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Doesn't citric acid simply belong to lemons, lemonade and freshness? In theory, yes: citric acid occurs naturally in citrus fruits. But in practice, the citric acid you come across in food, cleaning products and cosmetics almost never comes from real lemons.
That might sound strange – or even a little alarming – but once you understand how it works, it actually makes perfect sense.
Citric acid is used enormously widely:
as an antioxidant (to keep products fresh for longer)
as a pH regulator (to make a formula more acidic or more stable)
in food (such as soft drinks, sweets, sauces)
in cosmetics (such as creams, serums, scrubs)
The quantities needed for this are so large that it would be completely unrealistic to press all of that from lemons. You would need entire, enormous orchards for just one factory. That isn't practical, isn't efficient and usually isn't sustainable either.
Instead of using all those lemons, chemists looked at: what is citric acid actually at a molecular level?
They analysed the molecule and then set about recreating it. The result:
synthetically made citric acid has exactly the same molecule as the citric acid from a lemon
there is no difference in the building blocks: it is identical one-to-one
We call this nature-identical: it doesn't come directly from a plant or fruit, but the molecule is completely identical to the natural molecule.
The fact that the molecule is recreated in a factory doesn't automatically mean it's bad. In this case:
is it bad? No.
is it unnatural? Molecularly speaking, no either.
Your skin doesn't “see” an origin label. Your skin reacts to the shape and properties of the molecule. If that is identical to what occurs in nature, it will feel that way to your skin too.
That's why a nature-identical ingredient often simply feels like a natural ingredient: the structure is the same, and so is the interaction with your skin.
A brief overview:
Natural: extracted directly from nature (e.g. cold-pressed oil, hydrolat)
Synthetic: made in a factory, may resemble nature but need not
Nature-identical: made synthetically, but molecularly identical to what occurs in nature
In practice, citric acid almost always falls into that third category: nature-identical.
Important to bear in mind:
Not everything that is natural is automatically gentle.
There is a persistent myth that “natural” is always soft, safe and kind to your skin. The reality is more nuanced:
some natural substances can be quite intense
some nature-identical or synthetic substances can in fact be very gentle
Whether an ingredient is good for your skin depends on concentration, skin type, combination with other ingredients and the overall formulation – not just on the little label “natural” or “synthetic”.
When you read an ingredient list and you see citric acid (citroenzuur):
then know that it is almost always made synthetically
realise that the molecule is nature-identical to the one from lemons
remember that your skin recognises it as the same molecule
So it's useful not to be automatically alarmed by the word "synthetic", but to look: does this resemble what nature itself makes, and in what context is it being used?
Would you like to do more with ingredients yourself and better understand what's in your products? Then it helps enormously to get to know the basics of ingredients and labels step by step – exactly what we at Natural Heroes like to make accessible.
