The buzz is all about green.
“Natural” is a word that’s everywhere nowadays. If you care, you are “green.” Big corporations, seemingly joining the bandwagon, sink zillions into public relations campaigns and wave banners of world-saving crusades. Their websites warble to us, ““We’re responsible; we forward what is good and natural,” their products look the part, packaged in colors and materials that evoke “natural.” Labels suggest that what’s inside is what a person would think of as natural and safe.
Is it true? When you look beyond the expensively crafted facade, what IS inside those containers? Little even vaguely reminiscent of nature or bearing its life. You may find that image and actuality do not in truth match.
There’s a push, too, for use of Latin names for ingredients. The “logic” is, people anywhere can read this since the words are the same in any country; they’re in Latin. Have you spoken or read any Latin lately? The actual effect is more screen: just about no one can understand what these ingredients are, even if they are natural. So why make us have to write these in an ancient language only very few scholars recognize? The Latin terms make the most natural of substances appear as if it were unnatural!
Read labels and look up the words in cosmetic dictionaries. It all becomes clear. Most of what is in there (except for stuff like formaldehyde produced by mixing some of the chemicals together) is on labels.
Health Food Stores, Even Handcrafters May Deceive
Take refuge in a health food store? Inside its hallowed aisles you’d expect to find only natural and safe personal care products. Were it only so. The truth is that a number of products there are mostly natural; a very few are completely natural. To my puzzlement, I’ve also found that lots of so-called “handcrafters” use the usual, cheap junk along with some natural ingredients. The beach is crowded with stylish, tanned surfers riding the big, exciting waves of consumer desire for natural.
When companies, huge to small, dress in natural and responsible garb and still the world is a toxic mess, still illness darkens the lives and takes the lives of ever more people, something is amiss. We may be less healthy, not more, or scarcely more healthy for all the so-called natural products.
Are we all dancing frantically at a masquerade ball where toxic garbage is cleverly posing as “natural”? Is the scarcely natural ingredient or two in that homey-looking bottle just specks in an otherwise chemical soup?
The ACTUAL green movement is wonderful and so vitally necessary. But if corporate dollars were supporting the truly green — the organic farmers and those who protect the planet’s natural vital resources upon which all life does depend — wouldn’t our world be improving? Wouldn’t it be getting greener? Wouldn’t people be feeling more chipper?
Something You Can DO About It
What can you do about this?
1) It may be tough at first to tell the bogus from the genuine, but it is not that hard. Read and bother to clear up labels as above. After you’ve done some of this, you’ll be able to tell at a glance.
2) Decide to insist on the real thing, seek those rare companies out, support them and tell others. Maybe it’ll become less rare.
3) Send your dollars as votes for honesty and responsibility in the marketplace. Money keeps the good enterprises around and expanding.
Standards: What We Mean by Natural
When we say that our organic skin care and other products are natural, we mean that in the most common sense of the word. What is natural to you? a mountain stream? Sunshine, wild animals, plants, that sort of thing? Yes, those are natural. We think of a chemical cooked up by scientists as not natural.
As a note, “natural” in terms of personal care product formulation is not just “existing in nature.” Snake venom, belladonna and dangerous viruses are part of nature and have their place in the complex ecology of life but I wouldn’t want them in my personal care products, would you? So “from nature” is not the only requisite.
Safe, natural ingredients and those coming from nature with the least interference as in corruption or degradation from the full, living state. From plant rather than animal in virtually any instance. As closely as possible, in whole, ripened, healthiest condition. Unrefined, cold-pressed plants, low heat-dried whole herbs. Steam-distilled rather than solvent-extracted essential oils. We need the botanical goodness to be as alive and complete as possible.
There is a vast difference between unmessed-with plants and ingredients derived from plants but extracted with solvents and by other contaminating and life-stripping methods. To give you an idea of how repellant this is, think of soaking your olives in paint thinner rather than vinegar.
These ingredients perform like (and do some of the same damage as) certain chemical counterparts whose safety has been loudly questioned. So, plant-derived synthetics are about as bad as something that never saw a stalk or root in its existence.
Merchandizing, quite a game. Notice the pleasant implications of the word, “refined” — seems to mean “brought back to being fine,” or “elegant,” doesn’t it? When you learn about all the steps of it, you don’t want any such near your body. Bleccch. It’s tainted with noxious solvents; stripped of its essence to make its color acceptable (= almost no color) and to get rid of its scent. This really is a shame. Those things taken out were the heart and personality of the plant! When you see the word, “refined,” think “plant corpse.”
So, we reject all that might give us the financial edge big corporations enjoy if it means compromising health and integrity. No petrochemicals, hormone-mimicking or otherwise questionable preservatives, artificial “fragrances,” fillers, sodium lauryl sulfate, propylene glycol, TEA, methyl paraben, FD & C colors — we’re free of all that.
Plants do a better job anyway. We respond most immediately, as parts of the same natural world, to things of nature. Plants work with our bodies, not against or despite them. They are lovely to smell and feel inimitably good. They cost more as they take more time and more care — they grow — but isn’t this worth the bother?
The Reward of Taking Action
Everything one does to uplift, enhance, improve self and others buys one more health, happiness and personal fulfillment. We hope that you are striving to live an uncompromised Life, to share good things with others and to have the courage to tell it like it is. It’s worth the effort.
Thanks for being there and caring!
Evan