Why We Committed to 100% Natural

Our old school Rocky fans will remember our popular vanilla products.  We had a body butter and a bar soap that were star performers.  When we found out that the vanilla extract we had sourced was only 99.99% natural.  This sparked the debate that ended when we made the commitment to produce only 100% natural products. We stopped making the vanilla products, even though they were best sellers, and many customers were disappointed at their discontinuation.

Our logic was this:  What was to differentiate us from the other nearly-natural products on the market if we didn’t commit wholly to being 100% natural?  There is much noise in the marketplace about ‘all-natural’, ‘organic’, ‘naturally-derived’, and ‘botanically-based’ which, lets face it, live in a huge gray area and don’t really mean anything specific.  Even something that is labeled as organic only has to use 95% organic ingredients, the other 5% could be any synthetic chemical they want it to be. 100% Natural was as specific as we could get.  We defined what 100% natural means to us on our website for those who need more details, since all kinds of sustainability and nature-identical questions could arise from this.

What are your thoughts on this debate?  Is it important to you that your personal care products are 100% natural?  Why or why not?