Purchasing Patterns for Natural, Organic Beauty Products

Women's beauty buying habits and concerns

The term botanical raises similar questions. Sixty-six percent of women feel a product with botanicals contains some ingredients from plants; 35 percent feel it must contain mostly ingredients from plants. A product labeled “pure” is the vaguest of all, although half of all women felt a product labeled pure must contain 100 percent all-natural ingredients.

One-third to more than half of all women surveyed believe cosmetic products labeled pure, natural, all-natural, botanical or organic are regulated by the U.S. government. Fifty-six percent of women said beauty products claiming to be 100 percent organic are regulated by the U.S. government. Sixty-two percent of women also believe the term “certified organic” is a guarantee of the absence of pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides.

Baffling Ingredients

With a sea of ingredients in beauty products, confusion abounds regarding which ones are beneficial and which are potentially harmful. When asking women to indicate which ingredients they might want in their beauty products and which they’d rather avoid, responses were both predictable and surprising.

Predictably, women who normally buy natural beauty products know the “good” ingredients they want in their products far more than their traditional buying counterparts. Interestingly, of the conventional shoppers, 58 percent indicated they didn’t know whether an ingredient was beneficial or harmful. However, some of the borderline ingredients, or those highly touted in consumer circles as “bad” ingredients, such as parabens and hydroquinone, were not altogether dismissed by either group. On the whole, the top three ingredients women do not want in their cosmetics were artificial fragrance (54 percent), silicone (43 percent) and gluten (34 percent). The top three ingredients women were unsure about were coffeeberry (70 percent), hydroquinone (69 percent) and parabens (69 percent).

Organic Matters

Women want to feel safe, and 89 percent of them feel U.S. companies should be more forthcoming about which products are truly natural and which are not.

Amidst the confusion over which ingredients are harmful or beneficial, and which claims are regulated or not, one thing is clear. The USDA Organic Seal is something they see as a tangible piece of evidence that a beauty product is free of harmful chemicals. In fact, nearly a third (30 percent) of traditional beauty brand buyers would be motivated to try a natural/organic brand if it passed a USDA test indicating it were safe, even though only 19 percent of those buyers believe natural/organic beauty products perform as well as beauty products with synthetic ingredients in them. Ninety-three percent of all women said they might or would be willing to buy a beauty brand that has earned the USDA Organic Seal.

Alisa Marie Beyer is CEO of The Benchmarking Company (TBC), a consumer insights and branding firm focused exclusively on the beauty industry. TBC (BenchmarkingCo.com) is the publisher of the Pink Report™, consumer research reports driven by results from the women-only, permission-based Pink Panel and other sources.

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