Dear Valued Consumer

It is with great pleasure that we bring you our revised Gaia Organics range of natural personal care products. With more than 20-years experience in this field, we bring you a modern range of the finest products available anywhere in the world, in terms of quality, safety & efficacy. Formulations remain identical to those of ours now exported to the E.U. / U.K. markets.

My first product, a toothpowder, was made 20 years ago for my own use as a substitute for commercial toothpaste when my wife Lettie and I ‘dropped-out’ and began living self-sufficiently on a smallholding in the Garden Route, growing vegetables and herbs and with a herd of milk goats.

Many of the idealistic totally natural products that would follow for our own use have evolved since then, arising from practical experience and eventually dictated by solid natural product science, so that today you may also benefit from our mistakes and discoveries, many very hard earned.

We do not take lightly our responsibility for your health and well-being and we often face fierce criticism from well-meaning, yet essentially ignorant sources, of our sometimes controversial positions on so-called natural product formulation, yet the passage of time has and still does vindicate our principled stand as correct and holding of the high moral ground.

Scattered throughout this catalogue and more definitively dealt with in detailed reports, we will share with you the truths regarding personal care toxicology to help you gain perspective on the cesspool of alarmist toxic ingredient scare misinformation circulating on the internet and via e-mail and new age magazines as clever marketing strategies by those who know or should know better, but sadly prefer to profit at the cost of truth.

Because some truths are interspersed into promotional hype, it is difficult for distributors and consumers to discern what information is accurate and what not. A truly informed perspective is the key to making sense of this quagmire and using our 30-year knowledge base and full-time research facility, we are sure you will appreciate our considerable efforts to ensure your safety, including from surprisingly common natural product toxicity and health fraud.

Sincerely,

Stuart Thomson, Director, Gaia Research Institute, Garden of Eden, Knysna, South Africa

For more information on any ‘apparently’ controversial statements herein, read further and if not convinced please email director@gaiaresearch.co.za or phone 044-532-7765 & chat with the Director. You owe it to yourself!

Gaia Organics have, under the auspices of and as the independent funding arm of the Gaia Research Institute, been providing it’s own natural personal care products to South African and international clientele for nearly two decades. In recent years however, some competitors with little or no history, experience or expertise, have engaged in ignorant armchair public criticism of ingredients used by other role-players, including Gaia Organics, not on any merit, but as cheap, cowardly marketing ploys to enter a traditionally tranquil market with a big splash, a very effective and lucrative marketing strategy started by Neways, a US multi-level internet marketing company.

Local copycats, using Biophile magazine, pamphlets, forums and their websites, reluctant to forgo such harmful practices, continue to put profit before truth by deliberately disseminating fraudulent misinformation relating to crucial safety aspects of the ingredients of others. Gaia Research has completely rebutted such criticisms in writing. See “The Biofilth Files: Have You Been Enchantricked?” & “The Essential Organic Skincare Files: Are You And Your Toddlers Truly Naturebabes?” Gaia have uncovered a fraudulent misrepresentation, miscontextualisation and even outright false fabrication of misinformation, not only maligning the target ingredients of others, but also in the portrayal of ‘suspect’ ingredients used by the culprits themselves, that are not fully listed or are falsely portrayed.

It is truly ironic that the most innocuous (safest) ingredients comprising the base formulation or inert components of some Gaia Organics products are the ones that have been criticised as being unsafe, but this actually reveals the Neways plot, which deliberately targets the common denominators in most personal care products so as to cast as wide a net of malicious aspersions as possible. A further irony is that the culprits have had to compromise on the safety and efficacy of their own products, by using poor alternatives to the completely safe and efficacious common denominator ingredients that they have targeted, namely entirely natural mineral oil; quasi-natural sodium lauryl ether sulphate and nature-identical parabens. Alternative to these ingredients, which are perfectly safe when used correctly in pure form, are several orders of magnitude more hazardous than those they replace.

I have touched on some of these issues in this catalogue and invite you to evaluate for yourself the strength of the genuine superiority of our ingredients and products over that of the scaremongers, whose only advantage are their lies and false claims to safety and superiority by supposedly being ‘all natural’ and ‘organic’; great sounding ideals, but the reality is that such products could only either still be living in nature or, having been removed, are decomposing, since that is what happens to previously living things – when not ‘unnaturally preserved by human ingenuity’. At best, the life force ebbs away and at worst, toxic molecules are produced that really are undesirable. The term ‘natural preservative’ is an oxymoron. If it were truly natural, it would decompose and cease to be, which is exactly what happens to the traces of nature identical Parabens used to preserve our Aqueous Cream.

Not listed in the catalogue entries are the constituent ingredients of the Aqueous Cream, which like other complex ingredients, is listed as the complex. However, because the once standard British Pharmacopoeia Ung Emulcificans Aqueosum (UEA) formula is modified to meet our needs as entirely suitable for leave-on applications, Gaia Organics, in the interests of total transparency, shall proportionally list all the individual constituents: 1) water; 2) mineral gel; 3) cetyl stearyl alcohol; 4) mineral oil; 5) sodium lauryl sulphate; 6) methyl paraben and 7) propyl paraben. Items 2&4 are fractionally distilled to purity from crude oil, the richest and purest natural organic repository on Earth; 3&5 are synthesised from coconut oil and 6&7 from gum benzoin and are nature-identical to those found in Oka (an edible tuber) and Mangoes respectively and are used in traces just sufficient to maintain the integrity of the base cream long enough to complete product formulation, when colloidal silver and essential oils assume ultimate duty in the cream products. No parabens are used in non-cream products (those not listed as containing aqueous cream), which non-cream, but rather water-based products, are manufactured individually from start to finish, rather than from a common base.

Regular UEA contains too much Sodium lauryl sulphate, not only as a formulating emulsifier, also more to increase utility as a soap-free cleansing emulsion cream. It is also generally inappropriately preserved for leave-on purposes, traditionally with chlorocresol, but now more frequently with phenoxyethanol, which latter has spoilt a long and impressive widespread-use history of suitability for even troubled skin conditions such as eczema and (radiation) burns. We stand by our UEA as superior to ‘natural’ water & plant oil emulsions in terms of quality, safety and efficacy for our purpose of a stable inert spreading cream for our biological actives in such products. See Why is Gaia Aqueous Cream safe? We again challenge the opposition to provide a full listing of their ingredients and sub-ingredients as we have done. We really are proud of ours, they apparently not of theirs, as witnessed by only partial, and or vague listings of selected hype ingredients.

The order of ‘potential toxicity’ of Gaia ingredients from highest to lowest risk are: fixed & volatile (essential) plant oils (long and short term respectively); anti-oxidative vitamins; herbal extracts; synthesised coconut oil ingredients; nutrients/co-factors; kelp; fruit acids; crude oil sourced petroleum inerts; silver & parabenzoate preservatives. Please see our free blue-bordered “Consumer Awareness” booklet or “Personal Care Toxicology: The Facts” available here.