Beauty Industry Creates Standards for Organic Labeling
by Francine Hardaway on March 7th, 2008
The beauty industry has formed a new industry association to back standards for eco-friendly products.
What does this mean for you, the consumer? It means the industry took a survey last summer and 83 percent of the respondents thought there needed to be some kind of standard for products labeled “natural.” So now 30 major brands and a host of smaller ones are willing to agree on a standard for what can be labeled natural or organic.
Among the initial members of the coalition are companies as different as Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, Perfect Organics, and Oh, Oh Organics. All these companies are interested in owning eco-friendly brands now that the consumer is pushing for them.
The Organic and Sustainability Industry Standards (OASIS) seal:
- provides assurance to the consumer of credible value for Organic and Sustainable claims
- tells buyers throughout the world that a product has met the highest international standard for the Health and Beauty industry.
The beauty industry must do this, because Americans use an average of 10 personal care products a day. Most of them end up in the waste stream as we take our baths and showers. In the future, as water becomes more scarce, more and more government entities are going to turn to recycling wastewater.
Thus, toxic chemicals could turn up in our drinking water if they aren’t eliminated from our body products. Not to mention the damage they do to our bodies before we wash them off.
The European standard for product labeling, ECOCERT, stipulates that an organic product contain at least 10 percent certified organic contents. The OASIS standard will demand that products with its seal contain 85 percent certifiable organic content, and this will increase as green chemistry evolves.
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