How an organic ingredient is developed
To be certified organic, ingredients must be naturally derived. In skincare, this typically means plant oils, extracts, juices, and botanicals such as sunflower oil, avocado oil, aloe vera, chamomile, or green tea. Although these ingredients may be processed or extracted in laboratories, they remain biologically complex mixtures. Their composition varies depending on soil quality, climate, harvest timing, and processing methods. This makes organic ingredients inconsistent from batch to batch and difficult to standardize.
Processing a plant in a lab does not make it a controlled ingredient; it simply concentrates its naturally occurring variability. Because these ingredients are not molecularly defined or fully purified, they are more likely to trigger irritation in sensitive or reactive skin.
This lack of control has real consequences. Below, we examine how organic ingredients affect both skin health and planetary health.
Organic ingredients: how they can cause skin issues
1. Organic ingredients can contain allergens and impurities
Despite their “clean” reputation, organic ingredients naturally contain allergens, residues, and reactive compounds that can irritate the skin. As toxicologist Ewa Daniél explains in an interview with Bioli:
“There is no inherent reason why a substance derived from nature is safer than one created in a lab.”
In the article Art of Prevention: Essential Oils - Natural Products Not Necessarily Safe published by National Library of Medicine, it is stated that oils and extracts such as tea tree oil, lavender oil, and peppermint oil, among others, are well-documented triggers of irritation and allergic reactions, particularly in individuals with sensitive or compromised skin.
Because natural ingredients are complex mixtures of many compounds, it is difficult to isolate and remove problematic components without altering the ingredient itself.
2. Organic ingredients can increase the risk of irritation through heavy preservation
Many organic formulations rely heavily on water-based botanicals such as aloe vera juice or plant extracts. These ingredients are highly susceptible to microbial growth. As safety assessor Frederik Eberth explains in an interview with Bioli: “Botanical ingredients can be like candy for bacteria. To keep products safe, formulators often need to increase preservation.”
This often results in higher levels of preservatives and the addition of stabilizers. Ironically, formulations with fewer natural ingredients often require less preservation, making them more stable and better tolerated by sensitive skin.
3. Organic ingredients cause unpredictable skin reactions through their inconsistency
Organic ingredients are influenced by natural variability like weather conditions, soil composition, harvest timing, storage, and processing. Even small variations can alter their chemical profile. For sensitive or reactive skin, this inconsistency matters. Minor changes between batches can increase the risk of irritation or unexpected skin responses.
By contrast, controlled, lab-made ingredients are produced under tightly regulated conditions, ensuring consistent purity, performance, and skin compatibility from batch to batch.
Organic skincare: why it’s not better for the planet
Although organic cosmetics are widely perceived as environmentally friendly, their reliance on agricultural raw materials inherently requires significant land use. This raises questions about scalability and resource efficiency when compared to biotechnological or fermentation-based alternatives.
1. Organic skincare competes with food sources
Many organic skincare ingredients are derived from crops that are, in principle, edible. Avocado oil, coconut oil, sunflower oil, green tea, chamomile, and aloe vera are all grown on agricultural land suitable for food production.
While these ingredients are often produced for cosmetic use, they could just as well be eaten. Choosing to grow them for skincare is therefore a question of prioritization: using fertile land, water, and labor for beauty products rather than food.
As the world faces increasing pressure on food systems, dedicating agricultural resources to non-essential products like skincare deserves scrutiny.
2. Organic skincare takes up more valuable farmland
Organic farming generally has lower yields per hectare than conventional agriculture, because it restricts synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and yield-enhancing inputs.
As a result, producing organic skincare ingredients often requires more land than non-organic natural ingredients, and significantly more land than lab-made or biotech ingredients which require no farmland at all.
This increased land use contributes to:
- greater pressure on arable land
- higher water and resource demand
- increased impact on ecosystems and biodiversity.
When equally effective ingredients can be produced without crops, relying on land-intensive organic ingredients becomes difficult to justify from an environmental perspective.
3. Organic skincare has a higher impact during production
Life cycle analyses conducted by Bioli in collaboration with the Novo Nordisk Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark show that lab-made ester oils can be produced without farmland, using fewer resources and with a lower, more predictable environmental footprint than plant oils including significantly less water consumption, energy and co2.
4. Organic skincare requires more ingredients to remain stable
Plant oils and botanical extracts are prone to oxidation when exposed to light, heat, and oxygen. Oxidation reduces efficacy, creates unpleasant odors and increases allergenic potential.
To compensate, formulations often require additional antioxidants, preservatives, or fragrance, adding formulation complexity and increasing environmental impact. As Frederik Eberth notes in an interview with Bioli:
“When natural ingredients oxidize, they can become more allergenic and require additional ingredients to stabilize or mask degradation.”
The future of skincare is not organic—it’s intelligent
As skincare science evolves, the focus is shifting away from romanticized views of nature, and toward biotechnology, precision formulation, and skin biology. The most responsible skincare today is:
- minimal
- highly controlled
- low in allergens
low in environmental impact
Organic skincare may feel good conceptually—but when examined closely, it often fails both skin and planet. If we instead look to designed, not harvested and controlled, lab-made ingredients, including biotech ingredients, they are:
- built with a defined molecular structure
- purified to remove allergens and contaminants
- identical from batch to batch.
This level of control is why lab-made ingredients are often better tolerated by sensitive skin and preferred in dermatological and pharmaceutical formulations. Good skincare is not defined by whether an ingredient is natural or organic. It is defined by how it behaves on skin—and what it costs the planet.
Related article: Questioning natural skincare: Stop using sunflower, avocado oils, aloe vera and other natural ingredients
