Living Cruelty Free

Numerous people have recommended Juice Organics to me — it’s 100% cruelty-free, it’s vegetarian and it’s organic. (It would be the trifecta if it were vegan instead of vegetarian — I’m not sure why Juice Organics hasn’t gone vegan.) It’s made by the same people who make the Juice Beauty line — it’s just better priced, less concentrated, has fewer age-defying ingredients, and is made with only 5 organic juices instead of 26. Juice Organics is really much better priced than Juice Beauty — 6 ounces of the Juice Organics Nourishing Cleanser is $9.99, whereas 6 ounces of the Juice Beauty Cleansing Gel is more than double the price at $22.00.

I ordered a Juice Organics travel kit which was a really good deal — $10 from Amazon Prime — and tried out the nourishing cleanser, the vitamin antioxidant serum, and the SPF 30 Light Tint Moisturizer. I hate to buy full size bottles of products I’ll never use, so this was great for me.

My conclusions:

Juice Organics Nourishing Cleanser is a nice cleanser — it’s oil-based, so it is good to remove oil-based cosmetics from your skin, and it does gently clean without stripping your skin — in fact, it adds oil to your skin. It’s kind of like a very thin cold cream. I suspect if you’re a fan of the oil-cleansing-method this might work very well for you. It’s soap-free, and supposedly is made of white grape and apple juices, aloe vera, plant oils and vitamin antioxidants. Despite being oil-based, it does wash off my face pretty well — there’s only a mild oil residue, it doesn’t leave my face disgustingly greasy. (I suspect this might not work very well for people with really oily skin.)

Juice Organics Antioxidant Serum seemed just okay to me — supposedly it has age-defying antioxidants in a base of organic grape and orange juices to “revitalize, help smooth fine lines and help firm for radiant, ageless skin.” I didn’t see much effect, but I did find it a nice intermediate step before putting on the moisturizer — though I do think any sort of toner would have worked just as well.

Juice Organics SPF 30 Light Tint Moisturizer, however, is an excellent moisturizer with an organic white grape and pomegranate juice base with 10% titanium dioxide SPF. I really, really like this stuff — I think the idea of using tinted titanium dioxide as a sunscreen is a great idea — all the other mineral based sunscreens I’ve tried out have been awful because they use these brilliantly white minerals as the sunscreen without tinting them. I mean, I’m pretty pale but I still end up with bright white chalky streaks of titanium dioxide on my face from those things. Titanium dioxide is frequently used as a cosmetics base in nonsunscreen applications because it is brilliantly white — why anyone would think a mineral based sunscreen made of it is a good idea I do not know. So I think tinting titanium dioxide is a great idea — you get the skin cancer reducing benefits of titanium dioxide, without looking like you’ve smeared chalk all over your face. It’s the best of both worlds! (Plus titanium dioxide is a very long-lasting sunscreen, which is nice — unlike avobenzone which is only effective for 2 hours after you put it on, titanium dioxide is supposedly a good sunblock until you wash it off. If you hate to frequently reapply sunscreens, titanium dioxide is definitely a good way to go.)

I did have a little trouble putting on the SPF 30 Light Tint Moisturizer at first — I put it on way, way too thickly and ended up with an orange cast to my face. But now I spread it on very, very thinly and it blends right into my skintone and gives me a very slight evening out of my complexion (yay!). It doesn’t provide as flawless a finish as Earth’s Beauty powder foundation, but it’s a lot less trouble — with powder foundations I always manage to get powder all over the place, and I have to double check to make sure I’ve evenly powdered — this stuff is much less messy than powder, it blends in much more easily, and best of all, it does have a pretty matte effect once it goes on (though not as matte as a powder). (It’s very sheer — this would not be good for anyone who wants a lot of coverage.)

Overall, I really liked the way the cleanser, serum and moisturizer worked together. The pump packaging is very cute, easy to use, impossible to break a nail on, and pumps out exactly the amount of product you need. The scents were a little difficult for me to get used to at first — the cleanser and the serum smell kind of like fermented citrus fruit. But now I kind of like the way they smell — they smell kind of bright and citrusy to me now, and I’ve grown to like the lack of chemical fragrance. The moisturizer smells kind of like a mixture of kitchen spices to me — maybe allspice or cloves? That also took some getting used to but now I like it. I also appreciate the fact that all of these products are fairly concentrated — you really don’t need very much of any of them so I think they will last a long time.

However, I have had distinctly different experiences with these three products in the summer and winter. I started using the kit last November when it was still pretty warm here in the Bay Area, and the oil-based cleanser made my skin oily and the mineral-based spf moisturizer did not sink into my skin but stayed in a thin insulating layer on top of it — especially because I was applying it WAY too thickly — and the combination made me break out a little bit and become really sweaty every morning. So I was not happy, and was thinking of giving Juice Organics 3/5 stars at best. But I kept using the products and the weather suddenly became a lot colder, and miraculously my skin stopped breaking out and becoming sweaty and started looking great. Then I remembered that my skin usually goes from having oily patches and breakouts in the summer to having too-dry-skin in the winter, and realized that this oil-based insulating routine was great in the winter but bad in the summer.

Since then, I’ve ordered full size bottles of all the products and have been using them ever since — I like them a lot, I think they’re nicely moisturizing and skin-cancer-preventing and am ranking them at 4/5 stars. I actually think they are 5/5 star products for winter, but definitely not good products for summer unless you have really dry skin and do not live in a humid climate, so I’m compromising with 4/5 stars. In the summer I plan to switch back to the alba botanic sea moss line.

The Juice Organics trial and travel kit is available for $9.99 on Amazon (free shipping if you have Amazon prime). The regular sized cleanser, serum and moisturizer are available from the Juice Organics online store.

Juice Organics Nourishing Cleanser. Ingredients: Organic juices of vitis vinifera (white grape) juice, pyrus malus (apple) juice & aloe barbadensis leaf juice, organic botanical extracts of calendula officinalis flower & matricaria chamomilla flower, glycerin, organic plant oils of carthamus tinctorius (safflower) seed & helianthus annuus (sunflower), caprylic/capric triglyceride, cetearyl alcohol, cetearyl glucoside, sorbitan stearate, tocopheryl acetate & tocopherol (vitamin E), ascorbyl palmitate (vitamin C), tetrasodium edta, panthenol (vitamin B5), allantoin, phenoxyethanol, xanthan gum, benzyl alcohol, potassium sorbate, citric acid, limonene, linalool, citrus aurantium (sweet orange) & citrus aurantium (orange blossom) pure essential oils.

Vitamin Antioxidant Serum. Ingredients: Organic juices of vitis vinifera (white grape) juice, citrus aurantium dulcis (orange) juice & aloe barbadensis leaf juice, glycerin, organic essential fatty acids of linum usitatissimum (linseed) seed & borago officinali (borage) seed, thioctic acid (alpha-lipoic acid), ubiquinone (coenzyme Q10), magnesium ascorbyl phosphate (vitamin C), dipeptide-2, palmitoyl tetrapeptide-3, tocopheryl acetate & tocopherol (vitamin E), sclerotium gum, phenoxyethanol, sodium hydroxide, benzyl alcohol, disodium edta, hyaluronic acid, potassium sorbate, amyris balsamifera & litsea cubeba (may chang) pure essential oils.

Juice Organics SPF 30 Light Tint Moisturize. Active Ingredient: Titanium dioxide 10% Inactive Ingredients: Pyrus malus (apple) juice,* vitis vinifera (white grape) juice,* punica granatum (pomegranate) juice* and aloe barbadensis leaf juice,* glycerin, cucumis sativus (cucumber) fruit extract,* camellia sinensis (green tea) leaf extract,* glyceryl stearate, helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed oil,* cetyl alcohol, stearyl alcohol, caprylic/capric triglyceride, tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E), sodium PCA, hyaluronic acid, panthenol (vitamin B5), allantoin, cera alba (beeswax),* magnesium ascorbyl phosphate (vitamin C), mica & iron oxides (mineral tints), benzyl alcohol, phenoxyethanol, ethylhexylglycerin, limonene, linalool, farnesol, geraniol, citrus aurantium (petitgrain) and citrus reticulata (mandarin) pure essential oils.
* certified organic by a USDA approved agency.