Shampoos, skin cleansers, moisturizers, cosmetics—they're bursting with flowers and spices and all things nice, or so they smell. But mainstream body care products aren't the "herbalicious" concoctions their advertising suggests, and are packed with synthetic chemicals. Some people have become hypersensitive to ingredients in standard products and react with skin rashes, headaches, fatigue, nausea, or serious illness. Other people won't stand for the cruelty of testing synthetic ingredients on animals. And it's dawning on many people who choose organic foods and excellent nutrition that what we put on our bodies nourishes—or harms—not only our skin but our inner selves.

Enter the alternative. A small collection of companies offer skincare, hair care, and cosmetics made with only natural ingredients. Examples are Aubrey, Aura Cacia, Burt's Bees, Common Sense Farm, Dr. Hauschka, GratefulBody, and The Organic Pharmacy. Herbalists and wildcrafters often make their own products; some in the Hudson Valley are Falcon Formulations, Mountain Spirit Botanicals, Primitive Lip Color, and Rosner Soap.

"People really want natural skincare," says naturopathic doctor Tom Francescott, whose new "modern apothecary" in Rhinebeck called Dr. Tom's Tonics stocks several products lines he's chosen for their pure, natural, organic ingredients. "They are unbelievably clean. Mineral makeups are also getting very big. It's a huge trend."

"An oil slick is no better for your face than for the Alaskan coastline," says the Hudson Valley's Dina Falconi, author of Earthly Bodies and Heavenly Hair and creator of Falcon Formulations body care products. She's referring to the ubiquitous petroleum-derived ingredients in mainstream products. But petrochemicals and other inexpensive, synthetic substances can irritate skin, dry it out, trigger allergies, and penetrate deeper into the bloodstream, possibly disrupting hormones and accumulating as carcinogens. Typical mainstream ingredients are paraffin, mineral oil, phthalates, parabens, alcohols, lauryl/laureth sulfates, ethanolamines (DEA, MEA, and TEA), propylene and polyethylene glycol (PG, PEG), and artificial preservatives, fragrances, and colorants, as well as lingering herbicides and pesticides.

These are "junk food for the skin," says Shannon Schroter of GratefulBody, an all-natural skincare company based in Berkeley, California. "Your body looks at all these ingredients and says, 'I don't know what this is,' and tries to get rid of it. It should be called the 'skin stress' industry, because there's no 'care' in it."

Many synthetic ingredients have yet to be properly tested for safety and increasingly are suspected of harming humans as well as the environment. The phthalate esters, in virtually all personal care products and detectible in our blood, tissues, and urine, are one example. As endocrine disruptors, they cause reproductive abnormalities in a wide array of animals and may alter immune function, behavior, and memory as well. There are no long-term studies of phthalate effects in humans, though concern has been growing for decades about the impact of phthalates on human reproduction, especially on development of sexual organs in male fetuses.

Another turn-off of mainstream products: Cattle pieces not suitable for food are ground up ("rendered"), and the floating fat layer used as raw material for ingredients, especially in cosmetics. In July 2004 the FDA banned small intestine, brain, skull, eyes, spinal cord, vertebral column, tonsils, and other nervous system and immune organs from the mix—an action taken because "the vCJD [variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob] disease agent would likely be concentrated" in them.