Natural vs Synthetic Ingredients

We hear it all the time … this cream is natural, this cleanser is sourced from naturally derived ingredients, this serum is made from natural butters … but what does this all mean? How can you tell if a product is really natural? If something isn’t natural, where did it come from? 

 

Well a natural ingredient is something that’s produced without any human intervention. So you will find natural ingredients in nature. If an ingredient isn’t natural, we consider it to be synthetic. A synthetic ingredient is something you wouldn’t find in nature as it’s produced by humans, often in laboratories. But here is where things can get confusing, in some instances ingredients are considered nature identical, as they are found in nature but are refined or replicated via human intervention, and this remains to be a controversial topic as to whether nature identical ingredients are really natural. 

 

So how can you tell if a product is natural? Unfortunately in today's twisted world there is a lot of marketing trickery that exists which makes users think the product is natural, when in fact this is far from the case. A great example of this is when a product has the phrase “Organic Shea Butter” printed all over the bottle. This conveys the idea that the product is organic, but actually Shea butter is the only natural ingredient in the product, the other 100’s of ingredients could all be synthetic. As a result the only real way to determine if a product is natural is to read the ingredients label and contact the manufacturer. 

 

So what should you be using, natural or synthetic ingredients? Well it’s entirely up to you as each individual is different. Both natural and synthetic ingredients have many benefits and are valuable within the cosmetic world, which is why Cellular Cosmetics can produce both synthetic and natural products.

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