CONSUMERS WISH TO LEARN WHAT CONSTITUTES 'NATURAL' AND 'ORGANIC' BEAUTY FORMULATION

Increasing number of experts cosmetologists are feeling the need for the standardized process before a beauty and skin care product could be labeled as 'natural' or 'organic'.  In blogs and seminars on what constitutes 'natural' and 'organic' is being debated extensively because the consumers are becoming aware of the hazards of chemical and synthetic ingredients that are packed in most of the cosmetic and beauty care products.

the view being expressed widely is that the cosmetic regulations in the US are overly nuanced and too convoluted. Trends and marketing strategies have collided in recent years to make 'natural' and 'organic' beauty product labeling delightfully problematic.

The industry experts have emphasized that there has been a dilution of the meaning of 'natural' and 'organic' and somewhere along the way, the truly authentic, natural brands are paying up.

Herbally Radiant has learnt from its customers that the consumers, in general, would very much welcome to find the exact sequential in explaining truly clean, green, natural organic beauty product.

  

28000 PLANT SPECIES RECORDED AS EFFECTIVE MEDICINAL TOOL

More and more scientists are recognizing the fact that plants have amazing effect on human health. Herbally Radiant has been promoting this awareness with the help of its powerful formulations to prevent premature aging signs and to brighten up skin in the healthiest natural manner.
The investigative report in BBC magazine highlights how from being natural fire-fighters to potential famine-thwarters, there are four incredible ways that plants could revolutionise our world.

Cross-breeding super plants

When we eat vegetables on our dinner plates, what we’re looking at were once ordinary crops that were grown on a farm. But those farm-grown crops had relatives out in the wild - that were “to our food plants what wolves are to dogs”.But those roguish cousins living in the wild – far away from domesticating farms – have developed resilience to pests, diseases, soil salinity and climate change.

That’s why plant breeders are working to crossbreed these wild crops with our domestic crops to make them just as hardy as their cousins – while still offering us the benefits that tamed plants offer, such as a high yield. 

Cross-breeding wild vegetables with their cultivated counterparts on the farm could create a hybrid super-veggie resilient to pests and disease (Credit: LM Salazar / Crop Trust)

It’s a truly worldwide plan; the countries that have the highest number of wild plant cousins are Brazil, China, and India, while the countries with the highest concentration of them are Azerbaijan, Portugal and Greece. The benefits that this cross-breeding programme could have in developing countries in particular could be indispensable as world population growth reaches over nine billion.

Using plants as medicine

This isn’t anything new – the use of plants is medicine has been known since time immemorial. But are we being too slow to register new uses?

Over 28,000 plant species are currently recorded as being of medicinal use, but fewer than 16% of them are cited in a medicinal regulatory publication. When the World Health Organization last estimated the plant-based medicinal industry’s worth in 2012, it totalled a mind-boggling $83bn (£62bn).

The industry is growing increasingly popular; in Germany, around 90% of the population use herbal medicines that are derived from plants such as foxglove and garlic. But one major problem, of course, is that health regulators are keen to stop the proliferation of unsafe or phony products entering the market; a lazy approach to authentication has already meant that herb names have been confused with those with similar sounding names and patients have ended up ingesting a wildly inappropriate (and potentially lethal) drug.

China is one country trying to stop this. In December 2016, Chinese government officials announced their aim to integrate more traditional Chinese medicine into their healthcare system by 2020, as well as presenting detailed illustrations and descriptions of the source plants to stop any future confusion happening.

If we’re to utilise plants to their full life-saving potential,the researchers make urgent recommendations: sourcing plants from sustainable resources, cultivating them, introducing reliable traceability procedures and secure more effective quality control.

Bananas on steroids

Well, not quite bananas. The enset is a member of the banana family that has been cultivated in Ethiopia for tens of thousands of years – the Ethiopians in fact have over 200 names for it – and it has several different uses. As well as being a staple crop in Africa it can make rope, medicine, shelter, animal feed and clothes, not to mention also providing an ideal microclimate for coffee plants to flourish in. It withstands drought, heavy rain and flooding. Basically – is there anything that this ‘false banana’ can’t do?

But first, they’re going to have to figure out how to gather its seeds – at the moment, farmers take cuttings from the plants to grow more of them, meaning no one actually knows how enset is pollinated. However, once they work out this super banana’s secrets, there’s no telling the good it could do.

Fire-fighting plants

Most people throw burger patties or hot dogs onto a flaming barbecue – Kew Gardens in England instead decided to throw some plants on it.

The flammability of plants is seriously important when you think about wildfires and the devastation that they cause economically, socially and environmentally. It can happen because plant diversity is poor, and also because non-native plants simply haven’t adapted in time to the climate of their new home. But fire is a normal, important process in some ecosystems.

Plants that are likely to tolerate future increases in the frequency of fires are those with a thicker bark, a quick ability to resprout and the presence of serotinous cones; just like a phoenix from the ashes, these cones house seeds which are released into the air if a fire burns away the serotinous resin protecting it, ensuring the survival of the species elsewhere.

Herbally Radiant has been promoting the awareness about the amazing benefits of plants to our health, and especially to our skin. The powerful formulations developed by the R&D team of Herbally Radiant have proven very popular for preventing premature aging signs, rejuvenating cells and maintaining the skin in its best natural shining shape. 

NATURAL BEAUTY REMAINS BEYOND EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

Washington Post carries a thought provoking article on the increasing inroads being made by tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and others. 

The extracts of the article : Today’s ascendant monopolies aspire to encompass all of existence. Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow. They now aim to build driverless cars, manufacture phones and conquer death. Amazon, which once called itself “the everything store,” now produces television shows, owns Whole Foods and powers the cloud. The architect of this firm, Jeff Bezos, even owns this newspaper.

Along with Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, these companies are in a race to become our “personal assistant.” They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through our days and never quite leave our sides. They aspire to become the repository for precious and private items, our calendars and contacts, our photos and documents. They intend for us to turn unthinkingly to them for information and entertainment while they catalogue our intentions and aversions. Google Glass and the Apple Watch prefigure the day when these companies implant their artificial intelligence in our bodies. Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.

More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. They think they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine — to redirect the trajectory of human evolution. How do I know this? In annual addresses and town hall meetings, the founding fathers of these companies often make big, bold pronouncements about human nature — a view that they intend for the rest of us to adhere to, and if humans function like computers, why not hasten the day we become fully cyborg?

To take another grand theory, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has exclaimed his desire to liberate humanity from phoniness, to end the dishonesty of secrets. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” he has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Of course, that’s both an expression of idealism and an elaborate justification for Facebook’s business model.

Herbally Radiant finds these technology initiatives quite relevant to the evolving lifestyle in which beauty factor will continue to dominate.  Happily, it is beyond the reach of hi-tech so far.

HERBALLY RADIANT WELCOMES P&G DECISION TO REVEAL INGREDIENTS OF ITS PRODUCTS

Herbally Radiant welcomes the move by Proctor and Gamble to share online all fragrance ingredients down to 0.1 per cent in its entire product portfolio in US and Canada.

This announcement comes close on the heels of its competitor SC Johnson's decision to begin to disclose the specific ingredients in each of its home care products in 2014.

President of the Environmental Working Group has also reacted positively to this initiative and has hoped that in the cosmetics and personal care industry, more legacy brands and multinational corporations will follow suit. This lets consumers' demand to know the information that is being demanded increasingly by health-conscious people.

According to its announcement, P7G will share online all fragrance ingredients down to 0.1% in its entire product portfolio in US and Canada by the end of 2019. This expands on the company's earlier disclosure of a comprehensive list of fragrance ingredients used by it.

Consumers also need to avoid the products which do not reveal the ingredients. Most of the online suppliers do not disclose these, making unverifiable claims to increase their sales. 

"NATURAL" CLAIM OF BIG COMPANIES BEING CONTESTED

It has been reported that Walmart is among the dozens of companies that have been sued this year for claiming products were "all-natural." FDA which is due to specify what the term “natural” means in commercial matters.  

Herbally Radiant has been promoting natural skin care products and has been monitoring the deceptive marketing tricks by companies to raise their sales by branding their products as “natural”.  The misleading branding is mostly in so-called “natural” cosmetics and skin care products even when their chemical content far exceeds the permissible limit. The consumers are not in a position to know the fact in the absence of ingredients on the labels.

Food has direct bearing on the state of skin, and it is important that the word “natural” is not used to mislead consumers, some of whom have sued Walmart over its “all-natural” pita chips, which contain thiamine mononitrate and folic acid, made synthetically.

Sargento, the dairy giant, has been sued because the cows behind its “natural” cheeses are given genetically modified feed. HINT, the maker of “all-natural” fruit-flavored waters, has been used for using a common solvent to boost the drink’s taste.

Nineteen all-natural class actions have been filed this year, as of July 2017, there were only 27 such suits in 2016. The law suits claim that "natural" labels tricked shoppers into buying a more expensive cheese — or flavored water, or pita chip — by deceiving them about how the product was made.

According to a 2016 survey by Consumer Reports, 73 percent of consumers seek out products with the “natural” label. But many erroneously believe it indicates a food does not contain synthetic, highly processed or genetically modified ingredients, when in fact there are no clear rules for what “natural” is and isn’t.

Unofficially, the FDA says it expects natural foods to have “nothing artificial or synthetic (including all color additives, regardless of source)” added.

Till the “natural” term is defined officially, it would be wise for the consumers to exercise caution and satisfy themselves about the genuine naturalness of the product they eat or apply on the skin. 

PARABENS POTENTIALLY LINKED TO PREMATURE AGING OF SKIN

There have been some reports that suggest that there might not be enough evidence for direct link between application of parabens, through skin care products, and physical disorders.

Herbally Radiant has been cautioning consumers against potentially harmful chemicals in cosmetics and skin care formulations that have been linked by several earlies studies to health risks. Herbally Radiant has, therefore, been advising its customers to use safe and reliable natural skin care products which cause no side effects and have long lasting effect.

Briefly, parabens, man-made preservative chemicals, are used by manufacturers in a variety of domestic products, such as cosmetics, lotions and moisturizers, shampoo, shaving, and tanning products. Companies find them cost-effective in providing protection against micro-organisms for an extended shelf life of cosmetics. While there are multiple types of parabens, methyl, propyl and butylparaben are the most frequently used in beauty products. In recent years, concern has increased as to their role in producing potentially serious health side effects.

According to Costmeticsinfo.org, data indicate that methyl, propyl, and butyl forms of parabens interfere with the functioning of the endocrine system. Specifically, parabens are endocrine disruptors stored in the body tissue that interferes with glandular activity and hormone production. Moreover, these preservative chemicals are associated with the following in infants and children: developmental disorders, dysfunction of the immune system, learning problems as well as reproductive disorders. 

The Food and Drug Administration states that several assessments made by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review report that parabens are safe, with no side effects, in cosmetics at levels up to 25 percent, implying that exceeding the safe level is harmful because these are not good for healthy skin.

Ironically, while several of the commercial products that contain parabens are beauty products that are supposed to enhance the skin, such as lotions and moisturizers, research has found they accelerate the skin aging process. 

As reported by live-naturally.co.uk, researchers from the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine in Japan found that the methyl type of parabens increases sensitivity to and damage from the sun; that is, when exposed to ultraviolet rays, skin cells die at a much faster rate than normal. Therefore, one should read the ingredients to check for methylparabens before buying beauty products for the skin.