Botanicals Deserve Credible, Harmonized Assessments: Heine and Bartlett
Beauty Matter, one of the most influential publications covering the beauty and personal care industry, has published an article by ChemFORWARD’s Dr. Lauren Heine and Dr. Chris Bartlett, introducing our perspective on the challenges and opportunities that botanicals present for the surging clean beauty movement.
Heine, ChemFORWARD co founder and director of science and data integrity, and Bartlett, ChemFORWARD staff toxicologist, make the case that consumers and producers often assume that “natural” means “safe,” sometimes without adequate information to determine what hazards an ingredient may truly present.
In an effort to serve this growing market with credible data, ChemFORWARD convened an interdisciplinary group of professionals including representatives from brands of all sizes. Some offer products based mostly on conventional formulations while others focus more on plant-derived and/or renewable ingredients as well as suppliers of botanical ingredients, doctors and herbalists. They were selected to inform the development of an assessment methodology for complex substances such as botanicals.
We are honored to be able to feature the expert insights of our roundtable participants, and highlight comments from Mia Davis, vice president of sustainability and impact at Credo Beauty, a ChemFORWARD Co-Design Partner, Maureen Daniher, director of research and development at North Carolina-based botanical ingredient supplier Active Concepts, and Heather McKenney, head of toxicology & product safety at The Honest Company.
The principal challenge posed by botanicals is that, in contrast to conventional chemicals produced in a lab, botanicals often contain thousands of compounds, which can vary with seasons, geography, or extraction process, magnifying the complexity of assessing their effects and interactions. And in practice, there is a spectrum of ingredients from natural to natural-enhanced, natural identical, synthetic, and more, which are all used in cosmetic products at the same time.
● Extraction method – a leaf or seed may be safe/ benign but a specific substance extracted from the plant part may be harmful or using heat or a solvent may alter the chemical to introduce or unlock harmful characteristics.
● Exposure route – something that is safe to eat is not necessarily safe to put on your skin
● Concentration – a substance may appear in a personal care product in a higher concentration than it would be encountered in a fruit, leaf or other plant part; Ingredient suppliers may provide substances as a concentrate, contributing further difficulty to making comparisons.
● Plant part – seeds, roots, stems, fruit, flowers… just because one part is safely eaten doesn’t mean a different part is safe
● Threshold – how much of an ingredient is enough to be considered present, and effective, in a formulation; any information available about dose response
● Bioavailability – the amount of a substance that enters the body and has an effect
Based on input from the roundtable members, an assessment guidance document is being drafted for peer review. A pilot of common botanicals, using the new assessment guidance, is planned for later this year.