THE SPA TREATMENT

I don’t know how to say this best, so I’ll just come right out with it. Organic salts do not exist. That’s in spite of the fact that your body scrub or your bathing salts can bear the toughest-to-get USDA seal confirming that it is, in fact, 100 percent organic.

What’s the deal?

Water and salt are not included in the tally of organic contents when formulations are scrutinized ingredient by ingredient. So that means only the other ingredients, maybe a sprig of organically grown rosemary or mint, count toward the bath salts’ organic status. So, not to be nasty, but it’s possible that organic salts may contain no organic contents at all and still get the seal.

Confused? Here’s the what the National Organic Program, which provides the standards for the USDA, says: “Products labeled as ‘100 percent organic’ must contain (excluding water and salt) only organically produced ingredients and processing aids.”

There are a couple of fairly good reasons the NOP doesn’t count water or salt:

1. It’s not fair to count water when it makes up 75 percent of a skin-care product. Notice that it’s almost always the first ingredient on the product label, which is organized by volume? Factoring in water would give a product a false impression of purity, the thinking goes. (Not like this doesn’t.)

2. It’s hard to tell what water and salt have come in contact with over their millions of years on the earth or during their extraction process. In other words, the water is not coming from USDA-certified organic wells.

So that’s the intriguing news. You won’t be mad if I compare organic salt to organic minerals in makeup next will you?