There are many more safe cosmetic brands on the market compared to a decade ago. But label reading has not gotten any easier. Time to up your cosmetic ingredient listing translation skills.

“I just love this skincare line, and it’s natural!” How often do you hear this said these days? It is great that more and more people are interested in healthy products. But the sad reality is, many “green” products really aren’t all that healthy. The labels may say it is natural, it may have a few plant ingredients and the name may sound natural, but these things do not mean a product is safe.

That is what we are truly after here. Safe products. Forget natural, even organic. Think healthy, good for you cosmetics. And there is only one way to identify safe products for sure. Read the ingredient listings.

You’ve heard it before, it is important to know what is in your products. But are you often stumped by hard to decipher cosmetics ingredients? They can be difficult to read and some not so clean manufacturers even go out of their way to make harmful ingredients less identifiable. All caps, bold print, and no readily apparent listings are just some of the ways conventional brands make ID-ing nasty ingredients tougher.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can learn to read ingredient listings, simply and effectively. All you need is a few hot tips and one helpful crib sheet.

7 Steps to Reading Cosmetic Ingredients Listings Like a Pro

1. Like I said above, the terms on the front of a product label often mean very little. Reputable nontoxic brands mean what they say. But you will see everything from “Natural” to “Organic” to “Pure” on products that contain synthetic ingredients. Ignore the front of a product label and turn to the back (or the packaging) and look for an ingredient listing. No listing on the packaging or product? A brand website will sometimes carry ingredient listings. Still can’t find one? Consider it not worth your time and move on.

2. Speaking of ingredient listings on brand websites. Have you ever been searching products and notice all ingredient listings say “Key Ingredients”? Bet they are all healthy looking too, right? Many toxic brands who market themselves as clean will use this tactic to showcase the healthy ingredients they use. The problem is, they are not disclosing all ingredients, so we can’t be sure if it is safe or not. This is always a red flag to me and I assume they are using ingredients they don’t want us to know about.

3. When you do find an ingredient listing, it is important to know how to decode it. Ingredients are listed in order of concentration, from greatest to least. So say a product is aloe based (aloe making up the greatest portion of the product), aloe would be first on the ingredient listing. And so on.

4. Feel like you are reading Greek? Sometimes even natural ingredient names look chemical. Brands who follow the INCI (International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients) labeling standard are required to list ingredients using scientific names. For instance, Jojoba oil would be listed as “Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil”. This can make an ingredient listing look crazy long and hard to read. INCI also requires fragrance from essential oils be listed as “Fragrance” or “Parfum”, which both sound synthetic. Brands using essential oils for fragrance usually note this under the ingredient listing.

5. Of course, you are going to come across indecipherable ingredient names that are not healthy. Take a look at our 11 Toxic Cosmetic Ingredients to Avoid for help in identifying toxins. Bookmark for handy access while shopping.

6. We don’t always have time to peruse each and every label. When in a rush try this tip: Check the first five and last five ingredients on a listing. The first five make up most of the product, the last five are usually fragrance and preservatives. Not foolproof, but if these look clean, it is a fair bet that the product is safe.

7. Organically produced ingredients are healthier than the rest. But the most important first steps are to make sure a product is free from harmful ingredients. A product made with a few organic ingredients can still contain synthetics. Organic labeling for cosmetics is the same as for food: “100% Organic” means a product contains only organically produced ingredients, “Certified Organic” means the product is made of at least 95% organically produced ingredients, “Made with Organic Ingredients” means the product contains at least 70% organically produced ingredients. The remaining 5-30% is what you need to check out.

The long and short of ingredient listing reading is this: Don’t get fooled by natural or organic claims, know what you don’t want in your products, and do your own research. Your health will benefit from it.

Related on EcoSalon

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Organic? Natural? The Confusion of Reading Food Labels: Foodie Underground

6 Skincare Mistakes You May Be Making and How to Fix Them

Image of woman reading label via Shutterstock

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ColumnAre you confused by reading food labels? You are not alone.

In a sea of choices, reading food labels can be the thing that help to guide us in the right direction. Leading busy lives, we don’t always have the time to do all the research on everything we buy, so we look for certain indicators to help us get what we want. Some go for “organic” some go for “non-GMO.” Ultimately food labels should help us to know what we’re buying. Unfortunately, they don’t always serve that purpose.

According to a recent Consumer Reports study, around 60 percent of people look for the “natural” label when they grocery shop because they think that products labeled “natural” are better for them than those products without the label. In fact, 66 percent of Americans believe “natural” means a processed food has no artificial ingredients, pesticides, or genetically modified organisms. But the truth is, it doesn’t mean any of that.

There’s actually no FDA definition of “natural,” but “the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.” Which means you can essentially slap the word “natural” onto a whole lot of things. For example, when it comes to “natural flavors,” you can have “any number of (naturally derived) chemicals concocted to enhance the taste of your snack,” writes Grist. “They’re dreamed up, extracted, and blended by flavorists in labs to preserve what your food would have tasted like before it was processed, frozen, heated, pasteurized, or otherwise addled on the way to your grocery store.” Which is why you get things like Diet 7-Up boasting “100% natural flavors.”

A food marketing word that has come to carry no meaning, Consumer Reports actually launched a petition to ban the use of “natural” on food products.

What is a conscious food shopper to do? Simple. Buy real food.

Let’s go back to the FDA for help. According to the agency, “natural” is hard to define because, “From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth.”

Ah yes, there we have it, the one phrase that says it all: “food product.” A food product is not the same as real food. It is food that has been processed and made into something else. Some food products can be fairly harmless, a basic granola for example – as long as it’s not hyped up on tons of additives, and other things that are simply weird. Go-gurt anyone? As a rule of thumb, I am sure we can all agree that if a product comes in a flavor of “cool cotton candy” you can go ahead and assume that it’s not real food.

Which brings us to another one of the food labels that causes a lot of confusion: organic.

Organic is different, because it has guidelines and an entire certification process behind it. In a world where we’re ruled by industrial agriculture, organic is better than non-organic. But remember that there are plenty of small-scale farmers that can’t afford the certification, and like with anything, we shouldn’t let the organic label stop us from doing just a little thinking when we shop.

An organic banana is still a banana, and unless you live in the tropics, that banana had to travel a long way to get to you.

An organic apple from New Zealand individually wrapped in plastic, is still an apple from afar that’s protected by a single-use disposable wrapping.

Organic goji berries are still exotic superfoods that could easily be replaced with something more local.

The reality is, you don’t have to master the world of food labels to eat well, you just need to use common sense. Buying something that isn’t whole foods or grains? Turn that box or bag around and look at the ingredients list. If it’s full of a bunch of things you can’t pronounce, don’t buy it. The fewer the ingredients, the better.

We don’t need to overthink what we buy. In fact, the more we simplify what we buy, the better off we are. That means apples and not apple chips. Black beans and not bean dip. Sparkling water with a slice of fruit in it and not a soda boasting “100% natural flavors.” Plain yogurt with a spoonful of jam and not a Go-Gurt.

Don’t be fooled by a natural food label. Eat real food instead.

Related on EcoSalon

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Quinn Dombrowski

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