VANYA Skin Care

FDA and Skin Care Product Labels

The FDA does not regulate marketing tactics and words used in ads that cosmetic companies claim.

When companies claim “organic”, with cosmetics and skin care products this does not mean that is is fully organic or natural. There is no such thing as 100% organic or natural. If there is even 1% of chemicals, it is clearly not 100% organic.

I read an interesting thread the other day in a skincare related forum I visit, and the writer was discussing fake organic products and genuine organic products.

Here’s my take.

100% Organic and Natural Products?

According to the German Organic Food Industry Association (BOLW), the highest organic ingredients contained in any existing cosmetic product is 70%. The remaining 30% consists of some form of chemicals including preservatives such as paraben or methylparaben etc.

Bogus advertisements from cosmetic companies mislead consumers. This is why many people believe that there are cosmetic products that are completely organic but this is a myth.

Organic Food and Non Organic Food

Let’s compare organic food and regular food.

Organic food will obviously perish much quicker than non-organic foods because organic food do not contain any preservatives or chemicals or sprays or anything else to increase shelf life. This logic would also hold true for cosmetic products. If there really were 100% organic products, I doubt they would last more than 1-2 weeks at most. Imagine having to purchase your cosmetics every few weeks. What a financial nightmare (unless you can afford to do so).

What to Look For

So as a consumer, rather than searching for that non existent 100% organic product, it’s more important to look at the concentration of organic ingredients compared to chemicals.

e.g. Fragrance is hazardous right? But a product I use contains 0.1% of fragrance in the entire product. Now is this really dangerous or unfriendly? No I don’t believe so. How did I know it was 0.1%? I contacted the manufacturer directly and kept asking around

One last thing on preservatives. Instead of paraben, many companies are now replacing it with an alternative that is safer. But it is still a preservative nonetheless.

Having said all that, if you are still afraid or have doubts about using any form of product that contains a chemical, the only true alternative I can think of are homemade skin care solutions, which last for about 4-6 days. But even still, if the fruits or veggies you use in your ingredient is not organic, again it isn’t a 100% organic homemade product right?

The search for the holy grail continues.. lol