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What’s Behind the Natural Beauty Movement?
The beauty and cosmetics industry is full of buzzwords that can be confusing if you don’t know exactly what they mean. For instance, the term “clean” may make you think that a particular product doesn’t contain any chemical ingredients. In reality, a clean product can contain a chemical ingredient, provided it isn’t harmful or toxic.
Natural beauty involves sourcing product ingredients from nature. However, just because a product has been sourced from nature doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been completely adulterated by the time it hits your favorite lip color.
The term “natural” isn’t regulated by any agency in the U.S., which essentially gives every company their own creative license to define that term as they want to, which is pretty unnerving.
Why aren’t “natural” products defined and regulated? Possibly because government agencies just haven’t caught up with the trend toward more natural products.
Globally, the natural beauty and personal care products movement is increasing exponentially. Informed consumers are getting picky about what goes into the products they use, and we’re proving it with our wallets.
Who started the natural beauty movement and how is it being sustained? Good questions.
As a key player in the world of natural beauty products, The Detox Market has followed the trends and watched the movement unfold for a long time.
Here’s what you need to know about what drives the natural beauty movement, why we need natural beauty in the first place, and how to define natural beauty standards.
What is Driving the Natural Beauty Movement?
Call it consumer “wokeness.” At some point in the last decade, consumers began to seriously question the ingredients in their products. Maybe it was the increase in occurrences of cancers. Maybe it was a trend in reproductive issues. Maybe it was just that we wanted to know what dihydroxyacetone actually was.
The more informed consumers have become, the more we have begun to demand that the ingredients in our products are:
- Transparent. We want to know what the ingredient is and where it comes from.
- Essential. If it’s in a product, we want to know why.
- Performing. Consumers want ingredients that are effective and deliver on their promises.
We can also thank social media platforms for increasing awareness of the need for safer, more natural beauty products. There are numerous accounts on these platforms dedicated to uncovering unsafe ingredients in products, and promoting safer alternatives.
The consumer demand for safer ingredients has led to ingredient testing, and much of this testing has revealed what we had begun to expect: the ingredients in our cosmetic and beauty products are affecting us.
With a seriously underregulated cosmetics industry, it can be scary to think of the ingredients in our products that could be harming us. In fact, it’s even led to some politicians lobbying for change. In 2019 the Personal Care Products Safety Act was introduced to Congress to update regulations on personal care products and cosmetics which haven’t been updated in 80 years.
Unfortunately, this bill has little chance of being enacted, which leaves consumers to be their own advocates in terms of selecting products that are safe.
Thankfully, you can rely on The Detox Market to do the hard work for you. We’ve developed some of the strictest product safety guidelines in the industry.
Why Do We Need Natural Beauty?
The simple answer? Because we’re getting sick without it.
Ingredients in our products matter, and there’s increasing evidence that certain ingredients aren’t just unnecessary, they’re harmful.
While other countries seem to be taking note of this fact, here in the U.S. we’re a little late to the game. In fact, the FDA has currently banned just eleven ingredients from cosmetics and beauty products.
Thankfully, many companies have stepped up to the plate and taken the matter of cosmetic safety into their own hands, ensuring consumers can get access to safe, natural beauty products that don’t contain ingredients linked to health issues. The problem for the consumer, then, is sifting through the hundreds of available products to find which ones are safest, and which are most effective. That’s where The Detox Market saw a problem that needed solving.
No one has time to try to decipher ingredient labels, or determine whether a particular brand’s manufacturing practices are sound.
We saw a need for providing products to consumers that they could trust. When you visit our marketplace, you can trust that the products we offer adhere to our standards. We take the guesswork out of it.
Curious about our natural beauty standards? We’re completely transparent.
What Are Natural Beauty Standards?
When we founded The Detox Market, we knew we had to be specific not only about what we did not want in our products, but also about what we did.
As such, we created our standards to encompass both.
Our Ingredient Standards
What goes into our products is just as important as what we keep out. As such, we only allow purposeful ingredients that are as close to their natural state as possible. An ingredient must be safe, non-toxic, and effective to be included in our products.
We ban ingredients that cause harm. We define harm in these eight categories:
- Carcinogens
- Reproductive harm
- Neurotoxicity
- Environmental harm
- Organ toxicity/irritation
- DNA/cell damage
- Allergen
- Endocrine disruption
If an ingredient links to one of these eight markers, you won’t find it in a product offered by The Detox Market.
Exceptional Performance
Natural doesn’t mean simple or untested, and it shouldn’t mean you get a product that doesn’t do what it claims it will. Regardless of what your product does or doesn’t contain, it absolutely has to be effective or there’s no point in having it.
Our team tests each product we offer, so we can give you our guarantee that the product works and is effective.
Plenty of natural products work, but we search for the ones that are standouts.
Cruelty-Free Formulas
We hold our brands to strict cruelty-free standards. No part of the product can involve an animal from start to finish.
We believe it’s our duty to protect not only the environment and our bodies, but also other living creatures.
Our goal is to ensure our consumers can place their trust in the integrity of our products and how they’re produced, tested, created, and manufactured.
These are pretty tight standards, and as such, not many products will fit the bill. That’s okay with us. We’re really only interested in offering products that go above and beyond the status quo.
We want our products to outperform any other product you would try, so you can be confident that shopping with The Detox Market is always the best decision.
A Word About Chemicals
In our quest for more natural products, we’ve become a little frightened of anything that looks or sounds like it might be a chemical.
The truth is, there are safe chemicals.
In fact, everything is made up of chemicals (including you and me). Just because something contains a chemical doesn’t mean it isn’t safe.
In fact, some of the most dangerous chemicals in the world are produced in nature, though you’re unlikely to come across them in your day to day since a lot of these extra potent chemicals are in volcanoes or at the bottom of the ocean.
When you read an ingredient list and come across a term that looks like it might be a chemical, don’t discount it.
It could be completely harmless. Determining which chemicals are safe and/or natural does require a great deal of research. That’s another reason why The Detox Market exists. We do the research on these chemicals so you don’t have to.
Should I Switch to Natural Beauty?
In one word: yes.
There’s so much benefit to using products that are free from known toxins and full of beneficial, whole ingredients. Because the natural beauty movement is expanding so rapidly, there are numerous products available to meet your needs.
If you’re not sure where to start, we can help. We produce a seasonal beauty edit featuring some of our favorite brands and products with detailed information about product creation, sustainability, ingredients, and performance.
Another great option for making the natural switch is to consider our monthly Detox Box.
Each month you receive a curated box filled with natural beauty products from our amazing brands. This is a great way to test drive products, become familiar with brands, and fall in love with natural beauty without making a huge upfront commitment.
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Now more than ever we have to be our own advocates in terms of purchasing safe cosmetics and beauty products. You can join the natural beauty movement easily, by making the switch from products that could be harmful to products that are not just safe, but actually beneficial.
You can rely on The Detox Market to deliver information that is helpful and relevant in the natural beauty movement, and products that are safe and effective, always.
Sources:
https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/organic-personal-care-products.html
https://www.fastcompany.com/3068710/whats-driving-the-billion-dollar-natural-beauty-movement
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s726
https://www.ewg.org/news-and-analysis/2019/03/cosmetics-safety-us-trails-more-40-nations
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natural-vs-synthetic-chemicals-is-a-gray-matter/
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