What I See When I Read a Label

Field Notes — February 2026

A few years ago, a friend handed me a moisturizer she'd been using on her daughter. The packaging was beautiful — soft greens, botanical illustrations, the word "pure" in a delicate serif font. She wanted to know what I thought.

I turned it over and started reading.

This is the part of my life that's hard to explain to people who didn't train in environmental science. I don't read an ingredient list the way most consumers do — scanning for words they recognize, checking for things they've been told to avoid. I read it the way I was trained to read an environmental impact assessment. I'm not asking "is this safe?" I'm asking a series of more specific questions that most people — including most cosmetic chemists — never think to ask.

Where does this compound go after it crosses the skin barrier? Does it accumulate in tissue, or does the body metabolize and excrete it? What are the metabolites — the breakdown products — and are they safe? At what concentration does this ingredient begin to interact with the endocrine system? And what happens when it washes down the drain and enters the water supply — does it persist, does it bioaccumulate in aquatic organisms, does it disrupt reproductive systems in species that never consented to the exposure?

These aren't theoretical questions. They're the questions I spent my career asking about chemicals in watersheds, soil systems, and coastal ecosystems. The only thing that changed when I started formulating bodycare is the point of entry. Instead of a chemical being applied to a field and working its way into a creek, it's being applied to skin and working its way into a body. The science is the same. The pathways are the same. The consequences are the same.

My friend's moisturizer had seventeen ingredients. I could tell her the story of about twelve of them — not from the marketing literature, but from the toxicological research. It wasn't a horror story. Most of the ingredients were benign, or at least below thresholds of concern at the concentrations used. But three of them raised questions I couldn't answer confidently, and one — a preservative system common in "natural" products — had peer-reviewed data suggesting endocrine activity at levels consistent with daily topical application.

I told her what I'd tell anyone: it's probably fine. Most products on the market are probably fine for most people most of the time. But "probably fine" is a different standard than "proven safe," and the distance between those two phrases is where my entire career has lived.

The beauty industry operates on what you might call the permissive principle: an ingredient is considered acceptable until proven harmful. This is how most consumer product regulation works in the United States. The burden of proof falls on demonstrating danger, not on demonstrating safety.

Environmental science operates on the opposite framework. We call it the precautionary principle: if you don't have sufficient evidence that something is safe, you don't introduce it into the system. The burden of proof falls on the party proposing the exposure, not on the organisms being exposed.

These two frameworks produce radically different outcomes when applied to the same ingredient list.

Take fragrance. Under the permissive principle, a company can list "fragrance" as a single ingredient on a label, even if that word represents a proprietary blend of dozens of individual compounds — some of them phthalates, some of them synthetic musks that bioaccumulate in human breast milk, some of them allergens that sensitize over years of repeated exposure. The blend is legal. The disclosure is compliant. The product is "safe."

Under the precautionary principle, you can't use a compound you can't name. You can't use a compound whose long-term accumulation profile you haven't evaluated. And you can't hide behind trade secret protections when the question is what's entering someone's body through their skin every single day.

This is why every NICER product lists every ingredient, fully. Not because regulation requires it at our level of simplicity — with 3 to 9 ingredients, there's nothing to obscure. But because the philosophy demands it. If you can't say what's in it, you can't claim to know what it does.

The lens of environmental science changes more than just which ingredients you avoid. It changes how you think about the ones you choose.

When I select sunflower oil as a carrier, I'm not just looking at its linoleic acid content or its comedogenic rating — though both matter. I'm asking: what is the full lifecycle of this ingredient? How was the crop grown? Were pesticides used, and if so, do residues persist in the pressed oil? Is the farming practice regenerative — building soil health — or extractive? What happens to this oil after it's absorbed, metabolized, and eventually excreted? Does it introduce anything into the body or the watershed that wasn't there before?

Most cosmetic formulators never ask these questions because they aren't trained to. Cosmetic chemistry is primarily concerned with efficacy and stability — does the product work, and does it stay consistent on the shelf? Those are important questions. But they're surface questions. They address the product's performance without addressing its full impact on the biological and environmental systems it enters.

Environmental toxicology adds the dimension of time. A single application of almost anything is harmless. But personal care products aren't used once. They're used daily, for years, for decades. The question isn't what this ingredient does today. It's what the cumulative exposure does over a lifetime — to the person using it, and to every ecosystem the metabolites pass through on their way out.

This is why bioaccumulation matters. Some compounds that are harmless at any single dose gradually build up in fatty tissue because the body absorbs them faster than it can eliminate them. Over years, the tissue concentration climbs. This is well-documented for certain preservatives, UV filters, and fragrance compounds found in conventional personal care. The research is in the peer-reviewed literature. It just hasn't changed the industry's practices, because the permissive principle doesn't require it to.

I want to be honest about something: this way of seeing can be paralyzing.

When you've spent enough time studying chemical fate and transport — the discipline that traces a compound's journey from application through metabolism through environmental release — you start seeing pathways everywhere. Every product becomes a delivery system. Every ingredient becomes a question. The friend who hands you her daughter's moisturizer is asking for a simple yes or no, and what you have is a probability distribution and a list of unknowns.

The answer I've arrived at, after years of sitting with this, is not to avoid everything. It's to use what you can fully understand.

That's why our formulations are small. Three to nine ingredients, each one with a clear body of peer-reviewed evidence behind it. Not because minimalism is an aesthetic — I covered this in my last piece — but because at that scale, I can genuinely account for every interaction, every metabolic pathway, every environmental endpoint. I can tell you not just what each ingredient does on your skin, but what it does after your skin. Where it goes. How it breaks down. What it becomes.

At twenty or thirty ingredients, that level of accounting becomes impossible. Not difficult — impossible. The interactions multiply combinatorially, the metabolic pathways branch and overlap, and the honest answer to "what does this product do inside my body?" becomes "we don't fully know." That might be an acceptable answer under the permissive principle. It's not acceptable to me.

People sometimes ask me if I think the beauty industry is dangerous. I don't. I think it's inattentive. I think it asks the wrong questions — not out of malice, but because the regulatory framework doesn't require the right ones, and the training most formulators receive doesn't equip them to ask.

The right questions aren't "does this cause irritation?" and "does this feel good?" Those are starting points, not endpoints. The right questions are: what happens to this compound over years of daily exposure? What are its breakdown products? Does it accumulate? Does it interact with the endocrine system at concentrations consistent with real-world use? And what does it do to the water, the soil, and the organisms downstream when millions of people wash it off every morning?

These are the questions environmental scientists are trained to ask about every chemical that enters a system. I just happen to apply them to the system that is your skin.

The result is products that are simpler, that are fully transparent, and that I can stand behind not just today but in ten years, when the long-term data catches up to the long-term exposure. That's not a marketing position. That's a scientific one.

I'd rather use five ingredients I fully understand than fifty I'm guessing about.

— James Birchler, Founder + Chief Scientist

NICER follows the precautionary principle: only ingredients proven safe and effective by peer-reviewed science. Every formulation is handcrafted in small batches near Park City, Utah. Learn more at feelnicer.com.