From time to time customers or readers question the 'naturalness'of some of the ingredients in our skin care products. This is usually prompted by the INCI names that we are required to list on the tube. Even the most natural products have scary chemical names attached to them.

A few days ago we had a good customer express concernbecause shefound that our day cream had a poor rating on the EWG website. Her email is copied below.They rate the products on a scale of 0 - 10 with the lower the score the better.

Katrina asks:

"I was really disheartened to see your products reviewed and poorly rated by the this independent skin care agency. After reading your marketing literature that all of the ingredients in your products were digestible I really thought you would have scored a 0. Instead you scored a 4. Can you address the these issues. "

The link can be found by clicking here

The question was then put to our cosmetic chemist Sigrid.

Sigrid comments:

"EWG…..what can I say?

I think 4 is a really good rating if you take in consideration that they have a data gap between 60-90% and most comments are “not tested for use in cosmetic”

This is not correct, of course, because all ingredients we are using extensively tested for the use in cosmetic.

Basically they use any tests or trials they can obtain for assessment purposes.They asked if to get ANY trials or data in order to build their data base. It is not possible to obtain the exact information they are viewing, they simply collect everything they can get!

As all the people involved with the EWG are voluntary, it is very difficult to deal with them, and can take up to 3 months to even get an e-mail response. Their review panels sit twice a year to discuss and rate (or re-rate) the various products. I do find the ingredient rating quite frequently though.

Please see below a rating for Glucose. It’s a data gap of 76%. It is well known that Glucose is an important carbohydrate in biology, the energy source of all living cells, main product of photosynthesis and part of our body (blood sugar). I could not find any paper, patent etc. referring to the rating they’ve got for Glucose.

Essential oils, also if they are 100% natural and organic getting a rating of nine means if you are using fragrance it doesn’t matter how good the formulation is you’ll get an extreme high rating.

Inmy point of view it is important to have these independent bodies but at this stage I can not agree with the rating they offer to our customer and I think it is more confusing than helpful."

Warren comments:

I agree with Sigrid that these independent bodies are important and play a good role. I often refer to some of their material but you have to be careful that it is accurate. Some people contributing to it are somewhat over zealous and don't really understand what they are dealing with.

For example, they refer to ethanol in our products, but there is none and that alone gives the wrong score. I have no idea where they get that from.

They even give Vitamin E a score of 3.

Bottom line is that you should take some of these 'scores' with a grain of salt. If concerned about any aspect of these results contact us if it our product or contact the manufacturer if it relates to someone elses product. Ask for more clarification such as Katrina did to confirm the accuracy or otherwise of the 'score'.

As you will see there is a massive data gap of 85% in their assessment of our day cream. In other words they really don't know much about the ingredients that they are giving a score to and there is a lot of guesswork going on.

As a further example of just how unreliable the data is from EWG

There are two references to Xtend-Life in EWG and the ingredients which we have in our skin care products. One is that which was used for giving us the score of 4 which you can see by clicking herewhich we will call the 'score list'

The other can be seen by clicking herewhich we will call the 'general list'

You will find the following interesting.

I am going to list 6 ingredients and show you the differences in their score for the same ingredient. This illustrates the points I have been trying to make. Remember the lower the number is the better.

Ethanol. We do not use this ingredient although it is listed on both URL's. The score list has it at 6 whereas the general list has it at 5.

Tocopherol Acetate is listed at 5 on the score list but is listed correctly at 0 on the general list.

Phenoxyethanol is listed at 5 on the score list but at 4 on the general list.

Dimethicone is listed at 3 on the score list but at 0 on the general list.

Tocopherol is listed at 3 on the score list but at 0 on the general list

Cetearyl is listed as 1 on thescore list but at 0 on the general list.

Why have they got it so wrong on the score list? I don't know. We will write to EWG to ask them.

I can assure you that ALL the ingredients that we use in our skin care products are throughly researched and have all the safety data supporting them. There are NO question marks. If there were we would certainly not be using them, and I, my family and staff would also not be using them...but we do...every day.