As my quest for eternal youth increases in urgency, so too do the question marks over my head in the skin care aisle. With only a rudimentary grasp of biology, chemistry, and PR-puffery, I just don’t feel qualified to discern hope in a jar from hype in a jar.
I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing if my moisturizer is cruelty-free (as opposed to say, jam-packed with cruelty) or if my husband’s shaving cream is organic, but otherwise I’m clueless as to which buzzwords mean a product will simply wash my face versus wash my face without causing a rash.
I decided I needed a reeducation in some of the grooming industry’s more standard buzzwords—the ones I thought I already understood—so that I could make better choices for myself and my family. Hopefully now I’m better qualified to read between the lines, and even better, to erase a few frown lines while I’m at it.
Organic
This is perhaps the biggest buzzword in the industry right now, but there’s actually a lot of confusion around labeling. It’s easy to go “green” in the face with frustration at the seemingly interchangeable use of labels like botanical, natural, all natural, organic, and certified organic, but if we really care about what we’re slapping on our bodies, it will do us all good to know the difference between these terms:
Certified organic: Contains extracts from plants grown according to farming principles verified by a government or independent organization.
Organic: Contains extracts from plants grown without chemicals or pesticides.
Botanical or natural: Contains plant extracts, but is not necessarily organic.
Hypoallergenic
Hypoallergenic is a scientific-sounding word seen on anything from food to face cream to dog breeds and I wonder if I’m the only one who thought it meant “allergy-free.” I looked for its definition in a few medical dictionaries to find that it has no medical definition—the term was actually invented for a cosmetics campaign in the 50s. Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes hypoallergenic as “having little likelihood of causing an allergic response” and it doesn’t hurt the product makers to perpetuate this allergy-free myth. Although some manufacturers do clinical testing, others may simply omit perfumes or other common problem-causing ingredients. There are no regulatory standards on what constitutes hypoallergenic, so the bottom line is that people can still be allergic to hypoallergenic products.
