April 7th, 2009 · No Comments

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Today we’re all about fragrances. I’ve sampled some lovely new perfumes from the Demeter Fragrance Library, a homegrown company that has long been making mostly natural colognes and is now dipping into what it hopes will be a strong market for natural perfumes. It’s a pricier proposition and the company managers believe they’ve teased the numbers enough to bring natural scents to mainstream consumers.

These new Vintage Naturals are surprisingly good smelling stuff — you really can whiff the difference. With these, a rose is a rose; lavender is lavender. Each of the five scents has a true high note composed by Mother Nature, blended with undertones, also all from natural essential oils. Mimosa is accompanied by Ylang Ylang; Patchouli is spiced with orange and cardamom, and Lavender is leavened with orange, lemon and galbanum. They’re earthy, but feminine (and available this month at Sephora and online at Demeter).

The story is under our Food/Health and Shop sections. But let me tell you why I was excited to hear about these perfumes originally: They don’t contain phthalates. Phthalates are chemical compounds that are used as stabilizing agents in hundreds of beauty products and plastics, and are typically not on the label, but hidden under terms like “parfum” or “synthetic fragrance.” So we don’t really know which of our beauty products contains phthalates,  which are endocrine disruptors that have been found to interfere with male development in test animals, and also have been linked, by some studies, to certain cancers. (For more info see the Environmental Working Group website.)

Vintage Naturals joins other natural and organic beauty products that are swimming against the chemical tide by first, disclosing all their ingredients, and secondly, tossing out unnecessary additives, like phthalates that carry health risks. (Vintages Naturals relies on corn-derived alcohol, which serves as a sufficient preservative to maintain the fragrance, says Demeter CEO Mark Crames.)

I might not be able to pronounce phthalates (fay-lates, fye-lates, fee-lates, depending on who you’re talking with) and I can’t pronounce them definitively dangerous to adults. But I can read the warnings and celebrate another new product that shows less can be more in our inadvertent chemical diet.

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