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Should you trust the EWG?
What do you think? Here are my thoughts and a review of what the skin deep database really reflects.
http://www.dailydot.com/irl/environmental-working-group-cosmetics/
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9 Replies
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I think what they just did regarding formaldehyde hair treatments needed doing. There’s a lot of garbage in their site though.
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I really get a kick out of their EWG seal program where you can have cosmetics EWG Certified, but they charge 1% of revenues on that product for the seal. Now that’s a money-making scheme if you’ve ever seen one … going from “Safety Advocacy” to trying to get an annuity off of each product certified.
Many consumers do pay attention to EWG and I have clients who use it to screen proposed ingredients. So, rightly or wrongly, it’s one of those marketing issues that you do need to pay attention to on occassion.
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The EWG has its place, but must be read with some caution.
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The EWG may boast a learned panel of experts and consultants on their advisory boards but they probably have as many cranks, charlatans, loonies and “experts” in poor science there as there are in any other anti-progress pressure group - flat Earth societies or Elvis is alive and well and living on the Moon.
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in my experience, safety assessors/toxicologists always cite the CIR and SCCS as primary sources for their safety data - not one of them cites the EWG
to my mind, that really says it all
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Try to search for any basic cosmetic ingredient and EWG result will be almost always at the first page of google. Always I ignore it.
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@heraklit - I’ve always found that fact to be troubling. Raw material suppliers should do a better job of SEO.
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For me EWG translates into ‘Explanations Without Grounds’, never took them as part of the industry anyway.
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The problem with EWG is that clients (thankfully much less often than even 10 years ago) will sometimes approach you during the Product Development Phase and say “I want everything lower than a 2 on the EWG.” Fortunately the last few times this was brought up I was able to meet this challenge. It is the undeserved value that clients assign to this flawed website that can be the issue.
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