Be yourself. Love yourself. Take care of each other.

Hello, world! Shelly here! Time for another edition of Take Care, a weekly-ish bit of tips and updates to help you be yourself, love yourself, and take care of each other (and yourself!) I’m Shelly of Geek Out of Water.

If you've spent any time reading skincare labels, you've probably noticed that "natural" and "clean" get treated like synonyms. They're not. Conflating them is one of the most common points of confusion in beauty, and honestly, it's not entirely your fault. Brands have been blurring the line for years because vague language is good for marketing.

Here's what each term actually means.

Natural beauty is about ingredient origin. A natural ingredient comes from a plant, mineral, or other naturally occurring source rather than being synthesized in a lab. Simple enough. The problem is that "natural" says nothing about whether an ingredient is safe, effective, or good for your skin. Poison ivy is natural. So is arsenic. Origin alone isn't a safety standard.

Clean beauty is about safety, not origin. A clean formula excludes ingredients associated with potential harm: things like parabens, phthalates, formaldehyde-releasing preservatives, and certain synthetic fragrances. Crucially, a clean ingredient can be synthetic. If a lab-made version of an ingredient is more stable, more effective, or gentler than its natural counterpart, clean beauty has no objection to it.

Here's where it gets complicated: "clean" isn't a regulated term either. Any brand can call itself clean without meeting any particular standard. Which means you have to ask: clean by whose definition?

For GOOW, it's a specific answer. We benchmark against the clean beauty standards of major beauty retailers, which means our formulas exclude the ingredients those retailers flag as problematic. We also aim for 92% or more of the ingredients in each GOOW formula to be compliant with the EcoCert or COSMOS natural standards. So GOOW products are both natural (mostly) and clean (always), and those are two separate commitments we track separately. (Note that we aren’t certified by these retailers or organizations, but we aim for the same benchmarks).

The reason this matters: if you're choosing products based on "natural" alone, you might be missing out on products with synthetic ingredients that are genuinely safer and more effective. And if you're choosing based on "clean" alone, you might not be getting the natural ingredient profile you care about. Knowing the difference lets you make the call that's right for you.

Words are important. Labels should mean something. That's the whole point.

If you want clean and natural in one place, that's what GOOW is built on. Browse the full line at shopgoow.com where every product page includes the full ingredient list so you can see exactly what you're getting.

Questions? Reply to this email! Prefer watching videos? Check out my Ingredient Literacy series on YouTube. Send me your ideas for future ingredients to explore!

Thanks and remember: be yourself. Love yourself. Take care of each other,

💜 Shelly