Organic Baby Toiletries

For the first few weeks of your baby’s life, he or she will need noth­ing more than warm water to cleanse them. How­ever, as baby gets older you may be attracted to the ‘nat­ural’ label on baby wash, baby sham­poos and baby soaps. Many mums believe that toi­letries labelled ‘nat­ural’ are made of safer organic ingredients.

Mind­ful Mum has found that many prod­ucts that are labelled free from arti­fi­cial preser­v­a­tives and con­tain ingre­di­ents that most organic shop­pers would wish to avoid. The most com­mon ‘nas­ties’ that organic Mum’s want to avoid in children’s prod­ucts are parabens, petro­leum jelly, phtha­lates and sodium lauryl/laureth sul­phate  (SLS/SLES).  These sub­stances have been found to pen­e­trate the skin where they can cause dam­age to sys­temic tis­sue affect­ing the brain, heart, liver and eyes. Lit­tle is known about the long-term risks of fre­quent use of prod­ucts con­tain­ing these chem­i­cal nasties.

There is no legal require­ment for hygiene or other cos­met­ics prod­ucts to be organ­i­cally cer­ti­fied, because they are not part of the food chain.  How­ever, rep­utable man­u­fac­tur­ers of organic baby prod­ucts will reas­sure par­ents through gain­ing organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, which allows them to include the cer­ti­fy­ing body’s logo on their packaging.

To ensure you are actu­ally buy­ing organic when shop­ping for organic baby toi­letries look for an organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from the Soil Asso­ci­a­tion or from the Organic Farm­ers and Grow­ers Ltd (OF&G).

Related Arti­cles

Glos­sary for more infor­ma­tion on ‘com­mon nas­ties’ in toi­letry products

RELATED ARTICLES

• How do you know if its organic?
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• What is Organic?