions from water-light to thickliquid.

As for skincare, it makes the skin silky smooth, creates a subtle gloss and forms a protective barrier (aka occlusive). Also, works well to fill in fine lines and wrinkles and give skin a plump look (of course that is only temporary, but still, it'snice). There are also scar treatment gels out there using dimethicone as their base ingredient. It helps to soften scars and increase their elasticity.

As for hair care, it is a non-volatile silicone meaning that it stays on the hair rather than evaporates from it andsmoothes the hairlike no other thing. Depending on your hair type, it can bea bit difficult to wash out and might cause some build-up (btw, this is not true to all silicones, only the non-volatile types).

Propylene Glycol

What-it-does: moisturizer/humectant, solvent | Irritancy: 0 | Comedogenicity: 0

• It's a helper ingredient that improves the freeze-thaw stability of products
• It's also a solvent, humectant and to some extent a penetration enhancer
• It has a bad reputation among natural cosmetics advocates but cosmetic scientists and toxicology experts do not agree (read more in the geeky details section)

Read all the geeky details about Propylene Glycol here >>

Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate

What-it-does: preservative

It's one of those things that help your cosmetics not to go wrong too soon, aka a preservative. Its strong point is being effective againstyeasts and molds, and as a nice bonus seems to be non-comedogenic as well.

It is safe in concentrations of less than 0.1%but is acutely toxic when inhaled, so it's not the proper preservative choice for aerosol formulas like hairsprays. Used at 0.1%, Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate has an extremely low rate of skin-irritation when applied directly for 24 hours (around 0.1% of 4,883 participants) and after 48 hours that figure was 0.5%, so it counts as mild and safe unless your skin is super-duper sensitive.

Diazolidinyl Urea - icky

What-it-does: preservative

An antimicrobial preservative that helps your products not to go wrong too quickly. It works especially well against bacteria, specifically gram-negative species, yeast,and mold.

Somewhat controversial, it belongs to an infamous family of formaldehyde-releasers. That is, it slowly breaks down to form formaldehyde when it is added to a formula. We have written more aboutformaldehyde-releasing preservatives and the concerns around them atDmdm Hydantoin, but do not get too scared, those are more theories than proven facts.