DEEP DIVE: What are the biggest myths and misunderstandings about organic cosmetics? with Gay Timmons

[Intro] Hey, everyone. Welcome to Facially Conscious. I'm Trina Renea, a medically-trained Master Esthetician here in Los Angeles, and I'm sitting with my rockstar co-host, Dr. Vicki Rapaport, a board-certified dermatologist with practices in Beverly Hills and Culver City, Rebecca Gadberry, our resident skincare scientist and regulatory and marketing expert, and Julie Falls, our educated consumer who is here to represent you. 

We are here to help you navigate the sometimes confusing and competitive world of skincare. Our mission is to provide you with insider knowledge on everything from product ingredients to medical procedures, lasers, fillers, and ever-changing trends.

With our expert interviews with chemists, doctors, laser reps and estheticians, you'll be equipped to make informative decisions before investing in potentially expensive treatments. 

It's the Wild West out there, so let's make it easier for you one episode at a time. 

Are you ready to discover the latest and greatest skincare secrets? Tune in and let us be your go-to girls for all things facially conscious. Let's dive in.

01:26 Rebecca Gadberry: Hello, everyone. This is Rebecca Gadberry. I'm the resident cosmetic scientist, marketing and education person around here for the skincare segment of the industry. I am sitting here with…Σ

01:41 Trina Renea: I'm Trina Renea. I'm the resident esthetician at Facially Conscious. Welcome. Hello.

01:48 Rebecca Gadberry: Hello, it's nice to be here with you.

01:51 Trina Renea: You as well. I love our deep dives and when we get into it.

01:54 Rebecca Gadberry: I was just going to say that. 

01:56 Trina Renea: And have fun.

01:57 Rebecca Gadberry: we have a really good deep dive today with a lady that I have known for a few decades. 

02:04 Trina Renea: Wow! 

02:05 Rebecca Gadberry: I won’t say we're old, but, yeah. And she has taught me so much about organic. She's one of the icons in the industry as far as organic Cosmetics are concerned. 

02:17 Trina Renea: It's such a huge industry.

02:20 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, it is, and it's growing. You know that it is a little over $10 billion last year. It's going to almost double that or more than double that by 2030. I was really shocked.

It's not the same as natural, so we're going to talk about what the difference is.

02:36 Trina Renea: A lot more rules, I think.

02:38 Rebecca Gadberry: Absolutely. Her name is Gay Timmons, in case any of you out there are going, “ I think they're talking about Gay.” Have you read any of her blog posts on her ohohorganic.com?

02:51 Trina Renea: I have not, but I'm super excited to dive into this. Hopefully, you'll tell me after the show where I can go and see it.

02:59 Rebecca Gadberry: Actually, if you just look in the show notes for today's episode, or if you go to faciallyconscious.com…

03:08 Trina Renea: She'll be up under Guest.

03:10 Rebecca Gadberry: She'll be under Guest and then we'll be posting some of her blog posts from her blog on ours. So you'll be able to read them there as well. I hope she becomes a friend of the show, because she's such a strong resource. I know we've got her scheduled several times during the rest of the year.

But before we bring her on, I would like to give you some background for who she is. Like I said, she's one of the icons in the organic segments of the industry. She was in organic cosmetics before organic cosmetics became a thing. When there wasn't a lot of money to make from it, she was still there, still believing in it, still leading us towards that.

She started working in the agricultural products field, no pun intended, about 40 years ago. Then in 1991, she started working exclusively with organic ingredients. In 2000, she founded Oh, Oh Organic, which is a company committed to supplying certified-organic, sustainable, non-GMO ingredients to the cosmetic industry, while also helping companies become compliant with US and international standards for organic claims. 

A lot of people don't realize that organic standards are different depending upon the region or the country that you're in. We'll talk about that today.

Gay Timmons is, again, her name, and she is the president of the board of the Natural and Organic Health and Beauty Alliance, which is a trade association that provides resources to companies working in the sector of the industry.

In the early 2000s, she helped shepherd the extension of organic regulations into the cosmetic industry. When the California Organics Product Act passed in 2003, she was one of the leaders of shepherding the act into the industry as the act applied to companies that were selling in California.

Her motto is, “Save the planet. Look good doing it,” which she definitely does. You could see her picture.

05:29 Trina Renea: She's beautiful.

05:29 Rebecca Gadberry: She is. It also pretty much sums up our episode today. If you'd like to learn more about Gay and her company, please visit our Guest Page, like we were saying, at faciallyconscious.com, where you'll also find links to Gay's website Oh, Oh Organic. That's like, O-H-O-H organic.com. And her LinkedIn page. You'll also, again, find a few of Gay's posts in our blog.

So, Gay, welcome. We are so excited to have you here.

06:04 Gay Timmons: Thank you so much. I'm sitting here blushing in our audio world. I'm very flattered. Happy to be here.

06:16 Trina Renea: I think it's going to be an exciting thing for the public to understand, and our listeners, the difference between organic and just these natural ingredients that are out there. What's better? Why they would choose organic and does it matter? These kinds of things.

06:38 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, we'll be talking all about that. So, Gay, in a nutshell, what does organic mean when it comes to beauty? 

06:47 Gay Timmons: That's such a complicated question.

06:49 Rebecca Gadberry: I know. And people stand, like the skin and beauty, in the personal care aisle of Whole Foods and they think, “Oh, I'll just choose an organic product,” without really knowing how complicated that answer is. 

That's why we're asking it right at the top of the show. Let's get it all out there. Let's get it out into the light.

07:10 Gay Timmons: Okay. There's an easy way to kind of create buckets. One of the buckets is under the USDA, which is the Department of Agriculture, so it's from the food side of things, National Organic Program, so USDA NOP. That allows people to certify to a Federal regulation products that meet a whole myriad of rules. You got to get inspected once a year, everything has to be compliant with what the regulations are in that law, and those laws are becoming more and more strict as we speak, as a matter of fact. We can touch on that later.

Then we're going to go to the next category, which are private standards, organic standards. Because it's so demanding chemically to formulate things like hair care and certain actives that we want to use and certain things like emulsifiers so that you can use both oil and water in a formula, there have grown up over the years, really starting since about 2008, a couple of organic standards that are not laws, private standards.

COSMOS is one of them you'll see. NSF 305, which is an American standard through NSF/ANSI. Then there's another called— I'm blanking on it. Which is another standard out of Europe. And it's much stronger, I would say, in Europe. 

That's the second category, where you can get certified to a specifically cosmetic standard.

09:03 Rebecca Gadberry: So, the standard in Europe is stronger than the standard in the US?

09:08 Gay Timmons: No, it's just completely different. We do not have a cosmetic standard under law in the US. We have a food standard. So if your cosmetics happen to meet that food standard, you can get it certified to that food standard. If you need to use something like an emulsifier or certain approved preservatives, then you need to go into those standards that are privately written and designed specifically for the cosmetic industry as opposed to being designed for the food industry.

Then the third bucket, things where people don't get certified, they just do their level best to get as much organic content as possible. You see a lot of those products, probably more of those products than you will of the other two certified products. Certification is much more challenging, but it teaches you a lot about your company.

And then the fourth bucket are people who use some organic in their product, because they're trying to move into a more sustainable way of creating beauty products. So you will see those, it'll list them out in the ingredients statement, usually with an asterisk where it says, there'll be a little asterisk and then it'll have ‘organic’ or ‘non-GMO’ or the different categories of sustainable sorts of products.

I really look at it those four ways.

10:43 Rebecca Gadberry: Is sustainable the same thing as organic?

10:49 Gay Timmons: I would say that certified-organic, under the agricultural regulation, is the most sustainable standard for ingredients, and I say that because now that we've had this industry for more than 50 years, I think. I need to kind of look at that. I forget. There was a lot of organic farming going on before we had a law. 

But they've actually done a lot of research and we have found, for example, through multiple studies that organic agricultural methods sequester CO2 significantly, like 12.6% CO2 is pushed into the soil and stored in the soil as opposed to conventional agriculture where they're using synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. That ends up putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, which is the problem causing…

11:57 Rebecca Gadberry: We're going through, yeah. I had no idea about that. That's fascinating.

12:03 Gay Timmons: There's some good, hard science now to support what most of us could kind of just tell by observation was a better way of producing food. Now that we use those food ingredients for cosmetics, I would say that's the most sustainable ingredient source.

There are a few other things that kind of fall into that category that we can talk about.

12:26 Trina Renea: Being in the organic world, I'm sure that regular food looks really horrendous to you.

12:33 Gay Timmons: it doesn't, really. It kind of depends. I learned a long time ago that, usually, you can find sort of the top 10 root vegetables are going to absorb a lot more from the soil. So if you're using a lot of synthetics and a lot of petrochemicals in that soil management, root vegetables are going to be higher in that chart of having more of those things you may not want.

And then there's certain things. I don't have it memorized, but I think strawberries is at the top of the list. They use really a lot of pesticides on strawberries.

Generally, you can you can Google that if you want to really look at your food. I have used organic food for the most part because, to me, it's so much more about climate change. I've been aware of this for 30 years, so I want to see those farmers succeed and I want to see the demand for organic ingredients grow. That's why I started my company and why I stick to using organic and providing organic ingredients to our customers.

13:52 Rebecca Gadberry: Can any cosmetic ingredient also be organic? Can you make any ingredient organic?

14:00 Gay Timmons: In theory, I think we probably will be able to pretty soon. I think one of the issues is going to be— well, let me back up on that. The easiest way to do it is with the simplest ingredients, so all of the vegetable oils and butters. I have an organic Vitamin E, for example. It does tend to be that Vitamin E is more expensive than most vitamins, I'll admit. And most of the essential oils can be produced that way.

Those are really simple, minimally-processed ingredients. Then when you go to the next level where you're talking about let's just take those vegetable oils and fractionate them. So if you want stearic acid or lauric acid or that kind of thing, you can do that mechanically. We have organic glycerin.

So the rule under organic production for the processors is that you cannot change the molecule and you cannot use— actually, that's not their rule. They don't have that in that law. I'll back that up. You cannot use prohibited chemical reactions. You have to use mechanical processing.

Fractionating oils, for example, you can do with water and pressure. Esterifications, transesterification, temperature, like when they want to fractionate any of the saturated fats, palm oil, coconut oil, some of the butters, you can do it with heat and cold. You can get a palm olein or a palm stearin. One's a more solid phase and the other is a more liquid phase, and you can do that with temperature. So you can make increasingly sophisticated subparts of ingredients. 

And then those people who understand that a lot of the molecules that they end up further processing come from petrochemicals. The issue is can you find an equivalent function from something that is not made from a petrochemical. Increasingly, people are finding those. They're making different kinds of chemicals from plants that eventually probably could be from organic plants, and they don't involve the use of petrochemicals.

Again, to go back to the climate change issue, the petrochemicals are the problem.

16:57 Rebecca Gadberry: With climate change. They're causing the climate to heat up. I think right now, they're saying this is the coolest summer that we will experience for the rest of our lives. Kind of goes to what we're talking about here.

17:10 Trina Renea: It's so hot.

17:12 Rebecca Gadberry: I know, I know.

17:13 Gay Timmons: I know. I have a friend in LA who just sent— and I'm on the Bay in San Francisco. It's very reasonable and lovely here. But he sent a thing of his car dash saying it was 110.

17:25 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, in LA. 

I'm going to back up for just a second and do kind of a little recap for our listeners, because not everybody has a chemistry background who listens to us. We have a lot of consumers out there and a lot of non-scientists. 

I just want to recap, anytime you're looking at something from nature, whether it's a plant oil or it's a tea that's taken from dried leaves, whatever you're looking at that has grown in a field, let's put it that way, it's composed of a group of chemicals. 

So, when Gay says we esterify or whatever we're looking for, the stearin, whatever chemical she's talking about, those are naturally in the plant. We don't call them out because we don't want to say 350 different chemicals just to describe a plant oil, so we call it by the plant's name. But if you wanted to get technical, you could say these are the family of chemicals that are in this plant oil.

And when we go back and we process in order to get more chemicals to use in the industry, because if anybody's been listening to all the podcasts at the very beginning of when I joined, we talked about the fact that all ingredients are chemicals. That the name that we call an ingredient in the industry is a chemical.

18:58 Trina Renea: So there's natural or organic. It's still a chemical.

19:00 Rebecca Gadberry: It's still a chemical. No matter where it comes from, I'm still a cosmetic chemist, which is why we call it a chemist because we work with chemicals.

So when Gay is talking about all of these chemicals, they're there anyway. We're not putting them into the products from petroleum. We're putting them into the products when it's organic from plants that are grown agriculturally according to this organic standard. Is that correct, Gay?

19:33 Gay Timmons: Absolutely. I think that the big connection is that as we move away from petrochemicals, simply by virtue of the fact that the demand for gasoline will go down as we move increasingly into EVs, which is already happening in California.

19:56 Rebecca Gadberry: Electric vehicles. 

19:59 Gay Timmons: Yeah, and the New York Times came out and said the demand, I don't know, three four weeks ago, the demand for gasoline is going to plummet in five years. And what that means is that all of those by products that are used so frequently in the cosmetic industry are going to become very expensive and harder to get. Because when you take crude oil, which is what they make gasoline from, 47% of it is gasoline and the rest of it is all the stuff we make into hexane and propylene glycol and plastics.

20:39 Trina Renea: Interesting. 

20:40 Rebecca Gadberry: Even glycerin. Glycerin can be a petrochemical.

20:47 Gay Timmons: You can also make glycerin out of any oil, basically.

20:50 Rebecca Gadberry: Right, whether it comes from an animal fat or…

20:55 Gay Timmons: Well, my favorite thing is, all of a sudden, one day I went, “Duh.” Vegetable oils and oils are triglycerides, glyceride being the operative word there.

21:06 Rebecca Gadberry: For glycerin. Oh, my goodness. 

21:12 Gay Timmons: When you break those triglycerides off that glycerin backbone, which is how that molecule is held together, all of a sudden, you have all these other wonderful chemicals to use that do other things individually in cosmetics and in other parts of our lives.

21:32 Trina Renea: So it would be proactive right now to start looking away from the petroleum products, because in 5 years, it's going to become very expensive. Start finding alternatives.

21:44 Rebecca Gadberry: Everything will be: your plastic industry, your paint industry, any industry that uses petrochemicals, the price is going to go up. So start looking, if you're investing, for companies that are developing technology that are alternatives to petrochemical.

22:01 Gay Timmons: Absolutely. Or buy a farm. Either one.

22:06 Trina Renea: So, let me ask you a big question here. Are organic cosmetics better than those that aren't organic, for people to use?

22:16 Gay Timmons: It depends on the person and it depends on what you mean by the word ‘better’. One of the things that I look at when you use the word ‘better’ is it better for the planet? On that hand, absolutely. If you want to make an impact and you want to contribute and you can afford to then, by all means, organic is better because you're going to be supporting more organic farmers, and that's going to be better for the climate and for soil and for these horrible temperatures we're dealing with now.

But then I think there are other issues. I don't know if we're going to get into green chemistry, but I think the chemical industry as a whole is being looked at much more rigorously in terms of what are the effects of different products that people are using, because they use different chemicals. 

If the manufacturing of that chemical is a real problem for the environment, you'll see, for example, a lot of people are trying to replace BHA and BHT right now, because we know…

23:45 Rebecca Gadberry: Those are preservatives.

23:47 Gay Timmons: Yeah, it's an antioxidant and it is a real problem downstream. Environmentally, we know that it's pretty toxic, not good for people and different issues. That kind of thing. So, increasingly, we're looking at those sorts of effects that go from not just you put it on your face but who made the molecules that went into the stuff you put on your face and how did they get there. 

And what happened to the people who made them? That's the other thing. I always wonder. You know, the people who work in chemical manufacturing plants, what are the byproducts or the other effects of that? 

It's a pretty holistic system, in my mind.

24:33 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, and I think that's what green chemistry is about, but let's do just a podcast on green chemistry. I think it's a really important topic, but it's not organic.

24:40 Trina Renea: Didn’t we do that?

24:41 Rebecca Gadberry: No, we haven't talked about green chemistry yet.

24:43 Trina Renea: We talked about natural, green.

24:45 Rebecca Gadberry: We did, but we didn't talk about green chemistry, which is a new way of handling chemicals from their creation to their use to their dispensing or to their elimination, if you will. It's a very interesting concept. A lot of people misunderstand it because we say ‘green’ when we're talking about things like, “Oh, it's a green product,” or green and clean or whatever. That's not the same as green chemistry.

What Gay is talking about is where the chemical industry, not just the cosmetic chemical industry, but all chemicals are going. And in California, I think we have some acts now that are green chemistry acts that we are all going to be adhering to. 

25:38 Trina Renea: And this is all to save the planet mostly?

25:40 Rebecca Gadberry: It's to save the planet.

25:41 Trina Renea: Yeah, as a whole.

25:43 Rebecca Gadberry: But it's also to help humanity and animals. At UCLA, we were one of the very first to introduce a Green Chemistry Degree. There's a lot going on here.

Gay, when we're talking about all of this, as a formulator, I know that when I look at source materials I now look away from petrochemicals and look at other sources. I don't look at animals either, so that pretty much leaves you plant and mineral.

Mineral is not organic. That can't be organic, can it? So it's eliminated.

26:22 Gay Timmons: Doesn’t come from a farm. If it doesn't come from a farm or a plant, no.

26:29 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay. So when I choose an ingredient that is sourced from a plant, and I'm not talking about a petroleum plant. I'm talking about a plant that grows out of the ground.

26:42 Gay Timmons: Botanical.

26:43 Rebecca Gadberry: A botanical plant. When I choose something from that, that may or may not be organic. Is that correct?

26:50 Gay Timmons: Absolutely. The organic you have to have one of the certifications. And I would point out that's a really important thing. I think what you're talking about, this is the thing I think of, is what is the palette of materials that a formulator works with?

I think from the time I started working with this really on an intimate level in terms of really working with formulators the last 23 years, it's just grown exponentially. It's very exciting to me to see what is becoming available.

27:29 Trina Renea: But who regulates that, all those people? Who keeps them on point?

27:36 Gay Timmons: That's about to start happening a little bit more than it has. People say, “The cosmetic industry is not regulated.” I would beg to differ. I know that Rebecca agrees with me on this. It's like the FTC, the FDA, the USDA if you're using organic.

27:52 Rebecca Gadberry: The Business Bureau, there's so many.

27:56 Gay Timmons: The Departments of Health in various states, the county health people in various cities…

28:02 Rebecca Gadberry: The DOJ.

28:04 Trina Renea: Do people show up at your door and they're like, “Hello, we heard you have some organics here.”

28:08 Rebecca Gadberry: No, it's more like a complaint-driven.

28:10 Gay Timmons: Actually, they do. In the state of California, if you…

28:13 Rebecca Gadberry: Oh, for organic, yeah.

28:16 Gay Timmons: In the state of California, we have an Organic Cosmetic Law. I believe we're the only state to have that.

28:21 Rebecca Gadberry: Can you elaborate on that? 

28:25 Gay Timmons: That's the California Organic Products Act that you talked about. When they implemented the Food Act, they didn't want to degrade the value of the word ‘organic’ by having organic everything else, but none of those things had any compliance requirements. So we added language. It's not very long. It's like three columns in a 80-page regulation, because the state of California wholly adopted the organic food regulation and then we added the language about cosmetics.

We just have a few restrictions within that, because it was new. And that is that if you're going to use the word ‘organic’, at least 70% of the organic content has to be certified to the USDA NOP and you have to be able to prove that.

So if you're buying an organic ingredient, you need to have the certificate from the person, from the company bought it from, and that certificate needs to match the invoice. This is a problem we're about to run into that effective March of next year, they used to allow traders. You could buy organic ingredients and resell them if you didn't change the label or the container and you didn't have to be certified. Now, everybody has to be certified.

29:54 Trina Renea: That's good.

29:57 Gay Timmons: The state of California, also, so you have to have that 70%, you have to register if you are doing business in the state. So if you manufacture or own a brand in the state of California and you make an organic claim elsewhere other than just in the ingredients, so if you're saying it's made with organic ingredients, then you have to be registered with the state of California as an organic producer through the Department of Health…

30:25 Rebecca Gadberry: But not anywhere else in the country.

30:27 Gay Timmons: No.

30:28 Trina Renea: Which makes me think I want to only buy my products from California, organic.

30:34 Gay Timmons: We also have a proactive enforcement. The state of California is required to, if they have a thousand— I can't remember what the percentage is. It's been a long time since I've talked to them about it. But it's like they have to do 3%, or something like that, of all the registrants randomly every year. 

So every year, they will issue a report to those who want to see it saying that we either went into stores and took samples, and if we found a problem, we visited that company and said, “We want to your organic certificates for the ingredients you're claiming.” Or, “How in the world did you…”

I just looked at a label the other day. The top three or four ingredients on an ingredients statement, they're the majority of it. I saw a product. It said, “Contains organic ingredients,” on the front and on the side, but there's no way it's 70%. So that is not in compliance with the state of California requirement and that's a nationally-sold brand.

So the state of California could very easily knock on their door and say , “Please fix this,” or “How are you going to fix it,” which is normally what they would say.

31:55 Rebecca Gadberry: Where do you find that report?

32:01 Gay Timmons: Through the Department of Health and there is a person who— it's through the organic program, actually.

32:07 Rebecca Gadberry: That's what I was thinking it would have to be. Okay.

32:10 Gay Timmons: Yeah. The state of California organic program, which is the California Organic Program, through the Department of Ag, you can start through the Department of Ag. I think they have a link through the Department of Health. But if you Google it, they will tell you what they've done.

I don't think that they disclose names of companies, because those are usually ongoing and they don't want to besmirch anybody's reputation. They just want to get them to fix it. It's not a punitive program. It's really just proactively protecting consumers so that they actually get what they think they're getting.

32:47 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay. Got it. If I can find it, I will post it in our blog.

32:51 Gay Timmons: I can find you a link for it. I’ll send one. 

32:53 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay.

32:54 Gay Timmons: Did that answer your question about enforcement? 

33:00 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, about enforcement. Yes.

33:04 Trina Renea: And besides the benefit of helping the world using organic products and really trying to help with that, is there another benefit to using organic products for your skin?

33:22 Gay Timmons: I think if they're well-formulated. Just like anything else, you need a good formulator, you need good ingredients, and you need to be able to kind of put your money where your mouth is.

I've seen some not very good, just like everything else. In my experience, there are people who are sort of artists within any industry who are the top of the line. And so I think those people are really good.

33:52 Trina Renea: But if somebody wanted to find, like an esthetician let's say wanted to start an organic skincare line. How in the world does she find the lab that she can trust that's going to be really good, or the chemist? How does somebody search that out?

34:13 Gay Timmons: I think that just takes experience. How do you find any product that works? It's the same thing.

34:19 Trina Renea: By trying things over and over.

34:21 Rebecca Gadberry: You can Google it and you would Google ‘organic private label skincare’. 

34:26 Trina Renea: I don't trust that because that’s a lot of marketing.

34:29 Rebecca Gadberry: Good to know your manufacturer.

34:32 Gay Timmons: I think that there are a couple of— let's put it this way. When I started in this industry, number one, people laughed at me. 

34:46 Rebecca Gadberry: “You wanna do what?”

34:47 Gay Timmons: “Who cares? They don't care. Nobody cares.” They do care. And there's so many people in that industry and you as an esthetician, you're going to have people who have far more sensitive skin.

Here I am in this industry where there are a lot of people who have chemical sensitivities. They know what they react to, so they want to know exactly what's in their product. That's one of the big advantages of organic, because if it is a certified product, they list exactly what's in that product. You don't always see that on a conventional product, because you don't know if there's incidentals, you don't know all kinds of other things which we can't get away with in the organic industry. we have to list everything.

So there is that. And I think if you have people who have chemical sensitivities or they're going through cancer treatments or they're pregnant or they're nursing a baby or they just have super sensitive skin, whatever the thing is, you have to find the thing that works for each of those populations.

I think that that's, unfortunately, what you have to kind of start with. You can always call me up. I’ll tell you who I know.

36:03 Trina Renea: Okay. Hey, everybody out there listening, you can call her. She just said it.

So does organic actually mean that the product is sustainable?

36:14 Gay Timmons: I think within the confines of the ingredient. And then you have to look at the whole…

36:20 Rebecca Gadberry: The package.

36:22 Trina Renea: But somebody who's creating an organic skincare line is probably going to be conscious of that.

36:29 Gay Timmons: They are.

36:31 Rebecca Gadberry: I'm going to differ with you, because I deal with a lot of brands. I can tell you that, no. They would like to be, but when they see how pricey and how limited the options are, they say, “Okay, well, we won't do that part. We'll make that a regular bottle.”

36:49 Gay Timmons: I think that the packaging is much harder to source than ingredients. Right now, like I said, there's just been an explosion in much safer, more plant-derived materials and more organic materials.

37:06 Rebecca Gadberry: For ingredients.

37:07 Gay Timmons: Yeah, there's just all kinds of stuff that's out there that's really interesting, but you don't have the same latitude of choice with packaging. 

I think we will, over time. I think they're starting to solve that. I was just in a lab and they told me that they couldn't buy something from a particular company because their carbon footprint was too high, but they didn't really know what it was.

I said, “So, what is their carbon footprint? How do you…”

37:41 Rebecca Gadberry: I don't know. 

37:42 Gay Timmons: How do you know that? So I think that there's all these issues. 

That's one of the things that we're doing internally, is we're looking at our carbon footprint. I was really lucky as a distributor to have a regulatory person who, after working with us for four years and kind of learning about the cosmetic industry went back to school to get a degree in sustainability. Now, she is consulting to help us really apply numbers. 

I think, increasingly, that's what you will see. What are the numbers? If you work with X number of organic farmers or you have X amount of organic content, and that somehow relates back to that 12.6% CO2 sequestration number, what does that say about how your products are in relation to other products?

38:40 Trina Renea: I have a question. What's the difference between an organic product and a product with organic ingredients?

38:48 Gay Timmons: Just exactly that. You can't always do all-organic. Again, if we go back to the two different— when I talked about the different standards, I talked about the food standard. That's mainly anhydrous products, so products without water. Lip balms, body balms, serums, body oils, things like that, you can make those pretty easily to the organic food standard because they're all oils, basically.

When you go into hair care especially or anything where you want to have an emulsion, you need to go into those private standards. And in those standards, they have looked at the other ingredients and approved them for use in an organic product. Generally, they're doing that to go back to the principles of green chemistry, that's how those molecules need to be made. They can't be GMO. They have to be made using the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry. They have to be made from renewable resources which is botanical, plant-based products.

40:07 Rebecca Gadberry: And sustainable.

40:09 Gay Timmons: Those are your two main categories for certified products. And then there's the vast majority of people who, again, as you've just said Rebecca, you can't always afford to do it all at once. I know even as our company has grown, our expenses have gone down, our prices have gone down, because as our volume goes up we can do a better job to supply people.

40:37 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay. I'm going to bottom line this. We're going to go back to where we started. We are a consumer. We're standing in the personal care aisle at Whole Foods, and we're looking for organic. How do we know what we're looking at? How do we make a decision?

40:55 Gay Timmons: Okay. I'm going to do my simplest way. Eat it, like lip balm. You want a certified-organic product. You can tell it's certified organic because, on the back, it is required by law that it says who certified them. So it will say, “Certified organic by Oregon Tilth,” for example, my certifier.

There are 80 different certifiers but it always has to say that. If it does not have that statement on it, it is not certified. If you are then looking, if you have particular chemical sensitivities or babies or whatever, you also then can look for some of those private standards. And it will say, “COSMOS, NATRUE, NSF 305”. Those have been inspected. A third-party has looked at them and you can have the assurance that that is what you're are going to get.

Again, you look for that statement, “Certified by,” and it'll also say what standard it's certified to.

41:57 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay. Like I see Ecocert a lot. Is that a standard?

42:00 Gay Timmons: Ecocert is something you're going to see less and less of. They are a certifier. They certify to the COSMOS standard. It used to Ecocert standard. About five years ago, they started transitioning everything to the COSMOS standard. Because there were six standards in Europe and they merged them. They harmonized them all under COSMOS.

A lot of people still think of Ecocert because they're one of the largest certifiers, so you see their name more frequently. They're a very good certifier. 

42:32 Trina Renea: But, basically, if you're looking for an organic product in Whole Foods or something, you want to turn it over and see if it's certified by someone.

42:40 Rebecca Gadberry: A certification agency.

42:41 Gay Timmons: Yes. Absolutely. And then if it's too rich for your blood, then you start looking at how many organic ingredients and are the top-line ones. Water is excluded. There is no organic water, just like there are no organic minerals. But you want to look at those top-line ingredients and see what percentage of these products have an asterisk and say they're organic. That means you're supporting organic farming. They may be a little less expensive. 

43:14 Trina Renea: We only have about five more minutes of this episode and we're definitely going to have you back to explain some of these, define some of these words that people ask about in the green, clean and natural world, so that's going to be exciting.

But can you just, as we're kind of closing up here, tell me what are the biggest myths and misunderstandings about organic skincare? Just the biggest. I know there's a lot.

43:41 Rebecca Gadberry: That’s a huge question.

43:43 Trina Renea: I know and I'm like summing it up too. That's a sum-up question.

43:49 Gay Timmons: I think that a lot of people, first, let's speak just to certified organic. Most people that I have talked to in the consumer world don't understand that we are inspected every year. This is not a casual thing.

44:05 Rebecca Gadberry: As an organic certification, you're inspected. 

44:07 Gay Timmons: If it's a certification, I have mine coming up. It will take me five hours of proving how many pounds of organic sunflower oil I bought and how many I sold, because I go through a complete audit. Every single certified-organic product, whether it's a distributor selling the ingredients or a finished product, if it's your food or your cosmetics, goes through that process.

The same thing is true for those private standards. They have to go through inspections every single year. And those ingredients are the same situation. If somebody says they have an organic ingredient, they are required by law to have an organic certificate in their file. Increasingly, those will be enforced by both USDA and the state of California, in our case. I think Minnesota is doing something along enforcement. Not sure, but I believe they are.

So I think that's the best thing they can do. And I think that's the biggest myth, is that people don't think it's really regulated, but it is highly regulated. It costs a lot of money and it's a big commitment.

45:18 Trina Renea: But you're saying in California it's highly regulated.

45:21 Gay Timmons: No. The regulation for the word ‘organic’, ‘certified organic’ is regulated across country. In fact, the world. It's International.

45:32 Trina Renea: Great.

45:33 Rebecca Gadberry: But certified organic is different than saying organic. For instance, if organic is in a brand name, that doesn't necessarily mean that the product is organic. And the way that that works is kind of tricky, but the FDA says— and because, remember, the FDA regulates cosmetics. That's a primary regulatory agency for cosmetics in this country. If the FDA regulates according to a chemical standard for organic, which is…

46:07 Gay Timmons: But the FTC has shut people down who have ‘organic’ in their name that don't have organic in their product. And fined them in the many, many millions of dollars. So the FTC is also looking at consumer protection of abuse of this term.

Since there are other regulatory agencies overseeing it, they have something to point to and say, “You're lying. You don't meet these criteria.”

46:40 Rebecca Gadberry: Excellent. Okay. I'm going to leave it there. I'm not going to go into the details. I think you summed it up really well, Gay, as usual.

46:51 Trina Renea: And if something says it's natural, that doesn't mean it's organic.

46:54 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. We don't even know what ‘natural’ means.

46:57 Gay Timmons: Organic is natural, but natural is not organic. 

47:02 Trina Renea: Which one is better?

47:04 Gay Timmons: Organic.

47:07 Rebecca Gadberry: If you're looking for natural, I think organic delivers on what you're looking for, whereas natural is not a regulated nor clearly-defined term. 

47:17 Trina Renea: Right. So if you're really, truly looking for really natural products, look for the word ‘organic’.

47:23 Rebecca Gadberry: No, look for the word ‘certified organic’.

47:25 Trina Renea: ‘Certified organic’ on the back of the label, where it says ‘certified by’.

47:29 Rebecca Gadberry: Exactly.

47:30 Trina Renea: Okay, I'm learning. I'm understanding.

47:31 Gay Timmons: Underneath who made the responsibility statement, where it says who made the product and where they are. It has to be directly underneath that.

47:41 Rebecca Gadberry: Which is at the bottom, usually the back panel or the side panel.

47:45 Trina Renea: All right. Well, that was an excellent talk. That definitely cleared up some things in my mind and helped me learn a lot more about organic ingredients.

A little side note. When I went to Europe, I was in Italy. This is before the word ‘organic’ became a thing in the United States. But I was eating tons of pasta and I never got bloated. I was walking a lot and stuff but I was like, “Something about the food here is different than when I eat pasta in the United States.” So I was like, “I'm going to look for organic ingredients that I can find there that aren't full of things that are going to bloat me and make me…” You know, there's something to this.

There wasn't a lot out there at the time, but, man, it blew up, this whole organic thing, which I'm so glad.

48:39 Rebecca Gadberry: It didn’t bloat up, it blew up. 

48:42 Trina Renea: Yeah, but it blew up since I came upon that discovery in my mind.

48:48 Rebecca Gadberry: So there are personal benefits. One of them is you'll live longer if the heat doesn't get too bad. That's another way to look at it. 

Gay, it has been enlightening, as always. An eye-opening, as always, with you. We really appreciate you being here.

49:07 Trina Renea: Yes, thank you so much.

49:08 Gay Timmons: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.

49:11 Trina Renea: I'm really excited to also dive into some of your blogs and read more about you. This is really an eyeopener for me, so this is part of my learning process that I'm going to have fun with, so thank you.

49:26 Rebecca Gadberry: And everybody at home, remember to look at faciallyconscious.com/blog. You'll go right to some of the blog posts from Gay, but we'll also be running more throughout the year.

Thank you.

49:40 Trina Renea: Thank you. Thanks for coming, Gay.

49:42 Gay Timmons: Thank you. Bye.

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