I recently had the opportunity to try out some products from natural Australian brand Moogoo, and their associated cosmetics line Dusty Girls. Moogoo are a cult brand for people with sensitive skin, so I was excited to try it out for myself.
Moogoo and Dusty Girls are on the natural marketing side of things, but they’re relatively sensible – though not always consistent.
For example, they have these encouragingly sensible statements that I wholeheartedly agree with, and address common myths that natural (and non-natural!) brands often exploit for sweet sweet profits:
- We don’t claim that everything not natural is dangerous. Sometimes science can concentrate the beneficial effects from natural ingredients. And we use those ingredients ourselves. However, we do feel that some skin care products use poor quality ingredients because they are cheap and easy to manufacture in large quantities.
- If there are no preservation ingredients shown on the label, then the product will become contaminated with bacteria very quickly, just like any food. The bacteria cannot be seen or smelt. A poorly preserved cream can cause serious skin infection and eye damage if used on the face. Grapefruit Seed Extract and Essential Oils have been proven many times to be unreliable methods of keeping products free from bacteria. In our opinion, a tiny amount of an effective preservative is much safer on the skin than a large amount of bacteria.
- These “trials” and “studies” are not independent. They are performed by the company or its ingredient supplier. The trials are generally not published, are often not supplied when requested, and not able to be reviewed by scientific peers as all studies should be. This makes them meaningless. To find out if the ingredient has any peer reviewed evidence, try using Google Scholar which searches scientific articles (www.scholar.google.com)
- Therefore, if a cream is priced at $250 for 30ml, we would assume it has better ingredients. Unfortunately this is not the case at all. The price is dependent on the target market, not the formula.
- [citing the EWG] Many websites claim that almost anything else with a chemical name is toxic without providing the full references. Presumably the aim is to shock people. (BURN!)
But they also have statements that are a bit dubious:
- Moogoo pride themselves on not using certain ingredients such as paraffin oil (or mineral oil). They have some incorrect information on their site on this topic, such as that Aqueous Cream causes irritation due to paraffin oil, when in reality it’s probably due to the fact it contains SLS or preservatives or pretty much anything apart from the paraffin oil – I think this is a bit careless, since it’s information you can easily find with a quick Google search (here are some sources).
