Greenwashing: How To Spot The B.S. Behind A Lot Of Natural Skin Care

Natural skin care: it’s trendy, it’s cute, people want nature all over their face. But some of it is total B.S. Here’s everything you need to know about greenwashing, and what you should look for when it comes to natural skin care.

Wait, what’s greenwashing?

Let’s take it back to the early 2000s. The internet is here in full force. Paris Hilton is telling us to buy Juicy sweatsuits and pull our G-strings up over our waistbands #ThatsHot. People are starting to think that they should eat organic food to avoid all the nastiness in pesticides. Around this time, there’s an awareness shift. More and more people are like, “Oh shit, what the hell is in this product I’m putting on my skin?” Suddenly, loads and loads of “natural” skin care companies are popping up faster than pimples on a pre-pubescent face. Some of them really are clean. And some of them...are not.

This is the heyday of greenwashing, friends. Greenwashing is the practice of using marketing and tricky disinformation techniques to make a product look healthy, safe, and environmentally friendly when it’s really just the same old shit in a bottle. One of the biggest ways that skin care companies greenwash is through the word “natural.” But guess what? That shit doesn’t actually have to be natural at all for them to say it is.

Ok, but shouldn’t the FDA have something to say about that?

Sorry, but no. The FDA does not regulate the word natural at all. According to their website, “FDA has not defined the term ‘natural’ and has not established a regulatory definition for this term in cosmetic labeling.” So basically, peeps can say that things are natural with wild abandon, and then sneak all kinds of not-natural ingredients inside their formulas. There are no consequences for companies that choose to greenwash, other than angry customers calling them out.

Is natural really better?

That’s a great question and the answer is complicated. The truth is that there are plenty of substances found in nature that will straight up kill you. Arsenic, cyanide, mercury! All natural and all poisonous AF. There are also a lot of synthetic ingredients that are TOTALLY safe for you to have in and on your body. Synthetic vitamins are a great example. They’re made in a lab, but they’re molecularly identical to what’s found in nature. And they’re good for you! The point is, a product with natural ingredients isn’t necessarily a better product on its own; it’s about using ingredients that are clean and proven safe, and avoiding ingredients that are toxic or questionable.

So, what should I even be looking for?

We get it: this shit is kind of overwhelming. The best place to start is to make sure that all the products you use are free of parabens, phthalates, sulfates, and synthetic fragrances. Look for companies that specifically say that they don’t use these ingredients--like No B.S.!

No B.S. was founded because there’s a lot of bullsh*t in the skin care industry- so much that we named our company after it! When you stick with us, you can feel certain that we’ll always keep it real with you. We even have an ingredient page dedicated to showcasing the ingredients we use!

Check out our collection of skin care made with ingredients that are actually good for you, and see the No B.S. difference yourself!