Recently I was shopping with my daughter for lip balm. It’s one of those items that makes me roll my eyes. Her vanity is full of every expensive brand of lip crap you can imagine. You know the ones that sell for $25 at Sephora… the ones loaded with all the chemicals and crap and that I worry are tampering with her hormones.
But now she’s discovered the Yuka app and now she’s on a mission to only buy products that score as close to 100 as humanely possible.
Which is next to impossible most times. But she does get close.
Lip balm is one of those products that when you need it… you need it. I get chapped lips, I live in Florida and need something to protect especially my bottom lip from the sun.
So I find myself once again standing in an aisle scanning products with my teen daughter.
For those of you that don’t know what the heck Yuka is… it’s an app that you can use to scan stuff at the stores and it spits out ratings for food & beauty products.
One of the things I like about this particular app is that it wasn’t created by a big food company or a tech giant. And for me this is probably the most important factor.
Personally I dig that this company was born out of 3 people’s shared frustration over deciphering labels for their families. It’s also no surprise that the idea for this app was born in France. France has some of the tightest restrictions on labels in the world.
So much so that if I see a product that is made in France, I buy it. Because I trust the French & EU over the United States when it comes to labeling products.
They’re better at it.
They protect consumers.
It’s no secret France and the European Union have collectively become global leaders in consumer protection, especially when it comes to food and beauty products. They follow some of the world’s strictest labeling and ingredient regulations. The EU has banned more than 1300 cosmetic ingredients compared with about 11 under US federal law.
The US bans or restricts ingredients only after it has been proven they are harmful.
The EU takes the opposite approach. They use a ‘precaution-first’ approach and increasingly push the boundaries of consumer transparency in their laws and regulations. Food labels across Europe are generally more standardized making it easier for consumers to compare products.
They have built a culture of consumer protection. Which is the opposite of what we are experiencing on this side of the pond.
Which is why it makes perfect sense that Yuka was born there. It reflects the mindset that shoppers deserve clear information BEFORE they make a purchase, not AFTER.
Most of the other scanning apps I’ve found (aside from EWG which is fantastic) that were born out of Silicon Valley are obsessed with how to make shopping faster, frictionless and more addictive.
These tech companies and their apps are built to make us buy more, not better.
Another app I dig is the EWG’ Healthy Living App.This app helps me understand the science behind the ingredients. They are a nonprofit research organization that’s spent decades studying chemicals and advocating for stronger consumer protections. Less about the shopping experience and more about education and research.
I use these apps in tandem. Yuka for when I’m standing in the aisle deciding which item to toss in the cart and EWG for the deeper dives into specific ingredients.
The biggest difference between these two apps is how they calculate their ratings. Yuka uses an algorith that combines nutrition, additive and organic certification for food while its beauty scores are based on the highest risk ingredient in a product according to scientific research. EWG’s Healthy Living app takes a different approach by assigning a product safety score based on decades of research.
Both are trying to make labels easier for us to understand… they are just using different paths to get there.
Now… There is some argument by critics that these apps don’t necessarily tell you how much of the particular ‘questionable’ ingredient is in the product. They argue that we should be aware of the concentration of said ingredient because an ingredient's concentration often matters just as much as its presence.
Noted.
Neither of these apps helps me determine the behind the scenes info that is important to me. I want to know about the companies. I want to know who the founders are, how it’s made and where the ingredients are sourced from.
And while neither of these apps do that, they at least give me some point of reference as I stand there in the aisles with my daughter just trying to buy a lip balm that won’t poison her.
At least we have a starting point.
Stay sane out there.
~Christy
PS: I’m a translator and filter. While I didn’t create the product scores, the opinions expressed here are my own and I encourage everyone to read the ingredients and make their own decisions based on their own needs.
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