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introduction to skin care Organic skincare is all the rage at the moment. We are constantly bombarded with advertisements highlighting the organic credentials of either a product or brand, and the popularity of organic skincare products is as obvious to work out from the adverts in the magazines that we read as it is in the conversations we have with our friends. Whilst most of us have a good idea as to what standards we would expect food labeled as organic - specifically organic vegetables and fruits - to be produced under, it is not so easy to articulate what we expect out of a beauty product labeled as organic. The differences are, in fact, not that great. As we might expect, for a product to be labeled organic it has to have a transparent pedigree for each of its ingredients. That means that the use of fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides is a no-no for any ingredient that is destined to end up in a product sold as organic. Many people chose organic skin care products because they feel that by avoiding these chemicals they are making a positive choice for their health. The skin is the largest organ in the body, and it absorbs of course, so the desire to avoid chemicals, such as those found in fertilisers and pesticides, is easy to understand. For any ingredient to be called organic there has to have been a complete lack of any form of chemical on the land that it is grown in for over three years. In addition to avoiding the dubious connection between chemicals and our skin, organic skincare products also have the potential to lower our carbon footprint. Synthetic fertilisers and pesticides are often petroleum-based, and the benefits of moving away from any manufacturing process which requires fossil fuels is, at this point, fairly self evident. Organic ingredients also have the benefit of avoiding the damaging environmental effects that conventional synthetic pesticides and herbicides can bring with them. These chemicals can get into the food chain, which is obviously bad news for ecosystems. In addition, fertilizers can potentially leach into the water through surface runoff and cause eutrophication. Certified organic skin care products - that is skin care products that have been certified by a legislative body as being fully organic - will become more common in the UK in the next few years. For now the distinction between products that advertise that they are ‘Organic’ and ‘100% organic’ is an important one; the first means that the product contains a certain, unspecified percentage of at least one organic product, the latter means that all the ingredients used in that product are organic.