Opinion

The ‘toxic’ lies behind Jessica Alba’s booming baby business

Actress Jessica Alba, co-founder of the ironically named “The Honest Company,” recently declared, “One billion feels like a small number.” Alba was referring to her companies’ profits, made not by being honest with consumers but by spreading lies about her competitors.

The Honest Company sells a variety of organic and eco-friendly baby and personal-care products, such as diapers, baby wipes, sunscreen, soap, face wash, shampoo and toothpaste.

Yet the company’s main commodity is fear — and a false promise that its products are better and much safer for you and your child than those sold by other companies.
It’s a marketing strategy that clearly works.

Alba often boasts that she really cares about her customers and implies those other guys — her competition — do not.

Relaying the story of why she started her company, Alba told ABC News that after doing research, she “found that there are a lot of toxic chemicals in everyday products, and I was more horrified to find that there are more toxic chemicals in baby products.”

Is this true? Are there toxic chemicals in baby products?

Of course there are, and for good reason.

For example, baby-product companies that compete with Alba regularly add fragrances to their diapers.

The Honest Company — which produces fragrance-free diapers — suggests on its website that a conspiracy designed “to disguise the toxic stink of those unpronounceable VOCs [volatile organic compounds]” is the real reason the competition uses fragrances.

The website further suggests that these fragrances are “made up of hundreds of other chemicals and may contain everything from allergens and carcinogens to hormone-disrupting phthalates.”

Reasonable people know that fragrance is added to diapers to cover up another toxic stink — the one coming out of your baby — but claiming there’s a conspiracy afoot to harm kids is the far better marketing strategy for Alba’s “honest” company.

Sure, chemicals can be toxic — if consumed in certain amounts. Heck, water is dangerous in high doses! And it’s easy to get nervous when looking at some products’ ingredient lists.

Long, multi-syllabic words that are hard to pronounce and even harder to understand don’t exactly instill confidence in protective parents.

Still, chemicals in products — including those fragrances used in diapers — are used in trace amounts, often improve the safety of those products and have undergone hundreds of safety tests.

Alba probably won’t mention this, but even her Honest Company products contain chemicals.

For instance, her diapers are plant-based, gluten-free (in case your gluten-sensitive kid wants to snack on them, I suppose) and are made of an “absorbent core with fluff pulp harvested from certified sustainably managed forests.”

But they also contain sodium polyacrylatepolyolefin, Polymer Spandex, Polyolefin and Polyurethane.

Her dish soap contains cocamidopropyl betain, phenoxyethenol and methylisothiazolinone. Her facial wipes contain polysorbate 20.

To be sure, each of these chemicals is completely safe — just as safe as the regulated chemicals used by her competitors.

Alba stokes a kind of chemphobia, repeating a standard line used by radical environmentalists that “there are 80,000 chemicals in consumer products — chemicals that frankly haven’t been tested.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. And here’s where Alba’s misinformation campaign kicks into high gear.

Chemicals are regulated under nearly a dozen federal agencies and regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency continuously reviews the safety of chemicals and requires chemical manufacturers to provide the agency with all available health and safety data as part of the approval process required before manufacturers can use a chemical in their products.

Alba certainly is a savvy businesswoman. She recognized that many people — particularly women — have been convinced that common chemicals are a bogeyman that lurks, waiting to harm them, in every bar of soap and baby product they see.

So Alba started a company selling overpriced goods to nervous people with money to spare.

But her marketing tactics are below-the-belt: She tells the world that she’s the only one who can be trusted, implying the rest are out to harm, maim, poison and kill.

The “Honest” Company thrives on alarmism, and a false promise of safer, healthier products at a high price.

It’s a strategy that makes some people rich and many more riddled with anxiety.

We can salute her for her marketplace success, but we shouldn’t let her get away with pretending that she’s saving the world.

Julie Gunlock writes for the Independent Women’s Forum.