ORGANIC, VEGAN AND NATURAL RAW MATERIALS

DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A NATURAL, ORGANIC AND VEGAN RAW MATERIAL? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA OF HOW NATURAL, INNOVATIVE, AND CRUELTY FREE FORMULAS ARE DEVELOPED?

Due to the lack of regulatory legislation to regulate natural and organic cosmetics in Brazil, the beauty brands are responsible for establishing standards and definitions to prove that the developed product is indeed a natural product. It was with this in mind that we have decided to show you our Research and Development team’s routine here at Simple, and how we perform our research, how the development of new formulas is carried out, who our suppliers are, the challenges of maintaining the innovation and high-performance pillar allied to sustainability, and from all that, create and maintain our formulas development policy.

ON THE SUBJECT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, DID YOU KNOW THAT SIMPLE WAS THE FIRST REALCLEAN BEAUTY BRAND TO BRING A P&D TEAM TO THE COMPANY, SINCE ITS CREATION?

Yes, that’s for real! The idea of having our own P&D team was born together with Simple Organic as a brand back in 2017! Back then, there was already the need and concern in ensuring that, from our choice of suppliers to develop new products, up to the final product’s delivery, the whole chain would be composed of natural, organic, and vegan raw materials, free of questionable and problematic ingredients. In other words, to guarantee a true natural beauty! Beyond safety, sustainability, ethics and transparency, especially regarding the impact of every used raw material, Simple Organic also makes efforts to ensure that the productive process, ingredients and packages are planned and executed in a conscious and sustainable manner. To make it easier to understand and transparently explain why we choose each of our formulation’s ingredients, it is important to comprehend the difference between raw material types that compose natural, organic and vegan products.

Shall we?

NATURAL RAW MATERIALS

Natural raw materials are those derived from plants, animals, minerals, or microorganisms. There are also natural raw materials derived from other raw materials themselves. That’s really it! These ingredients are produced through a physical process or enabled by simple chemical reactions of natural raw materials. So, natural substances are those cultivated, harvested, created, and processed ecologically, and not synthetically produced, extracted or processed with petrochemical products or synthetic solvents, exposed to irradiation and/or genetically modified.

ORGANIC RAW MATERIALS

Organic raw materials are those originated from organic cultivation, this meaning that they are raw materials of exclusively vegetal origin, with sustainable and renewable production. For a cultivation or crop to be considered organic, it must combine the best environmental practices, an elevated level of biodiversity, and preservation of natural resources.

The input used in the production of organic raw materials must be of natural origin, safe, and ecologically correct, including fertilizers, soil correctives, and even the cleaning and disinfection products used at installations dedicated to vegetal production.
This way, many practices of conventional agriculture are incompatible with organic cultivation, like the use of pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), and products obtained from or through GMOs

The input originating from organic production must be obtained through transformation methos that ensure the maintenance of their organic integrity and the essential qualities of the products in every stage of the production chain.

That being said, organic inputs are basically butter, oils, waxes,
hydrolats, and oily extracts from plants.

DID YOU KNOW THATEVEN IF A RAW MATERIAL IS CONSIDERED NATURAL, IT DOES NOT MEAN IT IS ORGANIC OU VEGAN?

There are raw materials that are extracted from animal sources, such as animal glycerine, carmine pigment, lanoline, bee wax, among others. They are
considered natural but are not vegan or cruelty free. Just as with the water, argyle, and pigments from Simple Organic, which are natural but can’t be
classified as organic dure to their mineral origin.

In other ords, every organic raw material is natural, but that does not mean that every natural raw material is organic.

So, does this mean that water is not considered an organic ingredient?

The answer is YES! Water is a MINERAL compound, so it DOES NOT originate from an organic cultivation, and organic inputs are with no exceptions of VEGETAL origin.

VEGAN RAW MATERIALS

Vegan raw materials are all inputs that do not have animal origin and that are not tested on animals at any stage of production. This means that synthetic or problematic substances can be considered vegan.

Does this mean that a vegan product is not necessarily a natural product?

The answer is YES! You can be consuming a product with no ingredients of animal origin, but full of allergenic and non sustainable ingredients that directly impact the health of your skin and the environment.

Now that we have demystified the differences between each type of rawmaterial, we will explain how we initiate the choosing of each input to later transform them in the final products.

The first criteria for choosing raw material is that they must be proven to be natural, vegan and cruelty free. Even if natural and certified, we do not allow in our formulas any raw material that originates from or is tested on animals. This confirmation is done through a deep study of al tests and technical profiles that go together with the inputs.Another extremely important point, part of our product development policy, is prioritizing the creation of formulas that have the highest amount of organic raw materials as possible. As stated above, organic inputs arebasically butters, vegetal and essential oils, wakes, and plat extracts, which means formulating a high performance, natural, organic, and vegan productwith the highest possible percentage of organics is a huge challenge. Want toknow why?To make it as clear as possible, we will use the formulation of a liquid facial mask, an emulsion. Usually, to reach a high performance, innovativeproduct with this pharmaceutical form it is necessary to use other rawmaterials beside oils and butters. These are 100% natural, but can be considered organic, such as water, emulsifiers, thickeners, pigments, activesand preservatives. A facial mask is generally composed of 40% water, 7% emulsifier, thickener and moisturizer of natural origin, at least 15% of mineral pigment to ensure colouration and coating, around 2% of natural preservative and antioxidant, and a considerable percentage of active to ensure the products performance.Since a product’s formula must mandatorily reach 100% of ingredients, there is still the possibility of adding 35% of organic inputs to this formulation. On the other hand, in a watery solution with practically its whole formula composed of water, thickeners, moisturizers, and actives it ispractically impossible to add an organic input due to their pharmaceutical form, since butter, wax, and oil have no affinity with water, and to make the product stable it would be necessary to use an emulsifier, removing the product’s features that make it a solution in the first place.

That’s why Simple has the premise to always give priority to organic raw materials, when there is the possibility and the necessity to use them and make a product as organic as possible. However, as exemplified above, that is not always possible.

SO, DOES THAT MEAN THAT IT IS HARD TO FIND A HIGH-PERFORMANCE COSMETIC PRODUCT THAT IS 100% ORGANIC??

The answer is YES. For a product to be 100% organic, its formulation must be mandatorily composed by pure oils, or the combination of oils wakes and organic butters. However, there is always the necessity of using at least one antioxidant to keep the organoleptic features of the product, like appearance, colour and scent. Even if the concentration of an antioxidant is low, around 1%, it is still necessary. This way, the product can have 99% of organic inputs, and 1% of natural inputs, as with pure repackaging pure oils. To sum it up, our priority is to always use vegetal oils, essential oils, butters and organic plant extracts (because these inputs also exist only in a natural, but not organic version) when capable of being added to the formulation, in their highest possible percentage!

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