The 3.00% solution : Natural Marketing?
Sifting through the personal care products the other day I stumbled upon a Burt's Bees "Deep Cleansing Cream" whose bottle boasted quite a bit - it's made of bark and chamomile; it's naturally nourishing; the company that makes it is "Earth Friendly".... All that is good, right? Though all relatively broad statements, (bark? WHICH bark?), all those claims make some sort of stand, no?
But there on the bottom was a funny little boast, incongruous and awkward: "Made with 97.00% Natural Ingredients"....
Full disclosure- I LIKE Burt's Bees products, both for what they do for people's skin and for what the company stands. I like that Clorox, seeing how big the product line could be, bought them out last year and blew up their distribution to include every-day, very accessible chains. And I even like their design, though it's from a different era than Peeled Snacks' look.
So when I point out this 97%, this number, this STATISTIC, please understand that I'm not really trying to take down Burt and his Bee Hives.
Done- disclosure made. Now then....
What the "H", "E", "Double Hockey Sticks" do those two zeros in "97.00%" tell you? What insight into the product do they offer? As far as I know (and I know pretty darn far), there's no legal reason to carry the percentage out to the ten-thousandth place, and there's certainly no CHEMICAL reason. And did Burt really measure out the non-natural ingredients to be EXACTLY 3.00%?
No. No, no, no, bucause Burt has better things to do with his time, and because it's all a bunch of hooey anyway. The term "Natural", in fact, doesn't really mean anything, and the 3% is an approximation based on what chemical-ish ingredients the technicians put into the "cleansing-cream-mixer". If said technicians were being exacting, they'd know that there's no machine in the world that could pour liquid ingredients with the exactitude required to lock into place a precise ten thousandth portion.
Burt is just taking advantage of all of our desires for some sort of scientific basis for the term "natural". The word doesn't mean much UNTIL it's quantified, UNTIL it's hippie connotations measured by a goggle-wearing, white lab-coated bureaucrat with a mad-scientist-worth laboratory full of machines and sensors that can assure that your cream has NO MORE than 3% of "science" in it.
I am not fooled, and nor should you be- the value of the product not withstanding (I bought it, and used it this morning, and look fabulous because of it, thanks very much), the marketing department's assertions have little to know basis in the "truthiness" in which they steep. But I commend them for trying to sugar coat blatant commerce with wiggly science.
-a Fabulous looking Peeled Skinny
But there on the bottom was a funny little boast, incongruous and awkward: "Made with 97.00% Natural Ingredients"....
Full disclosure- I LIKE Burt's Bees products, both for what they do for people's skin and for what the company stands. I like that Clorox, seeing how big the product line could be, bought them out last year and blew up their distribution to include every-day, very accessible chains. And I even like their design, though it's from a different era than Peeled Snacks' look.
So when I point out this 97%, this number, this STATISTIC, please understand that I'm not really trying to take down Burt and his Bee Hives.
Done- disclosure made. Now then....
What the "H", "E", "Double Hockey Sticks" do those two zeros in "97.00%" tell you? What insight into the product do they offer? As far as I know (and I know pretty darn far), there's no legal reason to carry the percentage out to the ten-thousandth place, and there's certainly no CHEMICAL reason. And did Burt really measure out the non-natural ingredients to be EXACTLY 3.00%?
No. No, no, no, bucause Burt has better things to do with his time, and because it's all a bunch of hooey anyway. The term "Natural", in fact, doesn't really mean anything, and the 3% is an approximation based on what chemical-ish ingredients the technicians put into the "cleansing-cream-mixer". If said technicians were being exacting, they'd know that there's no machine in the world that could pour liquid ingredients with the exactitude required to lock into place a precise ten thousandth portion.
Burt is just taking advantage of all of our desires for some sort of scientific basis for the term "natural". The word doesn't mean much UNTIL it's quantified, UNTIL it's hippie connotations measured by a goggle-wearing, white lab-coated bureaucrat with a mad-scientist-worth laboratory full of machines and sensors that can assure that your cream has NO MORE than 3% of "science" in it.
I am not fooled, and nor should you be- the value of the product not withstanding (I bought it, and used it this morning, and look fabulous because of it, thanks very much), the marketing department's assertions have little to know basis in the "truthiness" in which they steep. But I commend them for trying to sugar coat blatant commerce with wiggly science.
-a Fabulous looking Peeled Skinny
