Natural

​From your feedback I have gotten more requests for more natural products. I wanted to talk about natural in terms of cosmetics, before I actually started posting about them.

The term "natural" you have heard thousands of times by now. One may say that comes from the earth or one may say that it ingredients that are not man made. Which is one of my points, there is no legal definition of natural. What does natural even mean? It mean whatever a company decides it to be. This is the companies formulation philosophy. I have experienced this form my formulation work. One brand wants to use natural ingredients that a certain demographic can pronounce where other clients trust my judgment and are okay with having a different marketing approach. So I formulate with all types of products. Natural, organic, fear-mongered ingredients, and many other. I just love formulating cosmetics. So personally, I do not care the naturalness of the ingredient. It is more of my readers and clients that want specific customers. Which I want to clarify, is not the problem, it is that people also then spread misinformation about it in order to get a sale.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation on this topic so I wanted to share information that I have learned over the years.
I also want to mention that when I was getting into making my own cosmetics is was because I wanted to make natural cosmetics. So I used to believe all the misinformation. It is really easy to get sucked up in it and then just confirm our fears. So I would appreciate an open-mind. 


Natural has no legal definition. Any brand can have their own definition of natural. This can be really confusing to people. As you can sort of understand the idea. The reality is that what one company sees as natural is not what another company agrees with. That is eventually want clean beauty has become. Now companies are trying to guilt other companies for their bad ingredients. All of this without looking into the science and just further confusing consumers.


Natural Fallacy
Is the idea that because it is natural it is safe. This is not reality. Poison Ivy, Arsenic, and Covid-19 are all natural but they are all have a negative impact on humans. With everything going on and nature trying to kill us, I thought that clean bueaty would die down.


Most of the time natural marketing is green washing. These brand will tend to promote their naturalness as being better for the planet. The reality is that these natural ingredients are resource heavy. For example, essential oils, it requires a lot of material for a small yield.



How Natural Effects Cosmetic Formulations:

• Worse Quality
• Worse Stability
• Increase Price
• Greater variability

Concluding Thoughts:
So at the end day, I want you to make an I formed discission. I acknowledged that the industry has gone to more natural products, so to go away from that is hard. In addition, it requires expertise to know and informing your consumers can be a very challenging. With all that said, you can chose what you want to do and what is right for your brand.