How can one avoid the wild assertions of many cosmetics manufacturers and the allergy-inducing effects of many organic products?
In brief :
– Taking a product that is straight out of a laboratory and made up of extremely toxic chemicals for the skin is a really bad idea. The products to avoid are those that contain: Parabens, Mineral Oil, Paraffin, Petrolatum, Sodium laurel – lauryl sulfate (SLS) – sodium laureth sulfate (SLES), Acrylamide, Phenol carbolic acid, Dioxane and Toluene. These different ingredients are linked to many complications that are not good for the skin nor for human health. Unfortunately they make up around 90% of cosmetic products on the market. You should avoid them!
– Completely organic preservatives are not neutral for human skin and up to a one in four gets an allergic reaction. It seems safer to use tried and tested neutral products from the chemical industry to find the best possible balance between natural products and the potential of modern technology. There are difficulties involved with attempting a completely organic product associated with the stability and neutrality of the creams. Here is an opportunity to use the best modern technology and the latest techniques and integrate the best from the organic world.
These days, the cosmetics market is saturated. The beauty industry proposes either organic products affiliated or approved by a number of institutions and porting a variety of labels or traditional products concentrated around various brands.
In other words there is a hole in the market! There is an opportunity between these two main offerings – organic or mainstream chemical – to offer the best of both worlds and to integrate the very latest scientific and technical knowledge in the package.
The biggest brands within the field of organic cosmetics have focused all their marketing and sales effort on the natural origin of their primary ingredients of their products and the fact that do not use any animal products (neither do we) nor anything from the mainstream chemical industry (here we use a few known tried and tested neutral ingredients). These brands have drawn special attention to the difficulty evaluating the nefarious effects of many traditional chemical agents in mainstream products on our skin.
If we follow their advice, then we should only use organic products as that is the only way to avoid the bad side-effects of traditional cosmetics. The problem is more complex than this. Ever since the emergence of organic products on the market over ten years ago, a real-life clinical trial of a very meaningful scale has been underway, it is the general public, and we have seen that many people become more of less sensitive and allergic to these products.
It seems that one of the main problems with organic products is the type of preservatives that are used. Of course organic products do not use parabens but these are replaced by potassium sorbate or potassium benzoate, both of which have been found to trigger allergic reactions in many people. Worse still, there a number of raw materials that have received an approved “organic label” that means they can be used in organic products although these raw materials are in fact drawn from petro-chemical synthesis.
We should keep in mind that an organic product may contain a certain proportion of ingredients that are made during petro-chemical synthesis and that at its root the organic movement was an attempt to move away from practices that were not aligned with life. This journey we fully believe in and share. We wish to provide the opportunity of giving you the best natural products that are drawn the best raw materials out there and are assembled the very best technology and practice from the cosmetic industry.
Take for example the opportunity to avoid parabens. We avoid parabens but use sensible chemical synthesis alternatives that are technically safe in clinical studies rather than known organic alternatives which are not.
When it comes to releasing new products from the traditional cosmetics industry, many of their products contain derivatives of the petro-chemical industry that we know we should avoid: Parabens, Mineral Oil, Paraffin, Petrolatum, Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), sodium laureth sulfate (SLES), Acrylamide, Phenol carbolic acid, Dioxane and Toluene. This list is made of ingredients now known to have side-effects on our skin or on human-health after many years of use.
Further, we note that the great majority of new product launches from both organic and mainstream cosmetic brands present no real innovation on the formulas already on the market and are in fact a rehashing of old products to try to make them further cover the costs of now outdated research and development from an old launch.