Many people mistakenly believe that using organic ingredients automatically makes a certified organic, but that’s not the case. In addition to requiring a certain percentage of natural and organic ingredients according to certification guidelines, the manufacturing process, raw material procurement, and storage must also meet the certification body’s standards. Products must pass annual factory inspections, document reviews, and more to potentially obtain natural/organic certification.
The COSMOS natural/organic certification, which Inna Organic has obtained, was jointly established in 2010 by five leading organic certification organizations from Germany, France, Italy, and the UK. These organizations created an integrated standard for beauty and skincare products to eliminate unnecessary competition among themselves.
These five founding certification organizations are:
- BDIH (German Association of Industries and Trading Firms)
- Cosmebio (French Professional Association for Natural and Organic Cosmetics)
- Ecocert Greenlife SAS (French International Ecological Certification Center)
- ICEA (Italian Institute for Ethical and Environmental Certification)
- Soil Association (UK Soil Association)
Although COSMOS was jointly established by these five organizations, full integration is still in progress. Currently, each certification organization maintains two parallel one based on the COSMOS guideliness and the other using its original certification criteria. Since Inna Organic has chosen ECOCERT as its certifying body, so the remainder of this article will use ECOCERT as an example to explain these certifications.
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