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.
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
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. Radico's pigments are already colored, so they never need to get in. That single difference is what everything below follows from.
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
Bonds to the Surface
- The CuticleNothing swells it open, because nothing needs to get through — no alkali in the formula
- Where Color GoesHenna and indigo are already pigments; they bind to keratin at the outer layers of the strand
- What Touches Your ScalpCertified organic plant powder and the water you mixed it with. That's the complete list
- Over TimeNo oxidative load is added by coloring — there's no oxidizer in it to add one
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 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.
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 in our formula, and each certification above screens for a different part of this list rather than all of it. The simpler check is the ingredient list itself: twelve plants, and nothing that isn't a plant.
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 — typically six to eight — 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.
Tone & Fix
No color of their own. They adjust how the pigment develops and how the paste behaves — amla, for instance, keeps henna from going too orange.
Ayurvedic
Long-standing hair herbs in Ayurvedic practice. Read the note below before you read anything into that.
About that third group
Bhringraj, brahmi and methi 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.
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.
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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