Green Lipstick?Making sense of natural bath-and-beauty products.
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009, at 10:38 AM ETWhen I go to the drugstore these days, it seems like every other bottle of shampoo and tube of lipstick is being marketed as "natural" and "organic." Do any of those labels actually mean anything?
The Green Lantern feels your pain—she often finds herself standing glassy-eyed in the soap aisle, seduced and confused by the pretty pictures of exotic fruits. We can all be forgiven for being hypnotized by the hype: After all, beauty firms spend, on average, a whopping 20 percent to 25 percent of their revenue on advertising and promotion, compared with just 2 percent or 3 percent on research and development. The industry knows that green is hot these days, and it hasn't been shy about exploiting it—between 2006 and 2007, the number of product launches that came with "natural" claims increased by 79 percent, while the number professing to be "organic" jumped 173 percent. As one savvy hair-care exec put it, the words "natural and environmental" used to mean "dried twigs and bark and herbs"; now they mean "juicy, alive and luscious."
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponSo how do you make sense of all the buzzwords? First of all, don't expect phrases like botanical or natural or plant-derived—or the Lantern's head-scratching favorite, nature-inspired—to mean anything. Though the FDA has the authority to reprimand personal-care product-makers whose labels make false and misleading claims, it's never imposed standard definitions for these green-sounding terms. So a body cleanser with only trace elements of cucumber extract can legally call itself a "natural" product, as can a fully synthetic product engineered to smell like an apple orchard.
The word organic, on the other hand, can sometimes have real meaning—though the precise nature of that meaning depends on who's using the term. The USDA began certifying organic bath-and-beauty products in 2005. (You can recognize these products by the circular "USDA Organic" logo on the packaging.) The government uses the same standards it applies to produce (PDF)—i.e., produced without conventional pesticides and by companies that put an emphasis on soil-and-water conservation—and offers three levels of certification: "100 percent organic" (meaning that a product contains only organically produced ingredients), "organic" (at least 95 percent organic ingredients), and "made with organic ingredients" (at least 70 percent organic ingredients).
There are at least four other new programs that purport to quantify the "naturalness" of American personal-care products. Two are already in use: the Natural Products Association standard (a green leaf logo) and Whole Foods' in-house Premium Body Care label (a blue-and-green sprout sticker). Two more labels specifically dedicated to organic personal-care products, the NSF 305 logo and the OASIS seal, will start appearing on products later this year.
Don't assume that OASIS' "organic" means the same thing as the USDA's—the definitions of each term vary from program to program. There's also no way to stop a rogue greenwasher from forgoing the stickers and logos altogether and calling its 90-percent-synthetic body spray "organic" just the same. (The USDA does regulate the term organic when it comes to food labeling, but it monitors only the specific phrase USDA Organic when it comes to personal-care products.) Inversely, you shouldn't assume that the lack of one of these five labels means a product has no green cred whatsoever. Since these certification programs are so new, and since there's still a lot of confusion over what their standards actually mean, many companies haven't yet decided how to get certified. We can only hope that the United States eventually takes a cue from Europe, where a number of certification bodies have recently joined up in an effort to harmonize organic labeling on cosmetics.
Slate Editors Spent All Day Arguing About Cancer Screenings and Health Care Rationing
What a Meal of Beef Stomach and Duck Throats Taught Me About the New China
The Blind Side: Illegal Use of Sandra Bullock
Train, Plane, or Automobile? What's the Greenest Way to Travel for Thanksgiving?
The Two Craziest Men in Hollywood Teamed Up To Make This Movie
Did Easy Rider's Predictions About America Come True?
Remarks from the Fray
Nina Rastogi levels a serious, and uninformed, charge in her column that the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is "overstating the science." It seems that Nina might have fallen prey to the same deliberate disinformation from the chemical industry that has us all wondering how much we can trust products on the market, and the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us. The strategy, first developed by the tobacco industry and now employing some of the same people who worked on that, is to exploit the doubt that accompanies all scientific inquiry. The billion-dollar PR machine to mislead the public is so rampant that there is a Congressional investigation into one communications firm, the Weinberg Group, which was hired by the American Chemistry Council to possibly mislead the public about bisphenol A. Meanwhile, the Personal Care Products Council spends millions lobbying against regulations and trying to convince the public that it's OK for personal care products – even baby products – to contain known hazardous substances such as formaldehyde, 1,4 dioxane or lead. American companies can do better than this, and they need to do better. The science on these substances is solid, and consumers do not want to buy baby shampoo tainted with carcinogens, or lipstick laced with lead. The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics encourages consumers to check out our Web site, as well as all sources you can find, to learn more about the health risks of certain chemicals used in personal care products, and the availability of safer alternatives.--- Stacy Malkan, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, Author of "Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry" (New Society, 2007).
-- stacymalkan
I'm glad you brought up the "doubt that accompanies all scientific inquiry," and the fact that commercial interests often exploit that uncertainty to squelch efforts at sensible regulation. Anyone who wants to know more about that topic should indeed click through your link, and read the excellent book by David Michaels. (Warning: It ain't beach reading.)
But I do think it's important to point out that the manufacturers aren't the only ones who can exploit doubt and uncertainty. Activist organizations are just as adept at what has now become a standard rhetorical gesture in the public sphere. Take the folks at the Discovery Institute, for example, who are using "Intelligent Design" theory to cast doubt upon the theory of evolution. There's no discernible commerical interest lurking behind their Christian evangelical message. Nevertheless, they have methodically emphasized every piddling inconsistency in the fossil record, and all the necessary tweaks and recalibrations we've made to Darwin's original idea.
Similarly, those dedicated greens with an evangelical bent have begun to cast skepticism and doubt from the ramparts of consumer activism: Your campaign's database of cosmetic products is just as willing to play the uncertainty game as the billion-dollar PR machine you despise.
To take just one small example: Punch into your database the name of almost any conventional shampoo, and you'll turn up a frightening "hazard" rating, and the insinuation that anyone who uses this product may be subjecting themselves to "neurotoxins," "organ system toxicity," and cancer. But a closer look reveals that most horrifying ingredient in that shampoo—the one that earns a red-highlighted, super-deadly hazard score of 8—is "fragrance". What makes "fragrance" so dangerous? Its actual chemical constituents are unknown, and some users may be allergic to it.
It's fine to point out that our labeling laws are insufficient-- and that companies can include any number of chemicals under a generic term like "fragrance." But I'd call it grossly alarmist and irresponsible to let consumers believe that the fragrance in Head and Shoulders shampoo is likely to cause organ failure, brain death, or cancer. Have there been any documented cases of death by dandruff shampoo? If Head and Shoulders is making people sick, what kind of mortality rates are we talking about? If one in 10,000 users develops some kind of mild allergy, does that make the shampoo a "highly-hazardous" product? Or is Head and Shoulders no more a "toxin" than peanuts, milk, cochineal, or any other all-natural, organic product that produces adverse reactions in certain, unfortunate users?
I bring this up only to point out that doubt cuts both ways—and activist groups have proven extremely adept at manipulating doubt to promote their own broad, policy goals. I'm sure Procter & Gamble would like us to take the "data gap" on their ingredients as evidence that everything is perfectly safe. But your Website invites us to see the same uncertainty as evidence that everything is harmful and toxic. That's the message of the bright-red "hazard scores," I'm afraid. And the frightened, naval-gazing mentality that it creates—sociologist Andrew Szasz has called it "reverse quarantine"—strikes me as regressive and counterproductive when it comes to public health.
-- engber
Slate editor Daniel Engber
(To read more or reply, click here.)