Not sure what to get the person who has too much? Kathy’s Climate kit is a great way to get someone started on the whole “reuse” and “reduce” of the 3 R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle.)

It comes with a bag, fluorescent light bulbs, a form letter to end junk mail and a few other goodies to take down that carbon footprint.

Note: you can also end junk mail through ProQuo.

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The Natural Products Association purports to be making healthy, natural products available to the consumers – and legal to sell. In a nutshell, where OASIS takes on agriculture and NOW takes on food, NPA stakes its flag into the vitamin and supplements territory. It seems as though a great deal of the NPA’s work is around governmental lobbying, with significant business benefits offered to their members ranging from research to FedEx shipping discounts.

They set for their own definition of natural.¹ Quoted here: ”

• The product must be made up of at least 95% truly natural ingredients, or ingredients that are derived from natural sources
• No ingredients with any potential suspected human health risks
  No processes that significantly or adversely alter the purity/effect of the natural ingredients
• Ingredients that come from a purposeful, renewable/plentiful source found in nature (flora, fauna, mineral)
• Unnatural ingredients only when viable natural alternative ingredient are unavailable and only when there are absolutely no suspected potential human health risks”

NPA goes so far as to offer a buying guide for potential customers.

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1. Note that there is no legal or officially documented definition of the term. [↩]

Apparently the Organic and Sustainable Industry Standards Board is the org that checks out whether no bunnies were harmed by your cosmetics company. They are not an official board and they are not internationally recognized – but as far as cosmetic green regulation, for the moment, at least in the US, they’re it.

From their site:

“the USA has not had a dedicated organic standard for the beauty and personal care industry. In absence of a true industry standard, companies attempted to apply the USDA NOP (National Organic Program) Organic food standard for beauty and personal care ingredients and products. But the USDA’s food standards were never designed for this industry, and limit certain types of “green chemistry” posing significant challenges for those seeking to create certified organic products.”

Membership is a sliding scale that organizations may pay to join on a sliding scale – as long as they pledge to assist in creating standards for organics ranging from cosmetics to household cleaners.

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In an effort to identify wildly proliferating organizations I thought it might help to identify some of the better known environmental agencies in the English speaking world. They’ll pop up one after another, and knowing which are government, which are privately funded, and which seemingly come out of nowhere.

Basically, the approach is this: does it come from the earth? Is it something we eat, walk on, or see?

Then there’s an organization for it.

The first of concern in the USA is the USDA NOP.

AMS stands for Agricultural Marketing Service. They are the third party keepers of organic certification. USDA NOP stands for, more or less, National Organic Program.

You can find Fact Sheets on the program here, a list of US certified organic organizations here, and the details on Congressional studies here.

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If you’re looking for a gift for the green-lovin’ tree hugger in your life, Starter Kit for Change has some serious potential. Kits include seeds, trees, sudoku and hot chocolate!

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Tea’s taking over in the US, as yerba matte’ forces coffee to edge aside and as more consumers become convinced of the health benefits of herbal teas.

To get the most out of your leafy-drinks, it’s important to distinguish between the two types of tea. In my case, when I say “tea” I mean “black tea.” The stuff that Boston had that party over. The stuff that ran big business in India and China. That stuff Giles is always having when Buffy is in trouble.

When I say “herbal tea” I really mean “a decoction of herbs called tea for lack of a better shorthand.”

Both can be tasty.

Both are acquired tastes.

For a yummy black tea, try it UK style: make it strong, as strong as coffee. To do this, you let it soak in boiling water for about 10-15 minutes. Add milk or cream – enough that the tea is no longer translucent. Add sugar to taste. This tea is nothing like that stuff your mom gave you for colds (or sobering up) when you were younger.

For herbal tea, it’s trickier: different herbs have different flavors. Some are incredibly bitter unattended, but blend well with other flavors.  If you’re just starting out, I recommend you begin with these flavorful herbal teas and then move towards the savory, bitter and medicinal-tasting:

Mints (peppermint, spearmint, catmint)

Florals (chamomile, lavender, rose, carnation, rosehips)

Spices (sage, cardamom, anise, fennel)

Once you’ve gotten used to a seven-minute decoction of those, brave the waters by adding a pinch of stevia leaf (not that processed stevia that comes in the little packets – actual stevia leaf) to your herb decoctions and move forward from there.

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I came across this in my latest issue of Food and Wine and it piqued my interest – since I live in an urban area, on the fourth floor of an apartment building, growing food indoors is an entertaining challenge. While I don’t think my fiancee would care for it – (who knows?) it does seem like a reasonable solution in our space-starved apartment to get in my greenery I desperately want without taking up more precious floor and shelf space.

I do have to wonder, though, what our apartment manager would think if she walked in on such a thing. Surely it can’t be worse than the couple next door keeping a meat locker in their carpeted living room.

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In a short-term sort of way, it’s not in my best interests to say this. But, since I would like my field of perfumery to not die of a bad case of nanny-state, and because I for one wish to stick to using natural materials¹  I will say this:

Fragrance policies are the fault of irresponsible fragrance consumers, and scented lotion users are part of that. You can use perfume/scented lotion irresponsibly just as you can drink irresponsibly. Like it or not, if what you do impacts the people around you, you’re responsible for it. This is especially true if you cause someone to have an allergy attack. It’s on your head if you cause someone anaphylaxis.

Using natural perfume is no guarantee that you will NOT cause an allergic reaction – that coworker who’s allergic to roses? She’ll still curse your name when you come in soaking in something rose.

When I say “using perfume” I also mean anything that has fragrance compounds in it, especially including lotions. I’ve had a lot of people tell me they don’t use perfume, they “use lotion” as though lotion is somehow less invasive. Lotion is usually a more invasive odor because you apply it to your entire body, and not to patches of skin. It also sinks into your pores, causing it to last longer, and reaffirming that coworkers and people who share public transportation with you will probably hate you. You may be enjoying that smell all day, but you are in the process likely robbing someone of the ability to smell, see or breathe.

I love scent. I do wear my perfumes, though not that often for the sake of keeping my olfactory palate clean and open to variety. I wear exclusively unscented lotions, partly because of an allergy condition that I have, but also because the scents that stick best in lotion bother me and others.

There is a way to wear scents out in public without asphyxiating strangers and loved ones. I call it the one-foot rule: try to keep your perfume/lotion light enough that people have to be within intimacy range to smell it. The way to do this is simple: don’t wear so much of it. Rather than spreading scented lotion over your entire body, use the lotion just like you would a solid perfume – and layer it over top of any unscented lotion you use to moisturize your dry areas. If you do use perfume, you only need to put some on one major pulse point – over your heart, on your wrists, on the back of your neck. Only one of these points, not all of them.

And if you’re going to be in a tightly packed area, like on a train or airplane, please – don’t wear any fragrance if you can help it.

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1. and have the continued joy of flipping the bird to syntheticists who think musk use is somehow a requirement [↩]

The crux of the problems with cosmetics is that ultimately, all things are chemical – water, blood, vinegar, parabens, any other odd thing you can or can’t pronounce – it has a chemical composition even if it’s air. Too much of anything will poison you. You can explode your brain by drinking too much water. You can rebalance yourself with Vitamin C – or cause serious acid reflux. That said, it takes less of some chemicals than it does of others to become dangerous. It takes a whole lot less cyanide to poison you than it does, say, clean water. ¹

This is what all the fuss is about when you’re told to avoid parabens, or these days corn syrup, or even aspartame. In small doses, whatever, you can enjoy it and your system will probably flush it. The problem comes in that, since there’s say paraben in your soap, your shampoo and then your lipstick – or there’s corn syrup in your soda, in your sandwich bread and in your orange juice – you end up taking in a toxic dose just because all those small doses you have in different things add up to bad news.

This is where the fuss is about cosmetics and food, and why places like the Cosmetic Safety Database rank the toxic materials by numbers. The missing information? How much of it you can absorb on a daily basis and reasonably expect to flush it. Since allergies are highly personal and individuals metabolize food and chemicals at different rates² there is no reasonable way to set this standard.

There’s a second issue that goes with the incomplete information: most of the studies linking said chemical to cancer or such and such disease is non-conclusive, and whether it’s non-conclusive due to direct corruption (a real problem worldwide) debunked for lack of empirical sample (what happens often to testing herb medicine) or because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom (conventional wisdom being possibly more dangerous than faith in common sense) it ends with a near religious division: natural versus synthetic is essentially a holy war,  with no one able to present safely concrete facts whether by matter of suppression or convenience. Big chemical companies are as bad as the Vatican. Small natural producers are all too often as whack-a-doodle as cult leaders.

So, when you get lists of things to avoid such as the following list:

• Fragrance (what kind? Natural? Synthetic? There’s a lot of stuff in fragrances consumers aren’t allowed to know about)
• Parabens
• Oxybenzone
• Triethanalamine

You can’t just take my word or anyone else’s that it’s bad for you. It’s imperative that you learn to look for yourself.

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1. Poison in this case being anything that completely throws your body out of whack. [↩]
2. thus negating many calorie-in calorie-out assumptions on diets [↩]

One of the big worries that perfumers like myself have is that our lovely, lovely plants with their lovey smells will disappear.  Thanks to FairWild, there’s some protection happening kind of – basically, the organization is  laying forth some standards in an effort to prevent overharvesting. I’ve downloaded the standards used, and once I’ve made sense of them, I’ll be adding a few more posts on the subject.

Along with the basics of careful use, they adhere to the following practices:

• Fair Labour
• Fair Trade
• Sustainability

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