I want to make a comment about Aveda, which was sparked by reading an ingredient list on a bar of Aveda soap and also by a post I received today in which the reader wrote, “I think of Aveda as safe, natural and cruelty-free…”
I have mixed feelings about Aveda, and have for years.
They are doing many great things. Their website talks about using green ingredients (and explains what they mean by that), wind power, and their commitment to the environment, yet their products also contain ingredients that don’t belong in a natural product.
While staying in a “green hotel” recently, I picked up the bar of Aveda soap in the bathroom that was offered to me as a guest. The wrapper was 100% post-consumer recycled paper. Good. It said it was “made with pure aroma from organically grown plants”. Good. But it also contained many other ingredients that were more akin to a supermarket soap than a natural soap, such as propylene glycol, fragrance (usually this means artificial, and actually, no organic essential oils were listed on the ingredient list), trienthanolamine, tetrasodium EDTA, and Yellow 5. I didn’t use this soap. I pulled my bar of natural soap out of my travel bag and used that.
To their credit, I see that Aveda is rethinking their ingredients and phasing out things like parabens and EDTA (you can read their ingredient policy at http://www.aveda.com/pdf/ourmission/
ingredients_policy.pdf). I admire the direction they are going.
But the fact remains, at this moment there are Aveda products on the shelves that do contain some less than natural ingredients.
I’m not objecting to the fact that these products contain these ingredients, but rather to the fact that Aveda strives to have an image of being completely natural and eco-friendly. On their website, for example, they do not give the full ingredient list of their products, only the “key” green ingredients.
Contrast this with a company like Lush, for example, who sells products containing similar ingredients, but clearly indicates via color coding which ingredients are “natural/organic” and which are “safe synthetics” (see an example of this at http://usa.lush.com/cgi-bin/lushdb/062?expand=Soap). Lush is perfectly clear about their ingredients and they don’t pretend to be a natural product. Lush products are also thought of by consumers as “natural” products because they are fresh and have some natural ingredients. The difference is that Lush doesn’t promote their products as being natural.
I haven’t recommended Aveda products over the years for this reason, and still won’t add them to Debra’s List. But I’m keeping my eye on them, because they are moving in the right direction.
