The Aloe Trick

More Tricks of the Trade here...

Aloe vera is an amazing plant. Its skin-healing properties are well-known. We use aloe vera gel in some of our moisturizers. The problem is that it can be used to perform a very clever trick at the expense of the organic consumer.

Do you know what sleight-of-hand is? It's when a stage magician makes you focus on something flashy in his right hand while he's doing something tricky with his left hand that he doesn't want you to notice. Some "organic" body care companies use aloe to do something similar.

Aloe vera gel is available in a very, very concentrated form—a dry powder, in fact. (Nothing wrong with that so far.) It's so concentrated that a very, very small amount dissoved in ordinary tap water makes reconstituted aloe vera gel. How small? One two-hundredth of the amount of water by weight—or one-half of one percent.

Now, something like a body lotion or a shampoo is normally somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% water and 30% core, or functional, ingredients: emollients or detergents with chemical preservatives added in. They're nearly always a mixture of synthetic oleochemicals and/or petrochemicals. Yes, even at your "natural" products store.

What if you were a manufacturer who didn't want to use certified organic oils, butters and waxes in your lotion, but wanted to call it "organic?" After all, organic, truly natural ingredients are expensive. Organic essential oils are expensive and hard to find, too. It's so much easier to use chemicals and conventional ingredients. And you can't beat the price of tap water!

Here's what you do: mix your conventional chemicals with your tap water, but first you put that tiny amount of organic aloe powder in the water. Voila: your lotion, shampoo, conditioner or body wash is magically now 70% ORGANIC. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain adding in the olefin sulfonate, sodium lauroamphoacetate, cocamidopropyl betaine, stearic acid, cetyl alcohol, methyl paraben, sodium benzoate, etc., none of which, by the way, originate from organic agriculture. Instead, look at the water: it's CERTIFIED ORGANIC.

The diagram to the left illustrates the concept. See the tiny white speck at the bottom of that test tube? That's the actual organic ingredient that goes into the mix. An eight ounce bottle of 70% CERTIFIED ORGANIC body care product only has to contain a mere 0.028 ounces of organic powder, a very tiny amount indeed—about the weight of a pea—to make the claim that the product is 70% CERTIFIED ORGANIC.

Does this strategy strike you as a little misleading?