The Élaument Edit
★★★★★ 5.0 · Verified reviews
The 8 words brands use to trick you
Pick up whatever you washed your face with this morning. Read the front of it.
I paid extra for those words for years. Then four of us started making skincare, and I went looking for the rules that say what a brand in Australia has to prove before printing one on a box.
Here are eight of them, ranked by what they actually prove. The last one cannot be true.
Eight words, ranked by what they actually prove.
Nobody read the front of your moisturiser before it reached the shelf. Claims get tested after a product is already selling, and only if people complain. Strongest word first, and it gets worse from there.
08
Certified organic
Sounds like a certification
Any brand can call a product organic. There is no Australian rule setting how much of it has to be organic, and nothing to pass before the word goes on the box.
The logo is the part that means something. A mark from a certifier like ACO or COSMOS means an outside body set a standard and checked the formula against it. Without a logo, the word is the brand's own opinion of itself.
Required to mean
Nothing, unless a certifier's logo sits next to it.
07
Dermatologist tested
Sounds like proof
Tested tells you something happened. It does not tell you what.
No rule sets how many people had to be tested, what was measured, how long it ran, or what counts as a pass. A product that irritated half the people who tried it can still say dermatologist tested, and be telling the truth.
Required to mean
A test happened. Nothing about the result.
★★★★★
The absolute GOAT in skincare. Complete game changer and so incredibly simple.
Brylee · Verified buyer
06
Hypoallergenic
Sounds like a safety standard
The word sounds like a bar the product had to clear. There is no bar. No definition, no test, nothing to meet.
Each brand decides what it means, then prints it. Two products carrying the word might have been held to completely different standards, or to none, and the outside of the box will not tell you which.
05
Natural
Sounds like an ingredient promise
Nothing in a product has to be natural for the product to be called natural. There is no definition and no minimum amount.
A formula can be mostly water and synthetic emulsifiers, hold a plant extract at under one percent, and use the word without breaking any rule. We use it ourselves, and it is true when we do. That is the problem. The word cannot tell you which kind you are holding.
Required to mean
Nothing. No definition, no minimum percentage.
04
Unscented
Sounds like nothing was added
Raw ingredients smell. So when a brand wants a product to smell of nothing, it has two ways to get there. Leave out everything that smells, or add a fragrance whose only job is to cover the smell of the base. The industry calls the second one a masking fragrance.
Unscented describes what you smell. Fragrance-free describes what is in the bottle. One of those words sends you to the ingredients list. The other sends you away from it.
Required to mean
Nothing about the ingredients. A fragrance may have been added to make it smell of nothing.
Ours, in full
Four ingredients in the oil. Nine in the balm.
Both lists fit on the front of the bottle. Two of them appear in both formulas, so eleven ingredients cover the whole routine.
Cleansing Oil · 100ml
Macadamia oil, castor oil, MCT oil, rosemary extract.
Hydration Balm · 50g
Macadamia oil, jojoba oil, beeswax, sea buckthorn extract, black seed oil, vitamin E, chamomile extract, calendula extract, rosemary extract.
03
Clean
Sounds like a line in the sand
Clean has no legal meaning here. Nothing defines it, so nothing can fail it. Every brand using the word has drawn its own line, and no two lines match.
02
Non-toxic
Sounds like it passed something
Whether something is toxic depends on how much of it you are exposed to, how, and how often. On its own the word has nothing to measure.
No Australian threshold exists that a product has to clear before printing it, and no test it has to pass.
01
Chemical free
Sounds like the highest bar of all
Water is a chemical. Macadamia oil is a chemical. So is every plant extract on every label you have ever trusted.
No product on any shelf is free of chemicals. The ACCC, the body that polices misleading claims in Australia, said so in 2014. Its deputy chair told the industry it struggled to understand how the claim could possibly be accurate, since all products contain chemicals whether naturally occurring or not. Brands print it anyway.
Required to mean
Nothing. The claim cannot be true.
Sixty seconds, any shelf
So what can you check?
The back of the bottle. Australian law requires every cosmetic to carry an ingredients list, printed clearly, with the largest amounts first. A brand that gets it wrong can be penalised for it.
The front of the bottle is the part a brand writes for itself. The back is the part the law writes the rules for. Five things to do with that, next time you are standing in an aisle.
- Turn it over. Whatever is on the front, the ingredients list is the only part with rules behind it.
- Read the first three. Largest amounts come first, so that is where the product actually is.
- Find the hero. If the ingredient the brand named on the front sits near the bottom, there is very little of it in there.
- Count the lines. A long ingredients list cannot pretend to be a short one.
- Look for a logo, not a word. Organic means something when a certifier's mark sits beside it, and nothing on its own.
Verified reviews, averaging 5.0
What people say once the front of the bottle stops mattering.
★★★★★
Love love, my cleansing oil and my balm cream. Skin has never felt so amazing and glowy each day. Thank you thank you guys for bringing out products that have no nasties.
Juanita · Verified buyer
★★★★★
I have been using this amazing balm for a month now, my skin looks amazing, I have had so many compliments with how my skin is glowing. Highly recommend.
Maddy C. · Verified buyer
★★★★★
Best cleansing product I have ever used.
Kayla · Verified buyer
