Fourteen things you’ll never find in a PrimalBasics product

Most “clean” brands lead with what’s in the bottle. I’ve come to think the more useful list is the one most brands never print: what isn’t.

When I started making my own personal care products, it wasn’t out of ambition. It was the opposite — a low, persistent frustration. I’d pick up a bottle, read the back, fail to recognise half of it, look those ingredients up, and land on one of two answers: “probably fine,” or “nobody really knows.” Neither is a standard. Both are a shrug. So at some point I stopped shrugging and wrote one down.

We call it The 0% Standard. It is fourteen exclusions, no exceptions — ten that apply to every product we make, and four more that apply where the chemistry makes them relevant. It is published on the site, it is verifiable on the label, and it is the one thing we do not compromise on, batch to batch.

The ten we exclude from everything

In every PrimalBasics product, you will not find: industrial seed oils, synthetic fragrance, hexane, phthalates, parabens, triclosan, sodium lauryl sulfate, propylene glycol, silicones, or petroleum derivatives.

A few of those deserve a sentence, because the reasoning matters more than the list.

Synthetic fragrance is the one I feel most strongly about. On a label, the single word “fragrance” (or “parfum”) can legally stand in for hundreds of undisclosed compounds. It is the largest blind spot in the entire category — a legal place to hide things from the person reading the label. When we use a scent, we name every oil that makes it.

Industrial seed oils, silicones, and petroleum derivatives are, more often than not, there to do a cheap job: bulk a formula out, give it slip, give it shelf life. They’re engineering shortcuts. We’d rather solve the same problem with an ingredient that earns its place.

Parabens, phthalates, SLS, propylene glycol, triclosan, and hexane are the preservatives, surfactants, and solvents that carry enough open questions that I’d rather formulate without them than spend a paragraph qualifying them. Some are used safely every day. That’s not the point. The point is I get to decide where our line sits, and I drew it on the far side of “probably fine.”

The four that depend on the product

The last four only make sense in context, so we exclude them where the category calls for it: aluminium and baking soda in our deodorant, fluoride in our oral care, and DEET in our insect repellent. Each is a default ingredient in its category — the thing you’d expect to find. We left each one out on purpose, and the product still has to work without it. That constraint is the whole exercise.

Why publish the list at all

Because a standard you keep in your head isn’t a standard — it’s a preference. Writing it down, and putting it somewhere a customer can find it, changes the relationship. It means you can hold me to it instead of taking my word for it.

That’s also why we built The Verdict — a public lookup tool on our site. You can paste in any ingredient, or any product, ours or a competitor’s, and see how it grades against the same standard we hold ourselves to. It currently covers more than 6,100 ingredients, every verdict source-cited, free to browse. Run something off your own bathroom shelf through it. Run our products through it. I would genuinely rather you check than trust me.

I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t. It is not a claim that everything we exclude is dangerous, or that “natural” means safe — it doesn’t, and that’s a phrase you’ll never hear from me either. Plenty of excluded ingredients are used responsibly by people who know what they’re doing. The 0% Standard isn’t a fear list. It’s a discipline: a published, fixed set of constraints that every one of our formulas has to survive before it ships.

Fourteen exclusions sounds restrictive. It is. It’s the most useful constraint we have — because every formula that makes it through is one I can stand behind completely, without an asterisk.

Read the full 0% Standard. Look up any ingredient with The Verdict.

— Mike