Hacker News Reader

>> This is the problem with a lot of organic->synthetic transitions: people know the effect by the name of the organic substance that produces it, and thus, to get any mind-share, you have to market the synthetic by making it appear similar to the organic.

You mean lie and say that it IS the organic - in this case. So in the world of computer products, you'd be happy with a knockoff laptop marketed with an Apple logo then? That's trademark infringement and it's illegal precisely because someone could otherwise market crap under another companies good name.

Trademark is a whole separate issue; product classes are not trademarks. (Except in the cases of "protected cultivars" of things like fruit and wine.)

But to try to use your example to make my own opinion here clear: yes, I would be happy with to receive a "knock-off" laptop with an Apple logo on it... provided it looked and functioned identically to an Apple laptop, including Apple's willingness to take it in for warranty repairs. (Tangent: such things exist! They're called "ghost shift" products, produced by the same factory-workers that produce the real ones, when nobody's looking.)

And that's what we're talking about here: chemical analogues that have the same effect on the body.

Note that this is all contingent on the idea that maltodextrin is a chemical analogue to aloe vera extract. If it isn't, then my argument here is moot.

If it was sold as "burn cream" I would agree 100%. But it is sold as "aloe Vera", which is false.

So you're all for falsely stating that something is in the product if it's not, as long as the company thinks it's sorta the same thing? Or do you mean like generic drugs say "compare to the active ingredient in Tylenol(tm)"? I'm all for the latter, the former is just fraudulent.

See my sibling comment. Lying is a problem with drugs—that we solved by creating the FDA—because drugs contain things that can hurt people when people take them who shouldn't be taking them. We classify everything with such ingredients—"active" ingredients—as a drug. Nothing that's not a drug is allowed to have any "active" ingredients; only "generally recognized as safe" ingredients.

It would be a public health problem to lie and say that something is acetaminophen when it isn't, and would also be a problem to lie and say that something isn't acetaminophen when it really is. Both would hurt people.

Lying about whether something contains the chemical compound "aloe vera" hurts (in the literal health sense of "hurts") no single human being. Therefore, it's not illegal.

It might be bad behaviour, but so is 90% of advertising. It's not particularly worse than e.g. orange juice that says it's "made from real oranges" when it's really made from a mixture of extracts distilled from oranges.

Again, as I said in my sibling comment: the only real "simple" thing that would make this better is to disallow the non-FDA-regulated product classes (things other than "food" and "drugs") from making ingredients claims at all, since nobody's checking them anyway. That'd interact in really strange ways with product names that are simply ingredient descriptions—as in this case—but using phrasing as in your example would probably give them an out.

The issue is false advertising. It doesn't matter if it works the same (according to whatever tests that are testing for whatever criteria that I might not share) if it's not what you were advertising and what I bought.

Allowing companies to advertise X but really sell Y because "testing says they work the same" is not a good idea. Very quickly artificial tests can be created that prove anything you want.

Pyrite works the same as gold for being shiny and yellow according to my tests!

Very quickly artificial tests can be created that prove anything you want.

I've had colleagues in the past who had previously worked for a product testing lab, and the impression I got was that the lab would devise whatever test they could to tell the client whatever they wanted to hear.

This is the market abusing an assumption, that if you're paying a lab to perform a test, that the lab is providing the test or that some standard exists to compare against. But of course the lab will run whatever test you want, or they think you want, to get a repeat business customer.

People hear lab test and think FDA approvals, an episode of CSI, or getting your blood work done, but these are different types of animals, some fictional.

Tell that to jewelers with gold. Really, what is the "real difference" between gold and 75% gold?

This isn't about substitute products, the products in question actually claimed real aloe as an ingredient.

> The products all listed aloe barbadensis leaf juice — another name for aloe vera — as either the No. 1 ingredient or No. 2 after water.

Er, no, that's what I'm saying: who cares about the label. It's a cosmetic. It just needs to do what it says it does. What the cosmetic "aloe extract" 'says it does' is to do what you think of when you think of aloe. It's describing its behaviour using a metaphor, like grape-flavoured cool-aid is describing its flavour using a metaphor. Yes, it's lying, but my point is that it's fully allowed to lie and there is no inherent problem with cosmetics lying.

Remember, if something isn't a "drug" according to the FDA, then it's not allowed to contain any "active ingredients" (i.e. anything anyone in some subgroup could potentially be harmed by and thereby need to be on the lookout for on an ingredients label.) Any cosmetic product is just a miscellaneous goop of generally recognized as safe substances. That's why we don't bother to require labels on them.

Now, if you're bothered by the lying as some inherent ideology rather than a means to any particular end, then there is something you could fix here: you could get the FDA to ban non-drugs from having ingredients labels at all. A non-fact-checked label is worse than no label—so get rid of them all.

What it says it does is "contain aloe vera". It doesn't do that.

That's not a "does." That's an "is." My point was that "is" does not matter for GRAS products, for anything other than ideological reasons; only "does" matters.

Unless you've got an allergy. Or any other reason to care what chemicals go into the products you consume.

Reasons which I'm sure you're able to completely and unambiguously enumerate for all people everywhere?

Either way your distinction between "does" and "is" is fundamentally incompatible with how the world works. It's a fiction. Things are what they do, and what they do is determined by what they are.

Furthermore, you're basically stating that the problem of changing the label is (for no good reason) significantly more important to avoid than the problem of degrading the trust across your whole customer base and handling every possible ethical conundrum that could result from this confusion. And that's just plain stupidity.

If something contains any chemical that anyone can be allergic (or sensitive, or etc.) to, the FDA gets involved and issues labelling mandates. The FDA is still sort of "distantly" monitoring the non-food, non-drug product category, to make sure products don't use any chemicals that would require them to become classified as food or drugs.

Which, if you think about it, means that everything that isn't FDA-controlled is still FDA-controlled (in a vague, gets-in-trouble-after-the-fact sense) such that it won't have anything in it that would causes trouble, health-wise, for some random subset of people; anything, in other words, that would be useful to know the existence of on an ingredients label.

Think about this carefully: products that aren't FDA-regulated don't require ingredients labels. Most of those products don't have ingredients labels. (No, seriously, go look if you don't believe me! You want to know what's in your shampoo? Too bad! You think you get to at least know what the "medicinal ingredient" is in your toothpaste? Nah, they could say whatever they wanted there, that bit is just advertising!)

Thus, if someone is sensitive to some substance, and the product has that substance, it's not required to disclose that fact at all. It can, in fact, be completely silent about it, and about everything else it contains.

The world you're imagining, where people get in trouble because they have no idea what's in cosmetics that can hurt them? It's already the world we live in, and yet people aren't being rushed to hospital left and right. People are, in fact, not getting in much trouble due to cosmetics at all. Because—once you have a blacklist of chemicals people could possibly be sensitive to, and require that non-food-non-drug products don't use those chemicals—it turns out that they can get away with just throwing in whatever else, and everyone is fine.

---

P.S. I am getting the sense, here, that I'm being pursued for taking the "practical discussion on how to cope with making a sacred tradeoff" stance that seems to always get people in trouble. You know, the stance where you e.g. tell people how to better avoid sexual predators, and then get yelled at because "people shouldn't have to avoid sexual predators, we should get rid of sexual predators." There always seems to be a contextual chasm, there, between the person with that stance assuming that the point of the discussion is "how do we best cope with the world we live in", and everyone else assuming the point of the discussion is "there is an out-group and we should hate them!"

I don't have time in my life to hate on any out-groups. I'm only really here to talk about how to cope. (My whole point here was just "you don't need to be anxious about how to cope with this new problem, because it's not much of a problem at all for you personally.") Maybe HN is not for me.

You want to know what's in your shampoo? Too bad! You think you get to at least know what the "medicinal ingredient" is in your toothpaste?

A bottle of shampoo from my bathroom has this list of ingredients on it:

aqua, cocamidopropyl betaine, coco-glucoside, disodium lauryl sulfosuccinate, glycerin, panthenol, glyceryl oleate, hydrolyzed wheat protein, sodium benzoate, parfum, citric acid, denatonium benzoate, tocopherol, hydrogenated palm glycerides citrate, lecithin, ascorbyl palmitate.

A toothpaste has this list on it:

aqua, sorbitol, hydrated silica, PEG-8, xanthan gum, sodium lauryl sulfate, aroma, sodium monofluorophosphate, calcium glycerophosphate, sodium sacharin, methylparaben, propylparaben, CI 73360.

Granted, this is in EU...

Edit: a funny typo, there's bound to be more.

aqua, parfum

Nobody said the ingredients had to use their common name, or readable by ordinary humans. :)

(sodium saccharin)

Don't forget that we use a gazillion languages here. They'd have to either produce separate packaging for each country / language region or attach a brochure to each tube of toothpaste. These Latin/English-based names are the lingua franca of the ingredient lists on this kind of products specifically. I'd say it's better than having absolutely no idea if the shampoo you bought on vacation contains stuff you're allergic to.

> there is no inherent problem with cosmetics lying.

I think I get your point - that as long as the consumer cannot qualitatively perceive a difference, then there's no harm. But thats incorrect for the following reason:

What about competitor products ? Presumably this product contains no Aloe because its cheaper not to. But what if XYZ corp wants to make real Aloe lotion ? Their product will cost more, but to the consumer the two will look the same. XYZ will lose money to their competition's lies, which is an undeniable consequence.

That's not a harm, that's a benefit. That's the market driving all the competitor-producers toward the cheapest way to make something that still satisfies people's needs.

I mean, I see what you're going for there; the other competitor should have a way to differentiate themselves for the top of the market who want real aloe and are willing to pay more to get it (even if it does do the same thing; irrational rich people are a good market.)

But this is already a solved problem, I think. Look at orange juice. "Made from real oranges!" is on the label precisely because the other one is allowed to say "made from oranges" when it's made from orange concentrate. But even then, the one "made from real oranges" is made from a mix of extracts piped through a factory that happens to take "real oranges" as an input at one end. Because that's still cheaper than making something out of "real oranges, made the way you'd expect."

Presumably, if there was a market you could capture by making orange juice "out of real oranges, made the way you'd expect" some company would advertise exactly that, and thus defame its competitors by implication, gaining in the process. The advertising market sorts itself out, this way.

You are going to great lengths to defend the kind of lying that you think is okay.

Which is fine as long as the effect is the same as that of defending truth.

> [lying is] not a harm, that's a benefit.

> you could capture by making orange juice "out of real oranges, made the way you'd expect"

no, you couldn't do that, because your lying competitor could write the same thing on their box of orange Tang.