What’s in a label?

January 17, 2012 by Alia 3 Comments

I’ve started reading labels. I look for them on food, on cleaning products, and most importantly, on skin care products. I first started doing this after reading Gill Deacon’s book, There’s Lead in Your Lipstick. I quickly realized that the products we use every day have all kinds of questionable and often mysterious ingredients in them. For those of you who have been following my blog, this is all old news.

Labelling my own skin care products

I started reading labels at the same time as I started making my own skin care products. However, it wasn’t until I decided to give my handcrafted goodies to other people, either as gifts or as a sale, that I realized I would have to label my own products. Honestly, the thought of learning the ins and outs of labelling stopped me in my tracks. It totally intimidated me. Logically, I immediately began to procrastinate.

Weeks went by. In fact, months went by. Finally, it was the night before I had to deliver a number of gift bags that a friend had ordered from me. The gifts were for non-family and non-friends. In other words, there was no way I could forego the labels and depend on their good will. I had to get down to it and make sure they were well informed of the ingredients I had used.

Labelling Requirements

Fortunately, it turned out to be far easier than I thought. Why I procrastinated on this, I’ll never know. I looked up the labelling requirements on the Health Canada site. The guide is a short 37 pages and covers everything you need to know. The rules can be boiled down to the following:

– List the ingredients you use in descending order of volume in the product

– Affix the label to the product to ensure the consumer will see it.

– List ingredients as per the International Nomenclature for

Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI).

There are acceptable abbreviations and acceptable generalizations (e.g. using the word parfum for scents) that can be used. There are rules regarding the type of packaging that you use. All in all, it was far less complicated and onerous than what I imagined.