Anyone interested in purchasing organic skin care products certainly has no shortage of choices to work with. You can buy an organic facial recovery oil, an organic moisturizer, and even organic exfoliation products and rejuvenating creams. But what are you actually purchasing? That is the real question, and one that should be important to consumers.
One of the big problems with the organic label is that it can be terribly misleading. There are so few regulations that it is easy to label a product as being organic when that’s not necessarily the case. It’s really up to the consumer to know what she is buying by looking into ingredients more thoroughly than just glancing at a label.
May 7 through 13 was hailed as Organic Beauty and Wellbeing Week by the UK’s Soil Association charity. Although the campaign was not as widely known here in the U.S., skincare companies and advocates of organic skin care products still worked together to get the word out about what constitutes truly organic.
Consumers Lack Confidence
If you question the importance of helping people better understand what organic truly is, consider a surprising statistic from a May 1 Pebble magazine article: some 76% of consumers admit to feeling misled by organic claims on beauty product packaging.
That is a staggering number by any stretch. It tells us that the vast majority of consumers who seek to buy organic beauty products aren’t necessarily confident about what they are buying. That’s not a good thing.
Poethique, a Massachusetts company that focuses wholly on all-natural skin care, believes it’s absolutely necessary that consumers know what they are buying. Part of their philosophy is transparency in all things, especially the ingredients they use.
If a customer were to go to their website to look up facial recovery oil, for example, the product page would include a full list of ingredients as well as an explanation of how and why those ingredients work. Not every skincare company does that.
Claims Are Not Always Trustworthy
Pebble magazine says that claims of being organic are not necessarily trustworthy because manufacturers can create products with just 1% organic ingredients and still call them organic. Pebble contributor Georgina Wilson-Powell says the answer is to look for certified organic products.
The Soil Association is one of only a few certifying agencies in the world for organic skincare products. The organization has been certifying beauty products since 2002. Their accreditation is based on the European Cosmetics Organic Standard.
It should be pointed out that a lack of certification does not necessarily mean a product is not organic. Again, it really boils down to the ingredients. If consumers carefully read ingredient lists – be they on packaging or an online product page – and then investigate what those ingredients actually are, they can determine pretty easily if something is truly organic or not.
Know What You’re Using
The lesson in all of this is to make an effort to know exactly what you’re using. Whether you are buying what you believe is an organic facial recovery oil or an all-natural deep cleanser, don’t just assume a product is organic because there is a colorful banner on the packaging that says so.
Read the ingredient list carefully. Go online and do a little research to find out what the active and inactive ingredients are. You might even be so bold as to send the company behind the product an email to ask, straight out, the amount of organic ingredients by volume. The more you know, the more informed your decisions will be.
