I’ve never seen labeling like this before. Interesting.
I wish more products would do this. It’s super interesting.
I am still waking up, and read the title as “Toothpasta”. 😰
I would love if all companys did this
I love it when companies do that. I have a couple of cosmetics products with such an explanation. I have very sensitive skin and this makes it easier to decide if I can use it.
Hey it’s me!
You’re one of my favourite terpenes
Get back in the toothpaste!
Well unfortunately once they’re out of the tube…
Love me some open source hygiene products! Blueland, the company that makes the cleaning sprays I use, does the same thing.
In my country at least, there’s a conspiracy theory, that claims citric acid is a toxic acid invented by the nazis then given the name to link it to a healthy and alkalizing (!!!) fruit.
I literally have a bottle of anhydrous citric acid crystals for cleaning. I lick them sometimes because they’re sour!
I never did trust the stuff.
Can we start doing this with everything?
When I was a kid, in my country all machinery and electronics were accompanied with full mechanical and electrical schematics.
good luck getting the electrical scheme of a current CPU
not because they’re secret, but because they’re pointless. you wouldn’t understand anything from such a schematic. it’s way too complicated, and has to be broken down with lots of extra annotations to be comprehensible.
A lot of times it’s because those things required maintenance, and it was possible to do with basic tools.
Most things these days aren’t built with maintenance in mind, mostly because they’re obsolete before they need to be fixed.
There are certainly things that doesn’t apply to, but for a lot of consumer products, it is.
Also if a CPU breaks in any way, you can’t fix it. Best to throw it away and get a new one.
Good thing is they basically never break, anyways.
“Obsolete”
ingredient lables can be pretty long. I think we need a QR code with this and much more information. it should be able to back track where you product came from and such.
Either that or it creates an incentive to use fewer, simpler ingredients.
Can QRs fit enough text to hold all the ingredients and their descriptions?
I’d hate it if they were just links to some crappy government website that’ll inevitably go down couple of years down the lineMaximum 4296 alphanumeric characters, but that’s with the largest-sized code and low/no error correction (so not always practical).
And with only the English alphabet, just like in the good old days of ASCII.
this is one of those things where distributed ledger would be useful as it should at least track chain of custody then there should be enough room left over for the ingredients table.
The problem is a lot of nasty things come from less scary sounding things. For example:
Ingredient: Ricin, Where it comes from: Castor beans, What it’s used for: Poison.
There’s historical truth to this. In toothpaste, no less.
Ingredient: Asbestos
Comes from: naturally occurring mineral
Used for: mild abrasive
To be fair here though, how much toothpaste do you dry and snort these days?
I assume there’s a better example to make your point because at least here you’re explicitly stating ricin is used for poison, an objectively good thing to know.
My point being that knowledge of where something comes from doesn’t tell you if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I could have rephrased “what it’s used for” to be “laxative”. A true statement which doesn’t expose the fact that ricin is a pretty powerful poison.
People are biased to think “chemical name bad, common name good” and that’s the problem I’m exposing. You can pull out a lot of toxic stuff from things that sound harmless.
The calculus here isn’t strictly whether it’s “healthy” or not. There are quite a few ingredients that can be derived from both plants and petroleum, for example, and I would choose the one derived from plants every time
This is still an improvement, let’s leave it at that.
Ingredient: Hydroxyl acid Where it comes from: Deep underground well What it’s used for: Industrial solvent
I wish. That would be rad.
JFC can we make this list obligatory on all products?
It’s so amazing to finally just read in plain English what an ingredient is supposed to be doing.
Maybe even add a few columns?
In Europe it is necessary that all food products contain such a list of all ingredients.
Example: Coke ZERO. Ingredients: Water, carbonic acid, colorant E150d, souring agent phosphate acid, sweetening agent (sodium cyclamate, acesulfam K, aspartam), natural flavor, flavor coffeine, acid regulator sodium citrate.
I translated that by hand so it probably contains mistakes.
Peanut butter:
- ingredient: Peanut
- Where it comes from: Peanut
- What it does: Peanut?
What it does: adhesive (sticks to the roof of your mouth)
I would like to see this but for laws as well. Just cut down all that self-important job security and say what it is in plain english
There is actually a law for that (in the US)(apologies for linking to a currently fascist source)
“Spices, natural and artificial flavors”
Mmm tastes like freedom and definitely not a corporate hellscape.
I hate to rain on a parade, but it’s marketing bullshit. Aqua comes from water, isn’t it? Purified one at that? “Vegetable”? Calcium fluoride is a source? “Natural ore” as opposed to an artificial lab grown ore?
It kinda looks nice unless you actually read it, or know what words mean. And if you do it’s obvious ploy to capture very ignorant people.It kinda looks nice unless you actually read it, or know what words mean.
Teaching children is pointless because it might look nice, but if you already know the stuff then you would recognize that it’s all fairly trivial, well-known stuff. No reason to point it out.
You just demonstrated that you actually don’t know what words mean.
I think you’re reading it too pessimistically. There are so many people out there saying, “If you can’t pronounce it or know where it’s from, then it’s straight POISON!”
There are artificial ores. There are people who will want to know the water they used was clean (the purified water). This looks like a great way to educate people on what they’re using and to learn not to be afraid of big, complicated words.
You can find those things out. Natural ore means it comes from natural deposits (its not a lab-formulated compound).
Some people prefer natural ingredients. Thats it.
Otherwise its very common with synthetic or refined chemical ingredients in toothpaste, like:
-
Sodium fluoride / stannous fluoride (lab-produced, though based on natural elements)
-
Artificial abrasives (engineered silica)
-
Detergents like sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS)
-
Synthetic preservatives, flavors, or colorants
Same reason people want to grow their own food. They know whats in it and what they put in their body.
-
Sure, this is still a marketing strategy that could be exploited by bad corps, but it is a step in the right direction. This is where rules to define those terms accurately would be a good use of regulations.
What, you don’t feel more informed to know that your glycerin comes from a miscellaneous vegetable?
Natural ore made me laugh. I mean, asbestos and beryllium are naturally occurring ores too…
I bet asbestos would make for a killer toothpaste, actually.
It’s homeopathic nonsense. None of those are accepted names for the substances they are talking about, and they don’t specify a quantity so it could be essentially zero for some of them.
What brand of toothpaste is this?
It looks like kingfisher tube. They are well known for their toothpaste without flouride but also has with flouride.
Ingredients are probably listed like that because the target group cares about what they use.
This has to be a response to those idiot tictokers wandering grocery stores and badmouthing anything with an ingredient they can’t pronounce. Usually shilling some sort of scam supplement while they’re at it.
I’m definitely bad mouthing the goddamn palm oil.
Judging from the text on the left, with it not doing animal testing etc., it looks like it targets more ‘conscious’ consumers in general…
Note that products derived from palm oil should be avoided if you can. https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/8-things-know-about-palm-oil
That article you linked seems to be saying that palm oil is actually really good?
It says that it is a major driver of deforestation because people are tearing down trees to grow more of it because it’s a very useful and versatile oil.
It later says that switching away from palm oil isn’t a solution because palm oil is actually such an efficient crop that if you used something else the amount of land needed to produce enough oil would drive far more deforestation.
The article is a call for more regulation on deforestation, not a call to not use palm oil. It in fact almost argues the opposite.
It’s not just deforestation, especially in Orangutan habitats that are endangered. They are also rife with forced labor, ie slave labor. They lure desperate foreigners with promises of good jobs, baiting and switching them with a life of slavery doing hard, very hard labor, including kids. The families can sometimes bail them out by paying several thousand dollars, a lot of money to these impoverished bangladeshis and Indians and the like.
Many of the desparate migrants that can speak english well are now sold to chinese gangs to run romance scams from slave compounds, a 40 billion dollar a year industry just in S. Asia they figure now, pig butchering and the like.
For sure. But the problem isn’t palm oil itself, which seems like something of a miracle plant when compared to other sources of vegetable oil. It’s that the supply chain for it is rife with abuse. Similar to coffee, or honestly, most things that are harvested predominantly in poorer countries with less oversight.
But, like coffee, it seems there are organizations that certify certain palm oil suppliers as “cruelty free,” so it’s probably better to try and hunt those out in favor of foregoing palm oil entirely, which seems like a pretty incredible product otherwise.
Even aside from environmental impacts, palm kernel oil is actually really bad for your cholesterol levels. It’s used as a filler in a lot of foods (many peanut butters, for example).
It grows great after you clear cut a very specific type of forest thats full of endangered stuff.
The oil itself is great.
If you decide not buy the omnicidal product because palm oil is an ingredient, that’s good.
Unfortunately only a tiny fraction of people are ethical. The rest are not just unknowingly buying products containing palm oil, but are actively choosing to speed-run us towards a mass-extinction event.
That is not really true and is more fear mongering. Palm oil is much better than any alternative that can be grown in the same regions. The issue is not palm oil but amount of consumption. Palm oil actually takes up less land than other crops that can produce that type of oil.
But why do we need to grow oil in these regions?
For solid fats there is no alternative crop growing in northern regions, it is either palm oil, coconut oil (similar regions), or butter. Butter is much more expensive and has other issues. Best thing to do is eat less crappy snacks that need those solid fats, like cookies and such. Without the need for cheap ingredients we would not grow it. But if we do need it, there is no easy alternative
Palm oil actually takes up less land than other crops that can produce that type of oil.
I think this is a little bit of a false equivalence, though. A hectare of borneo jungle ≠ a hectare of Saskatchewan prairie. It’s probably an impossible thing to accurately calculate, but I’d like to see kind of control for ecological cost. E.g. is 1 hectare of borneo as important to the earth as 2 hectares of prairie?
It also seems a bit obvious that an ecosystem on the equator would be capable of greater production than one closer to the poles. It always bothers me when people compare like “x crop takes 2 times as much water as y crop” when crop x might be grown somewhere that water isnt an issue.
Yes, but palm oil is a hard fat, it’s used for cookies and anywhere that needs to be solid. alternatives are coconut oil and butter. Neither are better in yield vs land use.
But if butter can be produced in abundant habitat like the midwest prairie instead of threatened species-dense places like Borneo’s jungle, I’d prefer to go with the higher land use but ultimately less ecologically destructive option.
Sure, it’s an alternative. It’s also much much more expensive and less healthy than palm oil (butter has more saturated fats and cholesterol).
Palm oil is much better than any alternative
Palm oil does what palm oil does. And it’s useful in food manufacturing because you can create the same products without using butter or transfats. That’s pretty much the only reason it gets so heavily used.
But the actual alternative to palm oils is to stop consuming or manufacturing products using palm oil. That means some products should just be pulled from the market. Oreos, for example.
But Oreos are mostly vegan and most of their competition uses babies in their recipes.
Fair point.
Why did they feel the need to church up “water”
Found this on Wikipedia:
Deionized water is very often used as an ingredient in many cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. “Aqua” is the standard name for water in the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients standard, which is mandatory on product labels in some countries.
Aqua is the actual word for water in spanish too.
this, i’ve seen “aqua” instead of water on pretty much every hygiene product i own
Note that products made with aqua contain dihydrogen monoxide
That’s a chemical. It’s also an acid: To some, it’s better known as hydroxic acid.
It has the highest pH of any known acid!
Technically the majority of strong bases are also weak acids. Those have higher pH.
Hahahah, I guess that depends on which definition of acid you want to go with.
May contain traces of dihydrogen monoxide
But where does calcium fluoride come from?..
If you bring calcium within sniffing distance of fluorine, you get calcium fluoride… just make sure you don’t have anything else close to the fluorine, including you.
Also, it’s basically just mined and purified as-is, it’s pretty common.
The Big Bang
“To bake a calcium fluoride, you must first invent the universe.”
It’s a rock
