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When you walk down the beauty aisle of your favorite store, you’ll find lots of clever buzzwords on products: highlighting, brightening, volumizing, and so many others promising a more youthful, beautiful appearance.

One word you’ll also see is organic, which tends to give off a more lasting impression. When a product is organic, it’s set apart to consumers in a way that no other buzzword can compare. An article from Self Magazine has helped us decode aspects of the organic mystery.

In the beauty world, there is no one set definition for what it means for a product to be organic. Unlike products in the food industry that must measure up to a list of regulations in order to be labeled as organic, the terms aren’t regulated for beauty products, which make it easy for companies to say that their products are organic very freely.

 

Some companies feel that if a product has been made from a natural source then it can be labeled as “natural,” but it still may be chemically modified in order to work the way that consumers want.

If you’re serious about buying organic beauty products, you need to make sure that you’re reading the labels carefully. Look for the USDA Certified label on a product package, since cosmetics that carry this seal have been made with at least 95% organic ingredients.

Beauty lovers, cross your fingers that there will be a stricter code of standardization soon, which will make it easier to understand if a product truly is organic as well as hold companies more responsible for how they label their products.

Jen is a 2016 graduate of Messiah College, where she majored in journalism and minored in gender studies. She's a proud Bostonian who is obsessed with tattoos, puppies, magazines and Sephora. She's been reading Her Campus since high school and was thrilled to join the HC team as a National Contributing Writer in September 2013. She became an HC Beauty Blogger in February 2014 and continued to write on-trend beauty posts until July 2016. A few highlights from her time writing for HC included attending and writing about two BeautyCon events and Cosmopolitan's Fun Fearless Life in 2015. You can follow her on Twitter @JenFlanagan14 and on Instagram @jenlea14.