A couple of months ago I was interviewed by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle for an article about the significance of obtaining the USDA Organic certification for manufacturers of personal care products (and thus the ability to use their official green seal on your packaging and labels). My company was the only company in the article who does not have the certification, so I was interviewed to provide a counter perspective as to the validity of the seal for that purpose.
You can read the article here but I’m not entirely sure she grasped what I was trying to convey about why a company might not want to pursue the certification. It’s true that the green USDA Organic seal is the most widely recognized one by consumers, and so it probably holds the most weight in the marketplace at the present time.
The problem with it is that the certification criteria were designed strictly for food and agriculture. Personal care products never entered regulators’ minds when they were setting the standards for this seal. So aside from the hefty annual fees associated with getting certification and the ongoing costs of maintaining it, there is a real question in my mind as to the value of this seal and the expectation it’s setting for consumers who rely on it.
Don’t get me wrong here. My motto is (and always has been) ‘if it’s not safe to put in your mouth it’s probably not safe to put on your skin.’ That means the vast majority of ingredients in the product should be safe enough for ingestion. It doesn’t mean you can eat the product! Making skin care products with fruits and other food products is all well and good but these products have no shelf life outside of a refrigerator and a very limited one inside the fridge.
Clearly that’s not a practical basis for an industry-wide standard!
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