Is “Natural” Skin Care Good Enough?

Natural skin care labelling currently doesn’t help much with our decision to go “organic”. Unless you read closely and scrutinise the lists of ingredients, which would involve knowing which are “goodies” or “baddies” (there’s thousands of possibilities), or carrying a list, most consumers rely on either known and trusted branding or well worded product names and slogans. Slogans such as “all natural”, “100% natural”, “made with natural ingredients” or “made with organic essential oil”, and so on.

The trouble is, just because it’s advertised as being “natural” doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s organic, or that the stated “organic essential oils” are the only ingredients! In fact, anyone can produce a product containing only about 1% of a natural ingredient and the rest of the product synthetic, and potentially harmful, and call it natural or even organic!

Natural” means made by nature, not synthetic, but to be fully “organic” a product needs to be chemical free and that means no pesticides, herbicides, artificial fragrances, artificial colours, artificial preservatives, or harmful additives are used, either whilst being grown, or in the factory during manufacture.

The answer to “is natural good enough?” is to look for products that clearly state ‘Certified Organic’ and display an accredited ‘Certified Organic’ logo. To receive organic certification would require the product to have at least 95% certified organic content, with no harmful synthetic ingredients at all.