It is the constituents found in herbs or plants that give them their main actions and make herbal skin care effective. Here is a brief introduction to an important plant constituent, the sugars.
Sugars
Everyone is familiar with this. It is commercially extracted from sugar cane and sugar beet. There are small amounts of sugars in almost all leaves as they are manufactured in this part of the plant. Sugars are also stored in the roots of many herbs such as liquorice whose botanical name Glycyrrhiza means “sugar root”.
Some sugar related plant constituents called glycosides have very useful and wide ranging actions. A glycoside has a sugar part joined to different part that is usually responsible for its therapeutic action. The non-sugar parts vary enormously in structure and action. One example is lily of the valley. This plant has several glycosides that help to strengthen the heart muscle. It is actually the non-sugar parts that do this job, but the sugar parts help their initial absorption into the body and heart muscle. Glycosides are used for two reasons in natural skincare, they help get other vital ingredients absorbed into the skin and they also are used to hydrate the skin by binding onto water molecules.
