I’m a little confused by the grading here

https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/products/818542-Lush_Body_Spray_Dads_Garden_Lemon_Tree__2019_formulation/

Says it has allergic effects. No shit? It’s full of citrus, as it says on the Lush website.

Says it has irritation for eyes potential. No shit? Don’t put citrus in your eyes, somehow this isn’t an issue for denatured alcohol though, which is toxic on purpose (so as to prevent it’s consumption as surrogate alcohol).

Then says it has Fragrance in it, fair enough that is proprietary, could be some shit in there.

The page for it says Allergies & Immunotoxicity is the only high common concern.

Again obviously you can have an allergy to everything so it’s a bit redundant, no? A full list of potential allergens would just be a list of everything, no?

https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ingredients/702512-FRAGRANCE/

Then for immuntoxicity, the table just shows a bunch of vague and uncited claims, referencing some mystery “open science literature”. Neither the product nor ingredients pages explicitly link to specific claims from peer reviewed sources such as journals doing literature reviews on the topic or even studies or papers on the subject, nor do they include a mechanistic explanation for the phenomena.

I’m not a scientist, but this doesn’t scream exactly scientific, you can’t just write “Source: science literature” I would’ve been expelled from uni trying to pull that shit even at first year bachelors’ level in an engineering course.

So it seems that this isn’t science or even evidence based, cursory Google search seems to suggest this EWG is a dodgy lobbying group that claims to be a non-profit. Where’s the lobbying - there’s power/money and incentive/goal.

http://www.undueinfluence.com/ewg_complaint.htm

http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2011/09/28/cleaning-up-the-ewgs-dirty-dozen/

http://www.realclearscience.com/2012/06/22/food_safety_science_vs_green_agenda_247623.html

They also made a film called “Not So Pretty”, which urged people to throw away their “toxic” and “harmful” existing beauty products, and buy ones that EWG recommends in the app and database they very conveniently provide where they lay out unsourced unscientific claims about the safety of various products.

Take this as you will, but if you ask me, this seems like a simple marketing scheme to prop up certain products and sell them to those who want to do right by the environment and look after their health by creating a fake “certification” of sorts, no different from recycling symbols on soda bottles.