Organic Personal Care Standards Go Public

By Timothy R. Kapsner


Today, more than ever, attention is being drawn to the many negative side effects associated with synthetic ingredients in conventional cosmetics. Earlier this year, California even passed an act requiring cosmetic companies to tell state authorities if a product contains any possible cancer-causing agents or substances that may harm the reproductive system. As consumers become more aware of these issues, they are increasingly seeking the most natural products they can buy and that means “organic.” However, lack of regulation of this term in the personal care industry has led to confusion for both consumers and processors.

To solve this issue, the Joint Committee on Personal Care was formed. Made up of food certification inspectors, cosmetic manufacturers, certifiers, chemists, consumer groups and government regulators—this group has worked for years to develop standards for the organic personal care industry and is now set to release these standards for public comment.

Challenges with the Creation of Personal Care Standards
The organic food industry has developed a very extensive certification program for processed food ingredients and products. The key word in this description is “food.” With food processing, the chemistry is often ignored. When cake is certified, the certifier doesn’t ask what happens to the sodium bicarbonate in the baking soda when it turns into carbon dioxide bubbles to make the cake rise or what reactions happen when the sugars caramelize to make the top of the cake brown. Why? Because it started with food and ended up with food, so nobody cares about those reactions.

In the personal care world, of course, the chemistry paradigm is completely different. Even ingredients that are “natural” or “naturally derived” are modified in some way that changes their chemistry to make them into something useful. The simplest example is soap. Most people consider soap to be the most natural foaming/cleaning product or ingredient you can use. It’s made by combining a vegetable oil or animal fat with lye and simply mixing for a while. In the process, the lye (also called sodium hydroxide) reacts with the oil/fat to hydrolyze or saponify it. The oil, described chemically as a triglyceride, is converted into the sodium salt of the fatty acids and glycerin is released in the process. A cleansing bar containing soap would have “sodium cocoate” listed on the ingredient list as the soap ingredient. Sounds like chemistry doesn’t it? Although sodium hydroxide is allowed in both the food regulation as well as the new personal care standards, it’s limited to 5 percent. A traditional bar of soap uses over 20 percent sodium hydroxide and thus doesn’t meet the requirements. On the other hand, liquid soap, which uses small amounts of sodium hydroxide, can qualify under the guidelines.

As one can see, the chemistry cannot be ignored in personal care. This industry—down to the naming system for the ingredients listed on the package—is built around an upfront recognition of the chemistry involved in making ingredients and products. It is this difference between the food and personal care industries that results in the biggest challenges and most vocal arguments. The battle is also being fought in the U.S. marketplace. Stop at a booth at the Natural Products Expo and ask about the organic cosmetic product claims. One person may nod his head and say the product is organic while next to him another person says no, it’s not. Someone may say that the products are organic but they’re not certified or that they’re certified but the package just doesn’t say so. The shampoo may have a front label that screams “organic” and an ingredient list that contains sodium C14-16 olefin sulfonate, a popular foaming ingredient made entirely from petroleum and used primarily in household products. A soap-based shampoo may have an ingredient list that includes all of the nice sounding oils but conveniently leaves out the lye that makes the oils into soap. This can be done, it’s explained, because the lye is a processing aid that goes away when the soap is made and therefore it doesn’t have to be listed. To a chemist, a statement like that sounds like the punch line of a bad joke.

Standards Worldwide
At this time, there are no government-regulated standards developed specifically for the organic cosmetic industry. The closest to that is in the United States. The USDA issued a policy statement in April 2004, shortly after the launch of the National Organic Program(NOP), specifically excluding cosmetics and other nonfood products from the scope of their organic program. A month later, however, they reversed their position and issued another policy statement that said that the current NOP food standards can be used to certify cosmetics.

European Union policymakers have recently updated the EU 2092/2091 food standards stating that they do not and will not cover personal care. Japan’s well-regulated organic food standards also do not apply to personal care. An imported personal care product can be sold in Japan with the organic claims in English—the Japanese consider these foreign words more of a decoration than a claim—however, their regulation prohibits translating any claims into Japanese.

Nongovernmental agencies have made some of the largest efforts to regulate organic personal care. Ecocert, the largest organic certifier in the EU, has developed standards that are widely used in the EU and other parts of the world. Although they are the defacto standards in France, they don’t have any official government recognition. The Ecocert standards have two levels of certification, “certified natural” and “certified organic,” the main difference being organic content requirements. The allowed processes and organic content requirements in the Ecocert standards are noticeably less stringent than those that are being launched in the U.S.

The Soil Association, a private certifier in the U.K., has also developed its own comprehensive organic cosmetic standards similar to Ecocert. Australian Certified Organic, the largest food certifier in Australia, with about half of the market, includes cosmetics in a section of their standards titled “Personal, Domestic and Industrial Use Products.” BDIH, a German federation for the pharmaceutical, health care and personal care industries, worked with cosmetics manufacturers to create standards that certify natural cosmetics. While they don’t use the word “organic,” the standards require plant ingredients, minimal processing and ecological sustainability.

History of U.S. Standards
The process of developing organic personal care standards has been underway in the United States for about 10 years. In 1997 the Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA), a private co-op food certifier, was asked to help create an organic cosmetic standard. OCIA agreed, and in 1998 a section was added to the OCIA organic standards on the certification of organic cosmetics. This standard went largely unnoticed by the personal care industry, and when the NOP went into effect for foods, the OCIA organic personal care standards were abandoned.

Shortly after the launch of the NOP, a small group of progressive personal care manufacturers, independent inspectors, consumer groups and certifiers banded together to move the process to another level. They worked independently for a short time and then asked to be adopted as an Organic Trade Association committee. This committee worked for several years, making significant strides, and then moved on to a new sponsor, NSF International, a non-profit, world-renowned standards organization. NSF has developed over 50 voluntary standards for the American National Standards Institute under the scope of public health and safety.

NSF Standards
As with any democratic process, the creation of the NSF standards has involved education, disagreements, conflict, some compromise and, ultimately, a consensus. The term and concept of “consensus” does not mean that the whole group agrees to everything in the document and the NSF organic personal care standards are certainly an example of that. They do represent a consensus of those who have worked so hard to create them.

The new organic personal care standards focus on processing. For the most part, personal care will follow the same regulations as food and use the same levels of certification as used in the food standards: “100 Percent Organic,” “USDA Organic,” which requires 95 percent organic content and “Made With Organic”, which requires 70 percent organic content. It was easy to decide that 100 percent organic would mean exactly the same in personal care as it does in food. The rest was not as easy. There are several chemical conversions that use processes, such as heating and mixing, which fit into the constraints of the food standards and can receive the USDA seal. Hydrolysis, for example, occurs when heat, and sometimes an enzyme, is applied to a protein or starch in water to break it down into an amino acid or simple sugar. Mixing organic acid with alcohol and applying heat and vacuum causes an esterification reaction. Saponification requires only mixing an oil with alkaline compounds, sodium or potassium hydroxide, which are allowed in limited amounts under the NOP for “USDA Organic” and “Made With Organic” categories.

The biggest difference between organic foods and personal care will be in the “Made with Organic” category. In order to allow a range of functional cosmetic ingredients to be used at this level of certification, a few processes and one processing aid will be allowed in personal care that are not allowed in foods. One of these is hydrogenation, which uses hydrogen to convert a vegetable oil into a wax. Hydrogenolysis also uses hydrogen to convert a vegetable oil into a fatty alcohol. This fatty alcohol can be made into an emulsifier by combination with glucose or converted into a foaming ingredient by combination with sulfur and sodium hydroxide (allowed materials under current food standards). Vegetable oils can be split with steam into glycerin and fatty acids. The fatty acid can be made into a foaming ingredient by combination with a protein fragment in a process called acylation. All of these processes use only one material, hydrogen, which is not allowed under the NOP food standards. Only hydrogen made from water will be used in organic personal care processing.

The standards do not include a list of prohibited ingredients, which would be prohibitively long. Instead, any ingredient that does not meet the standards will not be allowed. Examples include: parabens or diazolidinyl urea (a formaldehyde donor), propylene glycol (a solvent derived from petroleum), synthetic fragrances and the foaming agent sodium C14-16 olefin sulfonate.

Where Do We Go From Here?
After the committee releases the draft standard, there is a public comment period to allow any additional stakeholders to review it and offer comments. The standard is finalized once all views and objections have received due process. The resulting published ANSI standard is publicly accessible for use by manufacturers, certifiers, governmental agencies and any other interested users. The ANSI procedure also requires revision or reaffirmation of the standard at a minimum of every five years.

As the process of creating these standards has evolved, the question of government regulation has been an overriding issue. When the USDA launched the NOP, it recognized that it didn’t have the background to develop standards for personal care. It looked to the industry to do that, with the possibility that a working standard could eventually be adopted as a government regulation. The fact that this hasn’t yet happened anywhere in the world points to the complexity of the process, and thus it could take many years to accomplish this goal.

Looking beyond the borders of the United States, the food world is still struggling with internationalization of organic food standards. Many large cosmetic companies have significant markets around the world and it will be necessary to open up lines of communication to coordinate processes. Given the challenges faced by the organic food industry and the emerging organic personal care industry, this is a daunting task indeed, but not an impossible one. Stay tuned.

Timothy R. Kapsner is a founding member of the Joint Committee on Personal Care and a senior research scientist at Aveda Corporation where he develops products and explores raw materials including organic ingredients. He is also an instructor at the University of Minnesota, the author of seven patents and a contributor for several industry publications. He can be contacted at tkapsner@aveda.com.