To all of you Uber conscious and aware customers who have been asking quite a few questions lately regarding the Organic/Certified Organic status of our product formulations. It is a confusing issue and knowing who to ask at this point can be equally as confusing. We hope that this helps answer your questions.

First of all, at this time, there is NO regulation on a Certified Organic cosmetic product. This means that there is nobody supervising this process. The Federal USDA is working off of existing Food Industry standards. There is a list called the 205605 list, and it outlines food products that are considered safe and identified as certified organic raw ingredients. This list is what the personal care products industry is working off of. This list is not optimal for the skincare / cosmetics industry. It includes ingredients such as kerosene. This would not be relevant to skin care, as I’m sure you can see. So as an industry, we are somewhat left in the dark.

As far as being a certified Organic Lab, this in no way certifies a product as Certified Organic. By law, every individual product must be apprasied through a third party company that has been commissioned by the USDA to certify a product as certified organic. So even if a certified organic lab creates a product, in order to carry the "Certified Organic" seal, an independent party must certify the product. It is an extremely costly process and at this point in time, does not mean any more than conforming to non-specific USDA guidelines. This is why you almost never see a product with the official "certified organic" seal.

According to COPA standards which are identical to The Department of Health & Human Services service law standards, if a product contains 70% certified organic ingredients, you can legally call it an organic product. This is the guideline that ESSpa Kozmetika Organic Skincare and its manufacturers follow.

This is not to be confused with "Certified Organic", which means that a third party has tested the product and have granted a Certified Organic Seal for labeling. You see these often on food items, but not so much on skin and body care products.

There are people working to organize this industry to have agreed upon standards to carry the organic seal, but these standards do not yet exist, so everybody is working off of the aforementioned 70% organic standard. This means that 70% of the ingredients in our formulas are Certified Organic raw ingredients. This does not mean that our formulas are Certified Organic. What it does mean is that it is an Organic Product.

On March 3 the Personal Care Products Council submitted comments to NSF’s draft standard 305: Organic Personal Care Products (Draft or Draft Standard). NSF is developing this standard for the American National Standard and is requesting public comment at this time on its most current Draft Standard. The Council commented on a number of issues contained in the Draft and noted that it requires a CONSIDERABLE amount of further development. If you would like a copy of the Council’s comments, please contact Farah K. Ahmed, Assistant General Council, at 202-331-1770.