Since at least the nineties and arguably even before that, the trend has been towards making personal care products that are as natural as possible. The cosmetics business has gone green, both metaphorically and in the case of the labels often literally too.
In fact at one point all the labels in the Body Shop were green. ‘Natural’ has become the marketers’ adjective of choice. The Body Shop was of course a pathfinder and pioneer in the world of natural cosmetics in the seventies, but the mainstream was close on its heels. You only needed to turn the television on to see this. Timotei ran adverts that were designed to suggest that their raw materials included wicker baskets full of wild flowers gathered by a blonde woman in her nightdress.
The origin of this trend can probably be traced back to Rachel Carson’s enormously influential book Silent Spring and the environmental movement that it spawned. Environmentalism started out as a very radical notion that challenged the very tenets of society and its obsession with unsustainable consumerism. But over time it has morphed into more of a set of values that determines what you consume rather than how much. Once it started to be a factor at the till, the industry as a whole became a convert to greenery. I remember one trade fair I visited in the early nineties where the chemical suppliers had covered their stands with so many pot plants and bamboo screens that one would have not been surprised to see a Japanese soldier emerge from them unaware that the war had ended.
Green brands and green claims soon started to appear and continue to proliferate to this day. The natural product sector emerged and it still thrives.
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