Beyond "Natural"
You Shouldn't Have to
Take Our Word for It.
Hair color boxes carry a lot of reassuring words, and in the US only some of them are defined by law. "Natural" isn't one the FDA regulates for cosmetics — nobody has to verify it before printing it. "Organic" is more meaningful, but it comes in levels: a product can use the word while part of the formula isn't organic at all.
This page is about telling those apart — what a certification actually checks, what conventional color does to hair and why, and what's in ours. Where we make a claim, we'll point you to where it can be checked.
Two questions it deliberately doesn't answer have pages of their own: how each plant pigment actually stays on hair — they don't all do it the same way — and whether certification changes the colour you get, which includes where an uncertified product can have the edge over ours.
One thing worth saying up front. Radico stays on your hair for one to two hours — longer than a conventional color, not shorter. So we're not going to argue that time on your scalp is the problem; we'd be arguing against ourselves. Our point is narrower: for something that sits there that long, what it's made of should be verifiable rather than described.
What's on this page
The First Misunderstanding
"Natural" Isn't a Regulated Word
Plenty of hair colors are labeled natural, and it's reasonable to read that as safer. But in the US the FDA doesn't define "natural" for cosmetics, so the word on the front tells you the brand chose it — not what the formula contains. Certification is a different kind of statement, because somebody outside the company has to agree with it.
"Natural"
Often genuinely plant-derived. The limitation isn't the ingredients — it's that the word alone doesn't tell you what else is in there.
- ×May contain synthetic additives
- ×May contain artificial preservatives
- ×May contain synthetic pigments
- ×No third-party verification required
Certified Organic
Has to meet a written, inspectable standard — covering not only ingredients but how they were grown, sourced, processed and manufactured.
- ✓Grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers
- ✓Free from GMOs
- ✓No artificial preservatives or fragrance
- ✓Audited by a recognized certifying body
The Second Misunderstanding
Even "Organic" Comes in Levels
This is the part most shoppers are surprised by. A product can honestly say "organic" while a meaningful share of the formula isn't. How large that share can be depends on which standard is being followed — which is exactly why the percentage matters less than whether anyone independent checked it.
Tap any level to see what it can contain
How to read this ladder
These are the tiers you'll meet on a shelf, not a single legal scale. Each certifying body writes its own percentage rules, and they don't all count ingredients the same way, so two products showing the same number aren't necessarily comparable. Treat the figures as a rough map rather than a ranking.
One more thing worth knowing, since it works in our favour and we'd rather explain it than let it look like a boast: water and minerals can't be certified organic. Most cosmetics contain water, so most of them can't reach 100% however carefully they're made. Radico is dry plant powder — you add the water yourself, at home. That's a large part of why 100% is available to us and not to a cream or a liquid.
And one that doesn't work in our favour, for the same reason. Certification is a statement about what is and isn't in the pouch. It is not a statement about how well the colour works. Certified henna and uncertified henna carry the same pigment and behave the same way on hair. If you are wondering whether any of this changes the result you get, we have written that up separately — including where an uncertified product can have the edge over ours.
How It Reaches You
Inside the Strand, or On It
Conventional permanent color has to get pigment past the cuticle and into the cortex. That takes an alkali to swell the fibre and an oxidizer to develop the dye once it's there. Nothing in Radico needs the cuticle opened to get in. That single difference is what everything below follows from — though how each plant then stays is a different story, and we have set that out pigment by pigment.
Conventional Permanent Color
Works Its Way In
- The CuticleAmmonia raises the pH and swells the shaft, lifting the cuticle so dye can pass through it
- Where Color GoesDye precursors arrive colorless and develop inside the cortex once peroxide oxidizes them
- What Touches Your ScalpWhatever is in the formula — alkali, oxidizer, precursors — is in contact with skin for the whole application
- Over TimeKeratin is oxidized along with the pigment, and hair grows drier and more porous
Radico Colour Me Organic
Stays at the Surface
- The CuticleNothing swells it open — there is no alkali in the formula. Nothing has to reach the cortex, so nothing has to be forced through
- Where Color GoesHenna's pigment bonds to keratin at the outer layers. Indigo arrives colorless and becomes pigment there. Neither reaches the cortex
- What Touches Your ScalpCertified organic plant powder and the water you mixed it with. That's the complete list
- Over TimeThere is no oxidizer in the formula. Indigo does oxidize on your hair — but what oxidizes is the plant precursor, not your keratin
Where we stop short
You'll find plenty of sites willing to tell you exactly how much of a hair dye ingredient your scalp absorbs and what it does once it's there. We can't tell you that honestly. Absorption through skin varies with the molecule, the formula, and the person, and the health significance of it is still argued over in the research.
What isn't in question is the first part: whatever is in the formula is against your scalp for as long as the color is on. So rather than estimate the risk for you, we'd rather you be able to read the list of what's actually there — for our product and for any other you're considering.
The word "damaging" is doing a lot of work in this comparison, and it deserves to be specific. The next section is the actual chemistry: what peroxide does to the protein your hair is built from, and how researchers measure it.
The Word "Damaging", Specifically
What Peroxide Does
to the Protein
Comparisons like the one above usually stop at the word damaging, which is not a chemical term and can mean anything. Here is the specific change, the reason it does not undo itself, and how researchers put a number on it.
Hair is keratin, and keratin is unusually rich in cysteine — a sulfur-bearing amino acid. Two cysteines on neighbouring protein chains join through their sulfur atoms into a disulfide bond, and it is those bonds, in their millions, that give a strand its strength and hold its shape. Hydrogen peroxide breaks them.
The bond does not open. It is destroyed. Oxidation splits the sulfur bridge and converts each side into a sulfonic acid group — cysteic acid. Two chains that were tied together are now two loose ends, each capped with a group that cannot re-form the bond.
This is the part that matters, and it is why it appears on a page about choosing a hair colour. A broken disulfide bond can sometimes be re-made. Cysteic acid is not a broken bond — it is a different chemical group, and there is no reaction in a bottle that turns it back into cystine. Hair is dead tissue; it has no repair mechanism of its own. The cysteic acid stays in that strand until the strand is cut off.
How it is measured
Method one
Amino acid analysis
Hydrolyse the hair and count what is there. Cystine goes down, cysteic acid goes up, and the two figures move together. The oldest and most direct approach.
Method two
Infrared spectroscopy
Sulfur-oxygen bonds absorb infrared light at a wavelength nothing else in hair uses. The taller that peak, the more cysteic acid in the fibre — measured without destroying the sample.
Method three
X-ray mapping
Sulfur absorbs X-rays differently depending on its oxidation state, so the damage can be located within a cross-section of a strand rather than merely totalled.
Two findings from that work are worth knowing, because they are more specific than “bleach damages hair”.
It is dose-dependent, not a threshold. Infrared work on bleached hair reports cysteic acid rising in proportion to the square root of bleaching time — the signature of a reaction limited by how fast peroxide diffuses inward. There is no safe duration below which nothing happens; there is only more or less.
It concentrates where you can feel it. X-ray mapping of bleached hair found the highest cysteic acid in the cuticle, the outer layer — which is the part that governs how hair behaves in your hands. Permed hair showed it distributed more evenly.
What we have not measured
We have not run any of these tests on our own product, and nobody else has published them either. Our position is an argument from the formula rather than a measurement: cysteic acid is made by an oxidiser, there is no oxidiser in a Radico pouch, so we do not expect our colour to produce it. That is sound reasoning. It is not the same thing as a spectrum.
We would rather say that plainly than let this section imply we have data we do not have. If we ever run the comparison, the result goes on this page whichever way it falls.
One other honest note. Products that claim to rebuild broken bonds are making a claim about something else — we are not evaluating them here. What the chemistry above says is narrower and harder to argue with: cysteic acid itself does not revert.
And if your hair has been bleached or permed before, it already carries some. That is worth knowing when a plant colour lands differently on your ends than on your roots — the two are not the same material any more.
References
Nachtigal J, Robbins CR. Intermediate oxidation products of cystine in oxidized hair. Textile Research Journal. 1970;40(5):454–457. doi:10.1177/004051757004000511
Hilterhaus-Bong S, Zahn H. Contributions to the chemistry of human hair. 1. Analyses of cystine, cysteine and cystine oxides in untreated human hair. Int J Cosmet Sci. 1987;9(3):101–110. doi:10.1111/j.1467-2494.1987.tb00467.x
Application of XANES profiles to X-ray spectromicroscopy for biomedical specimens, part II: mapping oxidation state of cysteine in human hair. PMID 21876281 — the source of the cuticle-versus-cortex distribution above.
Evaluation of cysteic acid in bleached hair using infrared spectroscopy — the source of the square-root-of-time relationship above.
None of these studies involve Radico or plant colour. They describe what oxidative colouring and bleaching do to keratin, which is the comparison this page is making.
Independent Checks
Four Bodies Have Looked at This
Anything a brand says about its own purity is, in the end, the brand talking. So four separate organizations have examined our products, each screening for something different. To be clear about how this works: we pay the audit fees, as every certified company does. What that money buys is the inspection, not the result — a certifier that hands out its mark regardless has nothing left to sell.
Tap a certification to see what it screens for
Not in the formula
None of these are added to our formula. Heavy metals are the one worth explaining separately: they occur naturally in soil, so no plant product is entirely free of them — which is why we had a batch measured by an accredited laboratory rather than simply printing "none". Every result came in well under the limits Health Canada publishes for cosmetics. See the lab report →
What's Actually Inside
Twelve Plants. Nothing Else.
All 24 shades are built from the same twelve certified organic plants, in different proportions. No base formula, no carrier chemicals, no synthetic pigment. Any individual shade uses a subset rather than all twelve — between four and seven, six being the most common — and each product page lists exactly which.
Henna LeafPigment
Indigo LeafPigment
Manjistha RootPigment
Hibiscus FlowerPigment
Turmeric RootPigment
Colorless HennaTone & Fix
Amla FruitTone & Fix
Reetha FruitTone & Fix
Shikakai SeedTone & Fix
Bhringraj LeafAyurvedic
Brahmi LeafAyurvedic
Methi SeedAyurvedicPigment
These are the plants that actually carry color. Henna and indigo do most of the work; the others shift the hue. They don't all stay on the hair the same way — we set that out pigment by pigment.
Tone & Fix
Little or no color of their own, doing three different jobs. Amla is acidic, which keeps henna from going too orange. Colorless henna barely tints, and takes up room so a shade can be light. Reetha and shikakai are cleansing herbs, and between them appear in one shade only.
Ayurvedic
Long-standing hair herbs in Ayurvedic practice — though methi also does something plainly physical, which the note below separates out.
About that third group
Bhringraj and brahmi are in these blends because they have been in blends like these for a very long time. That's traditional use, and we'd rather call it what it is than dress it up as proven. We're not claiming they repair your hair, reverse damage, or do anything measurable that we could put a number on.
Methi is the exception in this group, and it is worth separating. Soak the seeds and they swell into a gel — galactomannan, a mucilage — and that gel is what turns loose powder into a paste that spreads without dragging. That is a physical property you can watch happen in a bowl, not a claim about your hair.
What we can say without stretching: they're certified organic plants, they're listed on the pouch, and they're not there to make anything cheaper. If the evidence for them ever gets stronger than tradition, we'll update this paragraph rather than quietly upgrade the language.
Why This Choice Compounds
A Strand Stays With You for Years
Hair grows about half an inch a month, and a strand in its growth phase can stay on your head for years before it releases. The ends of shoulder-length hair are roughly two years old — which means they've been through every application in that time, one after another, with nothing in between to reset them.
Anagen
2–6 years
The active growth phase — the long stretch during which a strand is on your head
Catagen
2–3 weeks
A brief transition as the follicle begins to rest
Telogen
~100 days
The resting phase before the strand releases and a new one begins
This is what makes the chemistry earlier on this page worth reading. Cysteic acid doesn't revert. Whatever a treatment does to a strand stays on that strand until it's cut off — so coloring every four to six weeks means roughly ten applications a year, each one landing on hair that still carries the last.
What we're not saying
We're not suggesting that hair color changes how your hair grows out of the follicle, or that switching products will improve what's already on your head. The argument here is simpler than that: the strand keeps a record. A strand that has been colored twenty times has been through it twenty times, and the only way to remove that history is to cut it off.
The same arithmetic applies to a comparison this page doesn't make. If a product covers grey better because a synthetic dye was added to the plant powder, that dye is landing on the strand ten times a year as well — we have written that one up separately, including where an uncertified product can genuinely have the edge over ours.
Growth phase durations: The Science of Hair, WebMD. Individual growth rates vary.
Certified Since 2012
In 2012 Radico became the first single-step hair color certified COSMOS ORGANIC by ECOCERT — one application, rather than the two-part henna-then-indigo routine. 24 shades, made from certified organic plants and nothing else.
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