Here’s an interesting product that I’m filing under my favorite topic: “Do beauty companies think we’re stupid?”
The ingredients they tell us about…
It’s a body wash under Colgate’s Soft Soap line. According to the front of the package, it features crushed Coconut and Jojoba extracts in a creamy body wash base. As you can tell from the picture it’s a nice enough looking product. It’s a nice creamy beige color and you can see the little scrubby bits inside. What do you think those are? Probably the “crushed coconut” that they proudly mention on label, right? Wrong.
…and the ingredients that really work.
Take a look at the ingredients on the back and you’ll see that it indeed contains coconut extract but it’s coconut oil. That certainly won’t give you little brown scrubby bits that we can see in the package. So what are those? We see elsewhere in the ingredient list that apricot seed powder is included in this product. So that’s what those little scrubbing particles are.
Now to be honest it doesn’t matter to me if I’m scrubbing my body with apricot seeds or coconut husks as long as I like the way the product works, that it leaves my skin feeling nice, and that it smells good. But would it have killed Colgate to say on the front label “with Coconut oil and Apricot seeds?” Or maybe they thought the word “seeds” might make us think it will scratch our skin? Well if that’s the case, shouldn’t we have known that? Now I grant you in the big scheme of things this is a pretty minor deception. Still if we’re going to hold cosmetic companies responsible for respecting our intelligence we have to start somewhere!
Image credit: http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6130/5992837346_f653e6f707.jpg
What do YOU think? Is Mid Brain off on another rant or do label “deceptions” like this annoy you too? Leave a comment and share your thoughts with the rest of the Beauty Brains community.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
The front of the pkg. says ‘crushed coconut’ which definitely leads you to think it has actual crushed coconut in it.
I hate it when they are missleading — sometimes it appears it’s on purpose, and other times it’s because whoever does the bottle advertising has no concept of what the product in the bottle is or is supposed to do.
It’s worse when the missleading information is in huge type face, and when you turn the bottle around the actual ingredients are in print so small only an ant can read it.
If it’s definite deception, I don’t want anything to do with the product. They don’t have my interests at heart. If it’s inadvertent and clumsy, I don’t want to have anything to do with the product because the makers are idiots and don’t know what they are doing and it could be harmful to me as well.
@Poppie: You don’t pull any punches! lol.
I hate this kinda thing. I like that you guys know what’s what and show us.
I am really frustrated when something sounds like it’s going to have some cool ingredient and really it’s a dupe.
I don’t want anything to do with tricks, and on this topic I can vote with my money by not buying it.
Unfortunately, the cosmetic industry is so filled with lies and outrageous claims about what products are and what they can do, I don’t know if they’ll ever stop. The truth is always in the ingredients, as long as they’re honest about them, but your average consumer cannot read an ingredient list and know what it means.
Can you imagine if they stopped all the lies and were honest about their products? “New from Lancome! A truly mediocre serum that contains a the new Peptide Reformer Complex 47, which is really nothing more than a mix of some slip agents and fragrance! It contains no ingredients proven to anything to your skin! It also has a high level of denatured alcohol and is in a jar. Not only will the alcohol damage the skin you have, the beneficial ingredients will degrade from light and oxygen exposure!!!”