Organic Beauty Week and the Campaign for Clarity

This week is Organic Beauty Week and, to celebrate the occasion, over the next seven days I'll be featuring some of my favourite organic beauty brands. I don't strictly use "all natural" or "all organic" products, and I'm not necessarily advocating that you should ditch your beauty routine for an all-new product line-up. However, I do think that it's really important is to understand the brands that you're buying into; to know how your purchasing decisions are affecting your own body as well as the world around you. 

Today I'd like to talk to you very briefly about the Campaign for Clarity which is trying to raise awareness about "greenwashing" - when brands promote themselves as more "green" than they actually are. It's a really common marketing tactic that occurs everywhere from the aisles of your local drugstore to luxury department stores. Brands know that consumers want to make "good" choices and so they pitch themselves - through their packaging or marketing jargon - in misleading ways. I've been fooled by these strategies many times, and the more I learn about greenwashing the more upsetting I find it. It's a deliberate attempt to mislead consumers and it makes it much harder to trust which brands are actually "green".

One of the biggest concerns of the Campaign for Clarity regards organic beauty products. Currently there is no legal standard in place for organic beauty. This means that a product containing a tiny percentage of organic content can be labelled as "organic" in exactly the same way that a product that contains 80% organic content. It's incredibly misleading and the only way around this problem is to look for certification from an accredited organisation who have looked in detail at the manufacturing procedures used to produce a product and at all the ingredients that make it up. 

The Soil Association are working to champion their "COSMOS standard", and any products bearing the COSMOS symbol conform to a strict set of criteria that guarantees a high percentage of organic content, alongside other important factors. Brands like Nourish, Botanicals and Green People all sell products that conform to the COSMOS standard, and Antipodes sell products that conforms to the AsureQuality Ltd. certfied organic standard (a similar independent body working in the Southern hemisphere). These are the sorts of certification that you need to look out for on product packaging so that you avoid buying into purposefully manipulative greenwashed brands. 

Over the next week I'll be talking more about the products featured in my photos today - along with many others - and offering you a series of certified organic beauty recommendations. If you're interested in dipping your toes into the world of organic beauty then please do check back in throughout the week. And if you'd like to learn more about the campaign then check out the hashtags #Campaign4Clarity and #OrganicBeauty on social media.

*This is not a sponsored post, but products featured in my photographs were sent to me for review purposes.