“A lot of retailers have said to us that they have to take baby steps. But when your house is on fire, do you take baby steps to the door or do you run like hell?” Kaye asks. “I feel like maybe we’re reaching a tipping point and we have a good shot at cleaning things up, but it’s not going to happen with baby steps. It’s time to make those giant strides!”
Kaye’s Actionable Advice: “People have to understand that it is indeed their responsibility to read the labels, question ingredients, and make more informed choices instead of just blind ones.”
The Company: John Masters Organics
What’s Organic? Products contain 70 percent to 100 percent organic ingredients certified by Ecocert, Quality Assurance International, California Certified Organic Farmers, or Organic Crop Improvement Association.
John Masters agrees the beauty industry has become much more complex and confusing for consumers than it was when he founded his company more than a decade ago.
“There are a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon by putting ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ on their bottles,” Masters says. “I recently went into stores and saw ‘organic’ on the front of some bottles, yet when I turned them round I didn’t see much organic anything in them. In the United States, it’s very difficult for consumers to decipher what’s going on because, unfortunately, the regulations here are not very strict.”
Masters’ products, which are sold in twenty-five countries, follow the more stringent European Union (EU) directives that required his company to provide documentation—such as material safety data sheets and a certificate of analysis—for every raw material in the products.
“Everything we say is organic had to be proven,” Masters says. “In Europe, we had to have studies done that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and we went through stringent challenge tests.”
Despite following these strict European standards, John Masters Organics’ products do not bear the USDA organic seal.
“The USDA standard follows the food standard, which is fine, but sometimes it’s not applicable to beauty products,” Masters explains. “There are some raw materials that are extremely beneficial, like certain forms of Vitamin A, but they’re not approved to be put in food products, so you couldn’t put that in your beauty product, if you wanted the USDA seal. It can be very tricky.”
Masters’ Actionable Advice: “Turn around the bottle and look for certified organic ingredients. You don’t want petrochemicals, like propylene glycol. You don’t want parabens, nothing ending in -mea, -dea or -tea, and no copolymers, which are a plastic. You don’t want artificial color or artificial fragrance either; the scent should come from essential oils.
