My Love Hate Relationship with the Body Shop

When I first found out about all the nasty ingredients in cosmetics I owned a few items from the Body Shop. I thought that these items would probably be safe and to my shock they were actually some of the worst items that I owned. My camomile makeup remover had 8 different parabens. Back then I wanted to use up the products I had until they were finished but the ingredients were so bad in the makeup remover that I threw out the bottle with over half of the product still left.  After this I was ready to swear off The Body Shop and never shop there again.

After seeing a google ad for The Body Shop that advertised itself as “natural” I decided to go on their site and look at some ingredients in their products. Their ad looked similar to this (I just typed in The Body Shop in google):

Although their marketing is untruthful, it turns out they have reformulated a lot of their products from 2012. The chamomile make-up remover had different ingredients listed on their website:

I actually couldn’t believe this and thought that maybe the website wasn’t listing all of the ingredients, so I went to the store and checked it out for myself. Yep, those are for sure the ingredients. No parabens! Although it’s still not the best ingredient list most of the ingredients listed rate 0-1 on the cosmetic database. The most harmful ingredients being:

SODIUM LAURETH SULFATE (Rating 3 on Cosmetic Database. Foaming agent)
PHENOXYETHANOL (Rating 4 on Cosmetic Database. Fragrance Ingredient/Preservative).
SODIUM HYDROXIDE (Rating of 3 on Cosmetic Database. Denaturant; pH Adjuster).
POLYSORBATE-20 (Rating 3 on Cosmetic Database. Fragrance Ingredient.)

In my opinion none of these are as bad as parabens. The only one that I really don’t approve of is the Sodium Laureth Sulfate (keep in mind everyone has different standards of what ingredients they will and will not use).

I checked out some other products at The Body Shop. Some items seem to have a good list of ingredients while most don’t.  I couldn’t find any makeup that had safe ingredients or hair products (except for the Rainforest Coconut Hair Oil).

It seems as if the Body Shop is making an effort to make their products safer. I don’t really know how much of that I can trust because the Body Shop is owned by L’Oreal. I also highly disagree with how The Body Shop markets themselves. They market their products based on ingredients from nature when sometimes you can’t even find that ingredient in the actual product. And although I have never seen a poster using the word “natural” I have seen it all around the internet. The Body Shop also preaches about ethics. How ethical can they be while putting harmful ingredients in their products?

I have a love hate relationship with them because some of their products have good ingredients but only some. It seems as if they are making efforts to change and I do think that have great potential to make great safe products.