You might be an advocate of “organic” products. You might only eat organic food, and endeavour to only use organic cosmetics. Where produce is concerned, an organic food is defined as food that is grown without pesticides. Where cosmetics are concerned there’s a problem, and the term “organic” has no hard and fast definition.
This means that any cosmetic company can use the organic label purely as a vehicle to market their products. So, regardless of where or how their skin care ingredients are sourced, they can use marketing strategies to suggest their product has organic qualities. OK, they have to be careful of the Trade Descriptions Act, but generally speaking the organic label is up to grabs.
People love organic. It conveys to them certain positive ideas, it associates products with nature, an idealised kind of nature as healer, a positive force, nearly supernatural. Of course the reality of nature is something different, nature can heal but it can also bring pestilence, destroy crops and spread terrible disease.
To counteract the negative force of nature, we use pesticides which keep crops clean and preserve natural harvests. Personal care products often use ingredients that, although natural, have been harvested with the use of pesticides. Does this make them bad products?
Probably not. In a cosmetic industry that sometimes likes to stretch the truth, it’s most important that skin care products work, and do what the marketers say they do.