What is "natural"?

(Christie, this update is for you. No more cupcakes at the top of the page!)

One of my biggest pet peeves is all the "natural" products on the market these days. Particularly in the bath and body world, it seems like everyone has jumped on the natural bandwagon.

As far as I can tell, there are basically two definitions consumers have in mind when they describe a product as "natural".

1) It is found in nature. Obviously, this definition doesn't apply to bath products; soap doesn't grow on trees.

2) It is made from ingredients that are found in nature with minimal processing. Handmade soap could qualify under this definition - although you'd have to make an allowance for the fact that lye used by soapmakers is made in a lab, and that many soapmakers (including me sometimes) use synthetic fragrance oils in their products.

One of the hottest topics on The Soap Dish (online community of over 5,000 soapmakers) is about the search for natural preservatives, natural fragrance and colorants, and natural additives. There is much debate surrounding this issue for the simple reason that in the world of marketing, the world "natural" is unregulated and essentially meaningless. An example - Method hand wash. The second ingredient on the label (after water) is sodium lauryl sulfate, a synthetic detergent that is created in a lab (does not exist in nature.) And they are scented with synthetic fragrance. Yet they claim that all of their products are natural or "naturally derived" (which is also pretty meaningless, since just about every ingredient can be traced in some way back to a natural source.) Another one - Glade Scented Oil candles which are labeled as "made with Essential Oils". The only problem - there is no such thing as Apple essential oil (or Clean Linen, or Mango, Peaches, Berry, Coconut, etc.) They can claim to be natural because there is no legal definition of "natural".

Of course, in my opinion the whole quest to make everything more natural is flawed to begin with, because it relies on the premise that natural=good and unnatural=bad. Let's explore that.

Things that are natural:

-tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes
-E. coli
-the flu
-fleas, mosquitoes, roaches
-poop (there's a thread on The Soap Dish that discusses a great recipe containing "sodium poopinate". That may only be funny if you're a B&B formulator.)

Things that are unnatural:

-toilets
-birth control
-bathing
-wheelchairs
-IVF

So there you have it: "natural" does not equal "good" and "unnatural" does not equal "bad". End of debate.

Ha!