The Difference Between Skincare Active Ingredients and Vehicles

In skincare products, when we talk about active ingredients, we’re talking about the actual chemical in the skincare product that does exactly what that skincare product is supposed to do. So, in this 8% glycolic cream, the active ingredient is glycolic acid, but let me show you something. If I put some of the cream on this towel, there’s a large amount of cream there but the actual amount of glycolic acid, it’s miniscule, it’s a tiny, tiny, little part. So what’s the rest of the “goop”, what’s the rest of the cream? That’s the vehicle, the vehicle that the active ingredient is dissolved in. The purpose of the vehicle is to actually help deliver that active ingredient to the skin where you want your skincare product to work. To better understand active ingredients and vehicles, let’s talk about blueberry muffins. In this blueberry muffin, the blueberries are the active ingredients and the cake between the muffins, that’s the vehicle of your skincare product. In skincare products, vehicles are usually composed of water or oil or alcoholic substances, not the kind of alcohol that you drink and when you put that all together depending the proportions that they’re put in and how those parts of the vehicle are put together you can get either a serum or a solution, lotion, gel, cream or an ointment. But we all know that water and oil do not like to mix together. So in order to keep them friendly and keep them all combined in this tube, we mix emulsifiers and surfactants. And if you want to complete your vehicle, just throw in a few preservatives to make sure germs don’t grow on the product, add some fragrance and add some coloring. I bet you never knew that blueberry muffins were so complicated.