We use the word "natural" in our own marketing, so we're not writing this from the outside. This is a look at what the word actually commits a brand to, including us.
"Natural" is one of the most-used words on a skincare label and one of the least defined. That's not a cynical take. It's a regulatory fact, and worth understanding before you let the word do any deciding for you.
There's no legal definition
In the US, EU, and UK alike, "natural" has no formal legal definition in cosmetics regulation. The FDA has no regulatory definition of "natural" for cosmetics. EU and UK cosmetics law requires that claims like "natural" be substantiated and not misleading, but neither defines what threshold a product has to clear to use the word in the first place. In practice, neither set of rules fixes a percentage, so the word alone doesn't tell you how much of a formula is plant-derived. In the UK and EU, a "natural" claim must still be truthful, backed by evidence and not misleading, but there's no single threshold behind it.
"Natural" doesn't mean "unprocessed"
The other assumption worth dismantling is that "natural" means minimally touched by a lab. It usually doesn't. Bakuchiol, the plant-derived retinol alternative we've written about separately, is carefully extracted and purified from babchi seeds: plant-derived, and also refined, because "extracted from a plant" and "untouched by chemistry" aren't the same claim. Most of the industry's move towards fermentation-derived ingredients (producing compounds through microbial fermentation rather than harsher extraction or synthesis routes) is itself a "natural" process in the literal sense, and also a deliberately engineered one. None of this makes an ingredient worse. It just means "natural" was never really describing a manufacturing method. It's describing an origin, and origin alone doesn't tell you much about safety, effectiveness, or how gentle something is on skin.
Where "natural" becomes a checkable claim
The place the word stops being marketing and starts being a fact you can verify is third-party certification. COSMOS Natural, certified by bodies like Ecocert, sets out which ingredients and processes are allowed, limits synthetic ingredients to a short approved list, and a traceable standard a brand doesn't get to define for itself. That's a meaningfully different claim from a brand simply choosing to print the word "natural" on a label. Many of our products carry COSMOS certification. Our Bakuchiol Refining Oil Serum, for example, is COSMOS Organic certified and built around oils you can look up: organic jojoba, rosehip, evening primrose and berry seed oils, alongside bakuchiol itself.
Does "natural" mean safer, or better?
Not automatically, and this is the part most natural-skincare marketing skips. Plenty of natural ingredients are excellent for skin. Plenty are also unnecessary irritants, and a few are genuinely worse for the skin barrier than their synthetic counterparts. Some plants are entirely natural and still hard on skin, while some lab-made or fermented ingredients, like glycerin or hyaluronic acid, are among the gentlest in skincare. Synthetic doesn't mean harsh, and natural doesn't mean gentle. Both categories contain ingredients that are well suited to skin and ingredients that aren't, and the only reliable way to tell the difference is looking at the specific ingredient and what it actually does, not the category it's marketed under.
What we actually mean when we say it
When we use the word "natural" about our own products, we mean: named ingredients you can look up, checked against the product's real formulation rather than assumed from the name or category, with certification claims verified rather than printed by default. That's a narrower, more specific promise than the word usually carries, and we think it's the only version of the claim actually worth making. If you want to see what that looks like applied to two specific ingredients, our bakuchiol vs retinol comparison and our piece on what ceramides actually do both go through exactly this exercise: what's really in the formula, what it does, and what the evidence actually supports.
Common red flags worth knowing
A few label patterns are worth specific suspicion, not because they’re always misleading, but because they’re commonly used to imply more than they can support. “Chemical-free” is meaningless in a literal sense (water is a chemical, as is every ingredient in every product ever made, natural or not) and is usually shorthand for “no synthetic ingredients,” a narrower and more checkable claim than the phrase itself makes. “Clean” carries similarly no legal definition and varies enormously by which retailer or brand is using it. A long list of botanical-sounding Latin names doesn’t tell you concentration either. An ingredient can appear far down an ingredients list, present at a fraction of a percent, and still anchor the marketing on the front of the bottle. None of this means a product using this language is being deceptive. It means the language itself isn’t doing the verification work, and the ingredients list is where that actually happens.
The short version
"Natural" is a real, legitimate quality to look for in skincare, and also a word with no legal floor under it in any major market. The word alone tells you almost nothing. What's actually in the bottle, whether it's been verified rather than assumed, and whether a specific ingredient suits your skin: that's the part worth reading past the label for, ours included.
The short version
"Natural" has no legal definition in cosmetics regulation in the US, EU, or UK. Here's what the word actually does and doesn't commit a brand to, and where it becomes a checkable claim.
Related ingredients
