Why refrigeration is key for organic, raw and all-natural beauty products

Natural beauty is more than the sum of a few drops of the hottest new ingredient. The real stuff—the good stuff—is about freshness; using products designed with active ingredients within a particular timespan so that the ingredients retain all of their freshness and efficiency.

Consider it as you would your food: The fresher the product, the more beneficial the results. However, food obviously differs from cosmetic concoctions—it’s unlikely you’d be eating the same banana over six months. Products containing organic, raw, and pure ingredients need to last longer than the average head of lettuce, but to keep the formulation free of chemicals, it often means removing many mainstream preservatives and replacing them with natural ones. It also means a shorter use-by date. Hence, refrigeration.

There are benefits to storing products in a cool and dark place. Most all products are meant to be away from heat, light, and sun. There’s also personal preference: having a cooled toner on hand for refreshing during hot days is a sure way to beat the heat, and nail polish kept in the fridge stops it from discolouring or separating. Additionally, if your place lacks central air, or tends toward the boiling point on sunny or humid days, refrigeration ensures your products are safe from any fluctuations in temperature.

Sure, your standard kitchen refrigerator can get the job done. But we think a tiny, cosmetic-specific fridge is a much cuter—and compact—way to go. The Odacité Mini Cosmetic Fridge ($150, odacite.com) does just that: it keeps active and raw ingredients at their freshest (around 12-15 degrees celsius) while looking completely at home on your vanity. It’s a fridge so small it could fit into a bar fridge. (Which could fit into a regular fridge—the Russian matryoshka doll of refrigeration!)

It’s worth noting that natural products are safe to use without refrigeration, and it’s not necessary to store all natural products in a perfectly well designed tiny beauty fridge. It’s simply on option for controlling the environment in which the product spends most of it’s time. As always, be sure to make note of when organic and all-natural products are opened, and use within the recommended date—whether you store them in a tiny fridge or not.

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