Think Dirty
Empowering ingredient conscious consumers to choose the safest beauty, personal & household products.
Think Dirty®, an app for your phone, available for both Android and Apple, is the easiest way to learn ingredients in your beauty, personal care and household products.
All you have to do is scan any product barcode and you’ll see easy-to-understand information on the product, including its ingredients list, safety scores, in depth information on each ingredient, and customer reviews.
Think Dirty® is a project born out of a personal journey to understand the truths in the beauty industry. After watching Annie Leonard’s “Story of Cosmetics”, which examined the pervasive use of toxic chemicals in our everyday personal care products, Founder and CEO Lily Tse was shocked the cosmetics industry was not regulated like the food and drug sectors. And like most women, she never thought any of the products she used would be described as “toxic” or could contain cancer-causing.
She found finding safer products to be very difficult. Although many products are labeled “all-natural” or “organic”, she learned that these claims don’t actually mean anything and that, in fact, there is little regulation or transparency in labeling of our personal care and cosmetic products.
She used her background in Design Marketing and desire to find a better way to create this app and over the years is just keeps getting better. The mobile app launched in Summer 2013 with more than 68,300 products listed and by 2020 that number has grown to 1.4 million.
Methodology
Unlike other ingredient databases, Think Dirty Focuses exclusively on the chemical content of the products in question.
They have consciously avoided the widely-used practice of “greenwashing”, whereby the environmental or social responsibility of a product’s manufacturer is factored into the assessment allowing a product to receive an artificially low toxicity rating, and are solely concerned about the possible impact of a given product on an individual’s health,
Their ratings methodology reflects that singular commitment.
Ingredients ratings are determined based on publicly available data released by non-profit and government agencies in North America regarding the health and safety of the individual components found in your personal care products.
We assess the overall risk of a given product based on the potential health impacts of its published ingredients. Each ingredient listed on the product label or manufacturer’s website is evaluated for documented evidence of Carcinogenicity, Developmental & Reproductive Toxicity and/or Allergenicity & Immunotoxicity
By default, products receive an overall Think Dirty® rating no lower than the highest rating of any individual ingredient.
If several ingredients in a given product receive high ratings, the product itself is automatically assigned a Think Dirty® rating of 10. It is important to note that even though some of the ingredients in personal care products may be present in very small quantities, the likelihood of significant repeated exposure is high due to the frequency with which personal care products are typically used.
Think Dirty Verified
For the selected natural beauty brands Think Dirty offers a verification service that requires a $99 application fee along with one time review fees and annual or monthly listing fees.
Once verified, brands receive the Vertification Badge next to all of their products, licensing rights to the Think Dirty intellectual property including the certification logo, free advertising through the app, all of the ingredients in their products will vetted by a experts and labeled with an official Think Dirty rating (if they don’t already have one).