Read the Label: A Final Word
The Ecologist’s year-long Read the Label campaign comes to an end this month. Pat Thomas looks back on its impact and looks forward to a healthier and more beautiful 2007
The interest in and demand for natural and organic beauty products has grown tremendously in the past few years. A recent survey in the US, for instance, found that around 90 per cent of women want to use natural and organic bodycare products.
Unfortunately, fewer than half of these women could actually define what ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ meant. That’s not surprising. A product need only contain one per cent of natural ingredients to be called ‘natural’.
A label can claim to have organic ingredients, yet still contain a range of synthetic industrial chemicals that are not good for your skin and have been linked with longer-term health problems. When words like ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ and concepts like ‘harmless luxury’ are co-opted as sales devices, they can lose their meaning. Our Read the Label (RTL) campaign has tried to bring meaning back to these concepts by making readers aware of what is in the products they buy.
To us at The Ecologist it is apparent that when cosmetic manufacturers use palm oil in its products they are as guilty as junk food manufacturers of furthering the destruction of the forest habitats of orang-utans and tigers. When manufacturers rely on petrochemicals to produce cheap chemicals for beauty products they are as responsible for the depletion of a non-renewable resource as a major oil company. Consider also: studies show that your skin can absorb up to 60 per cent of anything you put on it. Some estimates suggest that women absorb around 2kg of chemicals through toiletries and cosmetics every year.
When you absorb something through your skin, it bypasses the body’s normal metabolic pathways – it doesn’t get broken down or neutralised. Thus, when manufacturers use carcinogens in products, they are as guilty of damaging human health as the operators of incinerators. By raising such issues, RTL has sparked off a wider dialogue between our readers and bodycare product manufacturers. This is not always welcomed.
Questions like ‘Is this safe?’, ‘Why aren’t you using a more natural ingredient?’ and ‘How can you call your product natural when it clearly isn’t?’ are often fobbed off with excuses and the attitude that such issues are too complicated for the average person to understand. Many of you have been frustrated by the answers you have received, such as: ‘All the ingredients we use are approved by the European cosmetic regulations’ – Tesco, or ‘Parabens are approved for use as a preservative across the globe’ – The Body Shop.
Almost every manufacturer has fallen back on the excuse that it is allowed, by law, to use certain known toxic ingredients.
As the market for natural bodycare gets larger and more sophisticated, it will become even more important that consumers read labels and scrutinise claims. We should all question the corporate schizophrenia that calls a product ‘natural’ yet continues to add toxic ingredients and bombard consumers with baseless claims of unnatural anti-ageing effects, and to rely on new and largely unproven ingredients to drive sales.
In addition, every time we see a claim for ingredients derived from, say, rainforest plants, we need to ask whether it is ethical to buy a product made from ingredients that have been shipped (or flown) halfway across the globe, grown in less-developed countries by small farmers who might be better off growing food for their families. We should also be much more demanding about truly recyclable (preferably glass) packaging for our natural cosmetics.
In this regard, 2007 could be an interesting year. Many supermarkets and high-end manufacturers are planning new ranges of luxury ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ bodycare products. Will these also make vacuous promises of temporary quick fixes? Will they be truly organic or just contain a few organic ingredients amongst a raft of carcinogens and neurotoxins? The answer depends in part on the people who buy these products, their willingness to speak up when they know they are being greenwashed, and their refusal to part with their hard-earned cash for products that do not meet a higher standard of safety and honesty.
We would like to thank all our readers who have taken part in this campaign and sent us copies of their letters to, and replies from, manufacturers. Although the campaign is ending, we hope you will never stop asking more of your bodycare products.
Sidebar: Read the Letters
Below are a few small representative samples of some of the letters we have received from manufacturers during the past few months, along with Pat’s replies.
‘The list of “bad” fragrance chemicals contains a large number of chemical names that are actually naturally present as constituents of the essential oils in the second “good” list. The 7th Amendment to the EU Cosmetics Directive states that there are 16 naturally occurring fragrance constituents that must be listed on the label because of their allergenic potential (a disputed point but nevertheless still the law). This means that, for example, any product that contains geranium essential oil must list geraniol on the ingredients list even though it is not added separately, but is merely present as a natural component of the essential oil.’ – Neal’s Yard
There is no doubt that the fragrance chemicals singled out by the EU’s Scientific Committee on Cosmetics and Non-Food Products (SCCNFP) are of concern for their allergenic potential. There is also no doubt that some are present in natural essential oils. The difference is that in the matrix of an essential oil there exist substances, some of which have been identified and some of which we have yet to identify, which act as cofactors to mitigate potential allergic reactions. These cofactors are not present when a substance, such as limonene, is extracted and used singly or when it is synthesised in the lab.
The SCCNFP guidelines were drawn up because of the high incidence of reported allergic reactions to these substances. Since 95 per cent of fragrances used in consumer products are synthetic in origin, it is safe to assume that these allergic reactions were largely due to the synthetic forms. It is the SCCNFP, not The Ecologist, that has refused to draw the distinction between natural and synthetic substances, though it seems clear that they are not identical.
The way labelling laws stand currently, there is no way for a consumer to tell which fragrances are ‘natural’ and which ones are not, unless the manufacturer volunteers this information or the consumer knows which ingredients to look for ((usually listed in their Latin names – see RTL Sep 2006). Otherwise it is reasonable to assume that if one sees these potential allergens listed on the label of a fragranced product, the fragrance is synthetic and the potential for an allergic reaction is increased.
‘I notice that the article suggests soap as an alternative to detergents, although it is certainly harsher to the skin than some surfactants, as well as being derived from tallow (taken from boiled animal carcases)…’ – King of Shaves
Changing the subject is a common tactic used by manufacturers when faced with criticisms of their products. The insinuation that soap is some kind of homogenous substance purely derived from boiled animal carcases is nonsense. Some soaps are made from surfactants and detergents derived from animal fat, but the popularity of this ingredient is waning in favour of vegetable-based detergents/surfactants. As for the irritation factor, it is not the soap but the rinsing or lack of it, which can cause skin irritation. Detergents are formulated to rinse more quickly in hard-water areas, as we said in the original article on detergents. In soft-water areas, soap and detergents perform equally well. The detergent sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS) is one of the harshest detergents there is – which is why scientists use it in skin irritation studies as a kind of benchmark. If the tested substance is less irritating to skin than SLS, it is considered safe.
‘The ingredients octyl methoxycinnamate (OMC) and homomethyl salicylate (HMS) have not been proven to have any estrogenic effects.’ – Neways
This is simply not true. Laboratory test have consistently shown that both of these chemicals have an oestrogenic effect. Neways also suggested that these chemicals are not well absorbed. But sunscreen formulations often contain penetration enhancers that are not used in tests of the pure chemicals and which can drive the ingredient deeper into the skin. In one 2004 human study reported in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, not only was OMC absorbed into the body during the two-week trial, but it had a more marked hormone-disrupting effect in men. Such excuses also obscure the fact that skin application is not the only way in which we absorb oestrogenic sunscreen chemicals. Once washed down the drain they get into the water supply, are not removed by water treatment procedures and can then be returned to us via our drinking water.
