Hacker News Reader

Comment by kochb | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com