Our dream was to offer an all natural certified organic hair care system formulated exclusively for kids, that revolutionised the concept of environmentally friendly ingredients, while offering salon-professional level performance, and simply the very healthiest and safest personal care products!
Our formulations are all preservative-free, or more aptly thought of as self-preserving, and effectively prevent microbial contamination without traditional preservatives.
Preservation through Hurdle Technology
Eco.kid knows it’s critically important that our kid’s personal care products are protected from microorganisms to ensure product longevity and user safety. Our Hurdle Technology approach rethinks traditional biocidal preservation.
Instead of using one powerful biocidal preservative, creating multiple barriers to microbial growth (or “hurdles”), we focused on research and development into establishing natural formulation ingredient hurdles to keep microorganisms in check.
Eco.kid’s Alternative Preservation portfolio includes a combination of individual ingredients that symbiotically create a complete system that work with our formulations’ microbial growth “hurdles” to provide broad spectrum antimicrobial control in the bottle, but once diluted and applied to the skin and scalp these actives convert to microbial food to support the skin's natural beneficial microbes.
The Eco.kid’s Philosophy on Preservation
We must find safe, effective, and consumer acceptable ways to protect ingredients and products from microbial contamination through using a 100% non-toxic complete system in our packaged products, that once applied to the skin, in diluted form, do no harm to our consumer, or their skin’s microbiome. These “Hurdle Systems”, when combined with good manufacturing practices, create our biocidal-preservative-free, “Self-Preserving Personal Care” products that effectively prevent microbial contamination.
Why is this vitally important?
Children are not little adults: “The developmental component of a child’s physiology is changing maturing, differentiating and growing in phases known as "developmental windows". These "critical windows of vulnerability" have no parallel in adult physiology and create unique risks for children exposed to hazards that can alter normal function and structure.”
Source: Children's Health and the Environment WHO Training Package for the Health Sector World Health Organization www.who.int/ceh
A kid’s skin is like a sponge
Eco.kid is about the best practice in personal care products for kids; the healthiest and safest choices for our kids and our environment. Why? – Because we understand that everything that is used on their skin or hair penetrates. Their skin is like a sponge.
Kids produce six times less sebum (skin oil) than that of an adult. Without the protection of sebum, any chemicals dissolved or suspended in a lotion, solution, shampoo, or conditioner used on a kid will penetrate the skin to some extent during use.
Endocrine Disruptors (EDCs)
Kids may be exposed to endocrine disruptors through food and beverages consumed, pesticides residues on fruit and vegetables, household cleaning products, chemicals in plastics packaging, fire retardants in clothing, and through the preservatives and fragrances found in personal care used.
In essence, your kid’s contact with these chemicals may occur through diet, air, skin, and water.
At bath time, skin and water mix, so anything soluble in your kid’s bath time products is potentially available to absorb through your kid’s skin and into their blood stream.
Exposures to EDCs even at very low levels during the critical windows of developmental vulnerability of life can have substantial and sometimes permanent impacts on health.
It’s not that we cleanse our kids too often, it’s that we don’t use the right personal care for kids’ scalp and skin.
Many parents and caregivers see kids as something you “wash”, like the family dog or the dishes. They don’t stop to think of dangers of daily soaking their kids in a bubble bath full of harsh sulphate surfactants, biocidal preservatives, artificial colours and fragrances, all the well-established culprits of Atopic dermatitis, and many of these synthetic chemicals are also known endocrine disruptors.
For eco.kid to truly be the healthiest and safest choice for kids we needed to eliminate the need for preservatives (and synthetic fragrances) in every formulation. The two major sources of EDCs in personal care.
Even low doses of endocrine-disrupting chemicals may be particularly unsafe for kids. The body’s normal endocrine functioning involves very small changes in hormone levels, yet we know even these small changes can cause significant developmental and biological effects. This observation leads scientists to think that endocrine-disrupting chemical exposures, even at low amounts, can alter the body’s sensitive systems and lead to health problems.
