This week has been Organic Beauty Week and beauty products made by brands who have been certified by organisations like the Soil Association have been promoted.


I've found natural products are undoubtably better for my skin and it's great that they get mainstream press one week a year but it's important to remember that these certifications are still limited and have their own pitfalls you wouldn't expect.



To be certified, brands have to meet a certain criteria for how much of the product is organically grown and then that ingredient also has its own certification to go through to certify it as organic. This is great and gives a reliable standard for consumers that we know can be trusted which is more than the spurious "natural" and "made with organic ingredients" gives us.

It's important to be aware of what this means for certain ingredients though. The main example is water. Water isn't organic and can never be certified organic. I'd still say its pretty natural and not full of anything we'd want to avoid.

The Soil Association's Health and Beauty Standards guidelines on product composition are:-

50.6.2
You may label your product as ‘organic’ if more than 95% of the ingredients are organically produced. You must calculate the organic percentage as follows:
For a formulator, this can be a nightmare if you want the product to be certified. If your product is water plus other ingredients, if you don't hit the 95%, your product isn't "organic" enough anymore which to me seems quite frankly ridiculous. To get round it, formulations use things like apple juice as a stand in for water as its relatively cheap and it can be certified organic so the product gets its certification.

To me, this seems absolutely pointless that someone had to grow apples, transport them, juice them etc just so it can be used in place of water. To me, this is a complete waste of food that could be eaten and the earth's resources.

Mineral make up also suffers the same fate. Minerals also can't be organic so unless you add more things that can be to make up the percentages, your mineral make up can't be classified as "organic". Again, theres nothing wrong with a high proportion of minerals and I cannot see a real justification for needing to add in more organic ingredients just to get a certificate if the product itself doesn't need it. Again, I see this as a complete waste of resources.


This is why it's so important to know and understand what it is you are buying, learn what these ingredients are and what these certifications mean and really think about what it means in the whole, rather than just my face cream is organic so its fine.

Its so important that you do your research on these issues and come up with your own informed opinion as to what you do and don't want to achieve, even if it goes against the grain like my ignoring organic certifications in favour of actually reading a label.

Thankfully, from 31st December 2016 this is changing and the relevant standards will be the COSMOS standards. These state that:-

By exception, for rinse-off products, non-emulsified aqueous products, and products with at least 80% minerals or ingredients of mineral origin, at least 10% of the total product must be organic. 

This is definitely a step in the right direction and a more common sense approach with these ingredients!