What do you expect from your Natural and Organic Cosmetics product?

If you are like most people, you want it without synthetic ingredients like fragrances, colors and preservatives. And you certainly don’t want it to have petroleum derived products or silicone oils.

These are important pillars. But did you know that they are not enough to make a product as natural as possible?

This is why:

Some products cannot be made without chemically transforming some natural ingredients.

A shampoo is a good example. It cannot clean without surfactants. And there is no ‘natural’ way of making them: you need to chemically modify a natural ingredient to obtain a surfactant.

This has an important consequence: if you cannot exclude such substances, you must limit their use to a strict minimum.

Under the NATRUE-Label we call such ingredients ‘Derived Natural Substances’. We chose this name to indicate that they can never be entirely synthetic: they must be derived from a natural substance.

We only allow them when natural ingredients (by themselves) cannot achieve the required function - like the surfactants in our shampoo example. We also have strict rules on how they can be derived: only some specified chemical reactions are allowed.

But it takes more

Quantities matter: just because you have to include a Derived Natural Substance doesn’t mean a product should be full of it.

That is why it is not enough to define how natural ingredients may be modified, you must also define how many of these modified ingredients may be used.

We solved this by our double-guarantee: every product must contain more than a defined percentage of natural ingredients, and may only contain a limited percentage of Derived Natural Substances.

These strict thresholds are higher or lower depending on the type of product.

To take just one example, a shampoo needs more Derived Natural Substances than a body cream and that is why they have different rules.

This is how we achieve the NATRUE guarantee: every product is as natural as it can be.

I also recommend you to read this article by Rita Stiens. It shows what can happen without such a guarantee.