The cosmetic and personal care marketers of the world continue to frustrate the scientist in me. They take perfectly good products, craft meaningless stories around them and use blatant lies to dupe the public into buying. When did it become OK to make completely bogus product claims?
The myth of Chemical Free
What has ruffled this half of the Beauty Brains feathers so violently? This story about the Xenna Corporation and their new hair relaxers.
According to the news release, Xenna is launching a new “chemical free” relaxer.
That’s right, it’s “chemical free.”
Which leaves me to wonder, “If it’s chemical free, what’s in there?”
Everything in the known universe that’s made up of matter is a chemical. Water is a chemical (H2O). Air is a chemical (mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc). In fact, every bit of material that makes up all human beings is a chemical. We’re walking blobs of proteins, polysaccharides, amino acids, enzymes and more.
The only things that are not chemicals are things like magnetism, light, electricity, radio waves, empty space, and maybe dark matter & energy. Unless Xenna or other companies peddling similar claims has figured out how to harness the powers of these natural forces for cosmetic purposes, they just aren’t telling the truth.
Are they really selling empty product containers?
Between the Chemical Free Lines
The reason a claim like “chemical free” really bothers me is because it plays into and fosters a fear of chemicals. The implication is that chemicals are bad and evil and should be avoided at all costs.
In the cosmetic and personal care world, it leads customers to pay more money for products that don’t work better (they’re usually worse) and aren’t any safer. People get a false sense that they’re doing something good when it’s usually just foolish.
Even worse, this mentality leads people to make dangerous decisions about their health and well-being. They avoid drugs proven to be effective in treating disease. They use untested, unsafe herbal supplements believing it’s better for them. But worst of all, they stop getting their kids immunized for fear of the chemicals in the vaccines. Uniformed politicians blame vaccines for autism. These people are reacting to unfounded fears and making all of society unsafe from debilitating diseases.
The Beauty Brains bottom line
It’s fine for companies to sell products that use novel technologies. But you should avoid any company that would lie to you about the lack of chemicals in their products. Chemical-free cosmetics don’t exist.
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Excellent information! It’s sad that some corporations resort to scare tactics to sell products. Thank you for helping us all to realize that chemicals are not the enemy and get back to enjoying our skincare and cosmetics!
As someone who works in the chemical industry, I wholeheartedly agree. This post is pretty tame compared to one I would write.
Without chemistry and the chemical industry, we wouldn’t have much.
Ugh! I’m forever correcting people on that. I try to do it tactfully, but it’s one of the few things that I rarely can just smile and nod to. I’ve come across more than a few pages on “chemical free” cleaning and had to say something (baking soda fanatic that I am).
A search of “chemical free” on Google is disheartening.
This is basic science. Why don’t people know this? Heck, the truth is only a dictionary or Wikipedia search away?
I’m going to have to go make some t-shirts and bumper stickers now.
It all comes down to people being allergic to thinking. They’ll do anything to avoid acknowledging that you just have to think case by case and learn as you go.
Now, I’m the first person to be a bit skeptical of synthetic materials, since the “natural” stuff has usually been around for a few thousand years and has been beta-tested extensively as a result. But even that doesn’t mean anything, or else tobacco would be a fantastic all-natural product.
People just want to turn their brains off — “chemical” means bad. “All-natural” means dopey hippie stuff. They just don’t like the idea that they have to approach everything, turn it around and look closely at it, and make up their minds case by case.
I guess that through the years (I’m 55) I’ve come to expect this from marketers and reporters. Marketers want to use any angle they can get to sell their products, even if it’s misleading. Partly I think it’s because they don’t understand the science behind product and partly I think it’s the buyer beware mentality coming into play – everything is fair game as long as it’s not a blatant (to the average Joan) misrepresentation of the product.
I’m one of the people who would pick up a bottle of something labled “chemical-free” to give it a second look. Not because I’m stupid, but because I read the implied message: BAD chemical free. (Whether or not it is actually less toxic is a separate issue)
It just never occured to me that this is false advertising. Now that that thought HAS occured to me, I’m more likely to avoid products like these in the future!
I agree with you…mostly. There is definitly a trend towards total BS in marketing, where products claim to be natural, chemical free, etc., and it is a total scam. However, there are real advantages to sticking with products that help promote a more responsible use of our resources, which is a seperate issues.
Casey,
You’re right, there may be some advantages to using products that promote more responsible use of our resources. It’s not such a simple idea however. By using pesticides and chemical fertilizers you can make a plot of land produce much more usable food than one done using organic methods. Should we discourage organic farming just because it’s less efficient in its use of land?
Dear Beauty Brains,
I love your site and am frequently awed by your patience with some folks’ comments and discussion style.
All that said, I would like to point out that your own rebuttal to Casey uses a somewhat inappropriate analogy and a fairly loose definition of “efficient.” So, I don’t think Casey’s point is clearly refuted.
Using less processed chemicals (at least that’s what I think Casey meant by “products that help promote…”) to create similarly effective personal products is not the same as using fewer chemicals to promote growth and reduce agricultural predators. Yes, I get where you were going with the analogy – chemicals can improve quality of life – but these are fairly different ways to do that. The analogies are also differ in the relation to survival. While I love having soft hair and accenting my facial features with makeup, for example, I would totally trade those for a plate of food if I was hungry! So, your last question “Should we…” is really magnifying the implications of using less processed chemical in personal products.
Also, you are only looking at efficiency in a short-term way. While it may be more efficient for a few, or even 10 years, to use lots of fertilizers and pesticides, the long term efficiency of this strategy is questionable. At 20 years out, the organically managed field is likely to have produced more overall product, of better quality, than the heavily chemically managed field. These differences in cumulative production will likely increase as more time passed.
Thanks for having a space to have these conversations!
Meade
Meade,
Thanks for your comments and kind words.
I see your point about my “rebuttal” and the analogy not quite fitting. I was not actually trying to refute what she said, I was just trying to point out was that sometimes people think of things in too simplistic a way and it leads to unintended consequences. If we have to use up farm land to make cosmetics instead of using that land to grow food for people, it seems a worse use of our natural resources.
Organic farming may (or may not) provide a better quality product, but it creates less product, at least the way things are now, which makes it a less efficient use of land. As far as the comparison between longterm organic farming versus traditional farming, there is no evidence to support the notion that over 20 years an organic plot produces more food. It might, but maybe it won’t. Right now agriculture is moving to more organic farming because they can charge more for it. Unfortunately, that just means less food to feed the starving people of the world (IMO).
It may be better to use renewable resources but maybe not. At present recycling anything except aluminum is pretty much a waste of time and resources. I wish the science said differently but it currently takes less energy to make a new plastic or glass bottle than it does to recycle an old one.
You know, I do think you may be reading just a little to far into this, when a company says chemical free, they usually mean…… the harmful chemicals such as the chemicals that are generally in relaxers that fry your hair… I use a “chemical” free relaxer and its just made of natural and ORGANIC things.
If you want to find out the truth about which chemicals are in your products google cosmetic database and find a database setup by the environmental working group that is an independent nonprofit researching ingredients in products.
The Environmental Working Group is hardly an independent group. They also make conclusions based on political opinion and not on science.
For example, they rate every ingredient labeled “Fragrance” as an 8 (high hazard). This is simplistic and implies every chemical labeled Fragrance is the same. It’s not. This is sloppy science.
It’s also sloppy science because they allow practically anyone to add data to the database without independent verification.
There are hundreds of chemicals that have been banned from food and beauty products world wide due to the harm they can cause to people’s health. Oddly enough many of those same chemicals are still allowed in the so called civilized USA. Our FDA has said that it is true that they do not regulate the beauty industry like they do many other areas such as medicine. Consquently studies (by doctors and scientists, not just people who may seem crazy and have no real proof to the way they live) have found that many of these chemicals cause skin irritation, increased chances of heart disease and many cancers. Propylene Glycol is a chemical that is found in your deoderant, food, makeup and anti-freeze. It is a checmical that has to be disposed of in bio-hazardous waste sites and the workers that work with it have to wear special suits, yet we are ingesting and smearing our skin with this chemical hundreds of times throughout the day.
That is what these companies such as the chemical free relaxers are trying to say, although yes, capitalizing on, that there are chemicals that we could choose that would be better than others. In cases such as beauty products, just because it makes your skin or hair shine doesn’t mean it is healthy for you.
Just in case someone would like a bit of what the FDA has said (and I have many more quotes like this if you’d like more)From the FDA handbook:
“Cosmetics containing as ingredients amines or amino derivatives, particularly di- or triethanolamine, may form nitrosamines if they also contain an ingredient which acts as a nitrosating agent as, for example, 2-bromo-2-nitropropane-1,3-diol (Bronopol, Onyxide 500), 5-bromo-5-nitro-1,3-dioxane (Bronidox C) or tris(hydroxymethyl)nitromethane (Tris Nitro), or if they are contaminated with a nitrosating agent, e.g., sodium nitrite. Amines and their derivatives are mostly present in creams, cream lotions, hair shampoos and cream hair conditioners. The nitrosation may occur during manufacture or during product storage.
“Many nitrosamines have been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals. They have also been shown to penetrate the skin. Nitrosamine contamination of cosmetics became an issue in early 1977. In a study of 29 cosmetic creams and lotions, N-Nitrosodiethanolamine (NDELA) was determined in 27.
“FDA has urged cosmetic manufacturers to voluntarily remove from cosmetic any ingredient which may combine with others to form NDELA and to conduct additional testing to determine why cosmetics become contaminated with NDELA.”
The FDA urges…but does not restrict many chemicals or reactions that are common and that they themselves know may be harmful. But really folks…we’re not lab rats, right? So if they got cancer we probably won’t.
There are also chemicals banned in the US for safety concerns that countries around the world have no problems with.
Issues of whether certain chemicals are safe or not are never black and white. There is a bunch of politicking going on so decisions are not based strictly on science.
Incidentally, I’ve seen people work with Propylene Glycol. I’ve worked with it myself. There is no requirement that you have to wear a special suit to work with the stuff. That’s just chemophobic nonsense.
While I agree that saying something is “chemical free” is nonsense, I do sympathize with those who’d prefer to use cosmetic ingredients that are more recognizably familiar. I think there is value in preferring ingredients that have a long history of use by humans over those which do not. I don’t know what you would call that. When it comes to food ingredients, we use the terms whole foods and organic. For beauty products, what terms could we use?
Umm….If you think eating food full of chemicals is better than eating organic food you are nuts. I guess more chemical laden food is better than a lower quantity of organic food? How is that logical at all? That seems to me a fallacious argument.
Quality over quantity….Having farms yield more food does not justify the use of pesticides and chemicals in our food supply with the addendum that we can feed more people so it is ok. I remember reading an article where milk from the US was given to a third world country and the people that drank the milk began to develop secondary sex characteristics (i.e. breast tissue) from the hormones in the milk. I think if we went back to a more traditional way of growing our food would be better and healthier for everyone.
And there ARE cosmetics that have few chemical ingredients in them. So while some companies might abuse and mislead with their labeling, there are cosmetics that have none of the big chemical offenders (like for instances the parabenss or sodium lauryl sulfate ) and use more natural ingredients (earths beauty, misessnece, real purity, and others).
Hey everyone,
Another great LOCAL organic skincare company that is certififed is MADE FROM EARTH. I have been using their products for the last 6 months – and now stopped!! Because my skin has naturally improved itself and I have seen a real decline in the amount of wrinkles on the side of my eyes. I would recommend the “VITAMIN ENHANCED FACE FIRMING SERUM”. This is the cream I only used for 6 months and now stopped because it naturally has improved my owns skins ability to heal itsefl and become firmer.
As a body lotion, I use the HONEY HONEY cream. Smells like honey. Definitely check them out and they are way better priced than most organic skin care lines. . .the website is madefromearth.com
Many years ago, Calvin Trillin, commenting on the “chemical-free” craze mentioned the concept of “products with no ingredients.”
I think a major piece of information is being over looked and some people should maybe take a step back and realize that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts. First off, I completely agree chemical free products do not exist. I am not disputing facts or claims. I am in agreement. This issue is very comparable to the debate on the “Theory of Evolution”. A theory to a scientist is very much fact, however a theory to a regular Jane Smith for some reason, just means a crazy hypothesis or some idea that may or may not be true. So chemical free to the scientifically inclined always produces a good chuckle around the room followed by some rolling eyes, but to the lesser apes, chemical free is defined as: free (or near free/less) of inorganic compounds. Now if you were to label a product ‘free of inorganic compounds’ no one would understand, so companies go with what is understood or implied, in general, not verbatim. I whole heartedly believe people should take an active approach in learning about what they do or do not put in their body and how that said body works but I am also very privileged to have gone to university and understand many people do not share the same privilege and many not have the capacity for the scientific end of things. So as irritating as it is to see ridiculous statements everywhere, they are not geared towards the scientific community and as educated people we really should be able to understand that.
True enough but everyone (in the US anyway) has to take some science in grade school and have been exposed to the concept of a “chemical”.
I’m not sure that your definition of “chemical free” really covers it either. Inorganic compounds are those that do not contain Hydrocarbons. So, by your definition, a product that contains an ingredient like Mineral Oil which contains hydrocarbons and thus organic would be “chemical free”. So would Petrolatum and most other petroleum derived ingredients.
The definition must be something else.
How about “Xeno-Estrogen-Chemical Free” ?
or “Carcinogen Free”? Still too “above” the “lower apes”? How about, “Cancer-Causing-Chemical-Free”? People don’t even realize that their skin is an organ, or understand how porous and absorbant it is. I love going to the city and watch people get all uptight about someone smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk, and then proceed to get into their SUV and drive all over the city and freeway with their windows down. HeHe:) We are such ignorant yet judgemental lower apes aren’t we?
how much carbon emmissions are used in the productionv of the so called beauty products from relaxers to make up. how much does it cost for mother earth to keep up with ever changing beauty formula’s?
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