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Chemical-free is printed on shampoo, cleaning spray, sun cream and baby wipes.
It is not an exaggeration. It is not even a lie exactly. It is a sentence that cannot describe any physical object, because everything an object is made of is a chemical.
Water is a chemical. So is the sugar in fruit, the caffeine in tea, the protein in an egg and the oxygen you just breathed.
A chemical is simply a substance with a definite make-up. That is the whole definition. It carries no verdict about safety at all.
If chemical-free cannot be literally true, what is it there for?
Behind that label sits a bigger belief, and it is worth naming.
Natural is safe. Made in a factory is suspect.
It is comfortable, it is ancient, and it does not hold. Safety is not decided by where a substance came from.
These are all dangerous. Where did each one come from?
Tap an item, then a bucket
A physician five hundred years ago wrote the sentence that still runs this field. Roughly: everything is poison, and nothing is poison. Only the amount decides.
That is not a clever line. It is how the whole subject works. There is no list of safe substances and dangerous ones. There are only amounts.
Drink far too much water in a short time and it can kill you. It dilutes the salt your nerves need to work.
That is not a reason to fear water. It is a reason to stop treating substances as good or bad, and start asking how much.
This pair explains most frightening headlines about substances.
Hazard is what a thing could do to you, in principle, at any amount. Risk is what it will probably do to you, at the amount you actually meet.
A lion is a hazard. A lion behind glass is a very small risk. Headlines report hazards and readers hear risks.
A study finds a substance in shampoo causes tumours in rats. What is still missing?
Instruments have got extraordinarily good. That has quietly changed the news.
Substances can now be detected at amounts far below anything that could affect you. So found in becomes a headline where, twenty years ago, the same sample would have read as nothing there.
Detected means the machine improved. It does not mean the world got worse.
When a substance gets a bad name, makers often replace it with a cousin from the same family that nobody has studied yet.
The new label can honestly say it is free of the famous one. What it cannot say is that the replacement is safer, because the work has not been done. Absence of news is not good news.
Some words on packaging have legal definitions behind them. Many do not.
In the United States, organic on food is defined and enforced. Natural is not: the FDA has never made a formal rule for it, only a long-standing informal view.
Which words are protected differs by country. That list is worth knowing where you live.
Britain's advertising regulator looked at a sweetener sold as naturally sweet.
Getting it out of the plant took solvents, filtering, ion exchange and crystallising. The regulator decided shoppers would not call that natural, and that the claim had not been supported.
The substance was not dangerous. The word was doing work it had not earned.
Which of these tells you something you could check?
Tap an item, then a bucket
None of this means nothing is worth avoiding.
It means the questions are different ones. How much, how often, and by which route. Something breathed in every day at work is a different matter from the same thing touched once a month.
When something worries you, replace is it chemical with these.
How much of it, compared with the amount known to cause harm. How often, and for how long. And who says so — a regulator, or the shop selling the alternative.
There is one product that could truthfully be called chemical-free, and it is an empty vacuum.
Everything else on every shelf is chemicals, arranged well or badly. Once you can hear the word that way, the label stops being reassuring and starts being information about the seller.