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Given my recent explorations into greenwashing, I was unsurprised to find that animal testing may well belong in that category of “claims made without validation.” I’m aware that animal testing is funded, allowed, even encouraged – I’m especially aware of it living as I do near the University of Minnesota, where a great deal of [...]

I see a lot of newcomers to the bath/body/botanics industry promoting various lotions, potions and brews using the ubiquitious “No chemicals!” “No preservatives!” credo to peddle their goods. And while peddling is a business necessity, these particular phrases aren’t so useful. I have already discussed why “No chemicals!” is meaningless – everything is chemical. As [...]

There are a few new goodies released at Magickal Realism for you to enjoy: Our sunny citrus olive oil and vegan sugar cane scrub has soft-ground sunflower seeds to soften up the sensation of grit just a little bit. Very wakey-wakey, with niaouli, grapefruit, sweet orange, lime, lemon, mandarin and tangerine. Among our new fragrance [...]

In my quest to understand regulations that much better1 I’m delving even deeper into FDA regulations on cosmetics. So yes, another regulations series from me. I am reviewing this time some of the layman’s documents provided by the FDA, in this case, their user-friendly document Is it a Cosmetic, a Drug, or Both? What jumped [...]

Last week, prompted by a mention on a Cropwatch missive, I posted inquiring about the Global Harmonization Act for 2008, and could not find the legislative information or actual verbiage of the act anywhere, except for one small snipped saying I could find it on a website (I couldn’t) and that I could write a [...]
I just found out for sure that I’m moving and since I’d like the process to be as painless as possible, I thought I’d start now by trying to get as much stock as I can out the door. The prices are already marked down on my site – all you need to do is [...]

Customer education is an uphill battle at best, but sometimes I think moreso for natural perfumers. Because of the prevalence of mislabeling and using “natural” as a marketing term only, those new to true all-natural perfumes bring their expectations based on their experience with purely synthetic and synthetic/natural fragrance blends. So, for those who don’t [...]

There are two ways of viewing “naturals” in perfume. The first is that it smells like something natural. So a synthetically created eugenol that happens to smell like vanilla might be classed by some perfumers as “natural” in that it mimics something more molecularly complex. The second is that it is or came from the [...]

In the latest communication from Cropwatch, there was mention of a Global Harmonization Act of 2008. This piqued my interest – I’m not exactly thrilled with the decisions about perfumery materials IFRA has been making, since they are founded on next to no data, and harmonizing the FDA standards with EU standards – standards that [...]