What is Oxidative Stress?

Free radical damage, also known as oxidative stress or oxidisation, makes a huge contribution to the ageing process, destroying cells that affect our sight, hearing, and organs. It causes skin to sag, wrinkle, and age prematurely, and hair to grey. When free radical damage affects DNA, it's thought to contribute to cancer, and it's also implicated in Alzheimer's and heart disease.

Free radical damage starts with a chemical reaction. This can be triggered by sunlight hitting your skin, by an environmental toxin contacting your cells, or by unavoidable processes like the body burning oxygen for fuel. The reaction leaves behind a particle with an unpaired electron, most particles prefer paired electrons, so this makes it unstable.

To stabilise itself, that particle steals an electron from a neighbouring particle, which in turn becomes unstable and steals from another. This chain reaction can run thousands of events long, damaging every particle it passes through, eventually leading to cell breakdown and failure.

You may recognise this process by another name: rusting metal is the same oxidisation reaction, and it's just as damaging to us as it is to metal.

Antioxidants

Antioxidants stop free radical damage in a rather elegant way, they safely offer up an electron to the free radical, breaking the chain of destruction, without becoming unstable themselves in the process.

You'll find them in abundance in fruit, vegetables, herbal extracts, essential oils, and natural oils and butters extracted from plants and nuts without heat or solvents. Getting enough through diet, and applying them topically, genuinely helps your body fight back against free radical damage, this isn't just marketing language, it's basic chemistry.

Because our products are water-free and 100% natural, they're unusually rich and varied in these protective antioxidants. Our Natural Body Butter and Beauty Balm are daily treatments that help skin fight the ongoing, invisible battle against free radical damage and premature ageing.

Causes of Oxidisation

Some oxidisation happens naturally as part of necessary chemical processes in the body. Extraneous free radical damage, the kind worth actively reducing, can be minimised by avoiding:

• photo-damage from the sun
• airborne pollution, including cigarette smoke
• trans fats
• cooking with polyunsaturated fats (use animal fat or tropical fats like coconut or babassu instead)
• reused cooking fats, such as deep fat fryer oil
• toxins in cleaning, beauty, and occupational products
• excessive sugar and refined carbohydrates
• processed foods high in preservatives
• excessive alcohol

Avoiding these triggers where practical, alongside getting plenty of antioxidants, considerably reduces free radical damage throughout the body and skin.

Trans Fats

Trans fats form through unnatural processes like hydrogenation, still widely used in the beauty industry, though far less common in food than it once was. They also form when naturally unstable fats, the polyunsaturated kind, are exposed to sunlight, heat, or oxygen.

Natural Fats

• Polyunsaturated fats tend to come from plants grown in cooler climates (hemp, rosehip, borage), which haven't evolved to be sun-stable.
• Monounsaturated fats (olive, almond) are fairly stable and grow in temperate regions like The Mediterranean
• Saturated fats are very sun-stable and come from plants that grow in tropical climates (coconut, babassu, shea). Animal fats are also saturated fats
  

Heat used in extracting natural oils destroys their therapeutic compounds and can create trans fats in the process, which is why we favour cold-pressed oils and butters.

Tropical Skincare and Sun Protection

We use a high proportion of sun-stable saturated fats from tropical climates. These oxidise far less readily, so they won't contribute to free radical damage in your skin, and they're rich in antioxidants that actually boost your skin's own defences. It's why our Beauty Balm and Natural Body Butter, both in our Tropical Skincare Collection, can help protect against long-term photo-damage and premature ageing, even without a sunblock (they won't stop you getting sunburnt, so this isn't a substitute for sun protection on its own).

For actual sun protection, we recommend staying in the shade during peak sun, covering up, and using a mineral sunscreen (zinc oxide or titanium dioxide) rather than a chemical one. See our Ingredients We Avoid page for more on the hormone-disruption questions around certain chemical filters, and our Skin Irritants page for which specific filters are known contact allergens.

Linoleic Acid: A Day and Night Consideration

Linoleic acid is one of the good guys, genuinely one of the most beneficial fatty acids for skin. It's a structural building block of the ceramides that hold the skin barrier together, and it's anti-inflammatory, part of why it's so often recommended for acne-prone and compromised skin.

There's a catch, though, directly connected to everything above: linoleic acid is a polyunsaturated fat, exactly the kind most vulnerable to oxidation, particularly with UV exposure. Applying a linoleic-acid-rich product and then heading out into the sun works against the very repair you're trying to achieve.

That's why timing matters in how we formulate. Our night-time facial products, when skin is repairing rather than facing UV exposure, are richer in linoleic acid to make the most of its benefits while oxidation risk is at its lowest. Our daytime facial products deliberately keep linoleic acid minimal, balanced instead with more oxidation-stable oils and antioxidant-rich ingredients, so you get protection and hydration without adding fuel to oxidative damage during the hours you're actually exposed to it.