When Handmade Soap is Not Better

Hi Soaperific fans. I've been tooling around the internet on lots of soap sites checking out the awesome wares of the talented people I share the industry with. There are some really amazing soaps and soap makers out there. One thing bothered me though. Often I saw "all natural" advertised, but when I looked at the ingredient list there were chemicals like sodium laureth sulfate (not to be confused with sodium lauryl sulfoacetate)and diazolidinyl urea. The FDA deems these chemicals as GRAS (generally recognized as safe), but the EWG says they are high on the list of harmful ingredients. I don't agree with everything the EWG stands for. In fact most of the time I think they are eccentric and one sided in their view. It has been argued that all things are bad if you use too much of it. You can make your own decisions about the products you use, but consider this. Let's say, your shampoo has 20 ingredients and 19 of those ingredients are on the EWG's list of top carcinogens, you'd probably look for another brand right? People look for natural products because they don't want the garbage peddled in the main stream. So maybe its just me being...Well, me, but I really get irked when I see "all natural" on a product that contains even fragrance oil. Fragrance oil in my opinion is safe for the most part, if its phthalate free, but natural it is not. If there was one good thing the EWG is wonderful for, I would say it is the availability of Skin Deep. This site can be used by anyone to find the danger level of any one ingredient. I use it frequently when trying to decide what to use in my soap. The one thing they stink at is this campaign of trying to get everything in a soap bar listed on the label. What I mean is, if there is water in a soap (which there is) they want the water analyzed and each micro ingredient in the water listed on the label. This would make most labels so long that it would take a few pages of chatter that no one would care to read because it would be so long, but I digress. Bottom line: Read the labels...for now anyway. Make sure the basic ingredients suit your needs and don't believe someone when they say something is "all natural" when its not.