There are all kinds of "Natural" body care products out there. From the fanatically natural-like the ones that use only extracts of plants picked at specific times of the day to "natural" products from places like The Body Shop and Crabtree & Evelyn that combine some (in the case of the former) or surprisingly few (in the case of the latter) natural ingredients with all kinds of garish colors and aromas you won't find in any nature we've ever strolled through.

So what is natural? Well, the one thing we know for sure is that everything you'll ever find in any body care product (or probably in the world for that matter) must have been derived from either an animal, vegetable, or mineral source.

Nothing unnatural about animals, right? Especially when you compare them to most humans! But when you make soap out of animal fat (tallow)—as many pretty soaps in pretty flowery packages are—some people say, "It ain't natural."

Minerals are pretty natural too. At least, we've met some pretty mellow rocks in our time. But some people don't think it's natural to use mineral oil or other petroleum by-products in cosmetics because those aren't "living substances".

Which brings us to vegetables—those poor defenseless creatures we eat every day with reckless abandon (and without a pang of guilt). Everyone seems to agree that vegetables are real natural. And as long as you can trace the derivation of an ingredient back to one of them, you're on pretty high moral ground.

Unfortunately, you can derive the same ingredients from various sources. And even the people making the product might not know whether the ingredients are derived from animals, vegetables, or minerals. They can be following a formula that includes, for example, a couple of gallons of an emulsifier called Lezemul 561. If pressed to do so (to meet FDA labelling requirements, perhaps), they could find out that it contains glyceryl stearate and PEG-100 stearate. But good luck finding out whether the glycerine used to create the glyceryl stearate was originally a by-product of vegetable or tallow based soap manufacturing. Or whether the polyethylene in the PEG-100 stearate originally came from petroleum gas or alcohol, which, in turn could be methyl (wood), ethyl (sugar, grain) or who knows what!

If you're totally confused by now, welcome to the club. At least now you know enough to be suspicious of anyone who says, "Oh yeah, our products are completely natural," or makes any blanket claims for that matter.