Coverage: Report says Jessica Alba’s Honest Co. uses banned ingredient

The Honest Company is under fire again.

The company, which was co-founded by Jessica Alba, boasts about its “safe” products and even goes so far as to list ingredients it deems unsafe, but an investigation by The Wall Street Journal revealed the company uses one of its forbidden ingredients in its laundry detergent.

Serena Ng of The Wall Street Journal reported the news:

In less than four years, the Honest Company Inc. surged to a $1.7 billion private valuation thanks to its marketing of cleaning supplies, diapers and other consumer products that it says are safer and more ecologically friendly than other brands.

The company, co-founded by actress Jessica Alba, is challenging giants such as Procter & Gamble Co. and Clorox Co. with a guarantee that its offerings don’t contain what it says are harsh chemicals found in many mainstream products. One of the primary ingredients Honest tells consumers to avoid is a cleaning agent called sodium lauryl sulfate, or SLS, which can be found in everyday household items from Colgate toothpaste to Tide detergent and Honest says can irritate skin. The company lists SLS first in the “Honestly free of” label of verboten ingredients it puts on bottles of its laundry detergent, one of Honest’s first and most popular products.

But two independent lab tests commissioned by The Wall Street Journal determined Honest’s liquid laundry detergent contains SLS.

“Our findings support that there is a significant amount of sodium lauryl sulfate” in Honest’s detergent, said Barbara Pavan, a chemist at one of the labs, Impact Analytical. Another lab, Chemir, a division of EAG Inc., said its test for SLS found about the same concentration as Tide, which is made by P&G. “It was not a trace amount,” said Matthew Hynes, a chemist at Chemir who conducted the test.

Honest disputes the labs’ findings and says its own testing found no SLS in its products.

Mallory Schlossberg of Business Insider released the company’s response to The Journal’s investigation:

The Honest Company has released the following statement to Business Insider:

“At The Honest Company, our mission is to develop safe and effective products for our families to use and for families everywhere to feel great about. Despite providing The Wall Street Journal with substantial evidence to the contrary, they falsely claimed our laundry detergent contains Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS). To set the record straight, we use Sodium Coco Sulfate (SCS) in our brand’s laundry detergent because it is a gentler alternative that is less irritating and safer to use. Rigorous testing and analysis both by our internal research and development teams as well as further testing by external partners have confirmed this fact. The Wall Street Journal has been reckless in the preparation of this article, refused multiple requests to share data on which they apparently relied and has substituted junk science for credible journalism. We stand behind our laundry detergent and take very seriously the responsibility we have to our consumers to create safe and effective products.”

Lindsay Blakely of Inc. explained criticism the company has recently endured, including its rapid growth:

Honest has faced criticism over its products in the past. Over the summer the company was hit with a rash of complaints over the effectiveness of its “natural” sunscreen. Sunburned customers posted pictures of themselves on Twitter and Facebook. Honest’s first response to the kerfuffle was a statement insisting the sunscreen had passed extensive third-party tests and suggesting users may not have applied as directed. Later Alba and co-founder Christopher Gavigan published a more personal blog post promising “we’ll do what it takes to make it right,” though did not admit any specific wrongdoing.

In September, the company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in California claiming that Honest’s products aren’t as natural as advertised. And more recently, a second class-action lawsuit was filed in New York in February claiming that Honest “products in fact contain a spectacular array of synthetic and toxic ingredients” and the company’s advertising is misleading. Honest has called these suits “baseless.”

The three-year-old company was on track to pull in $150 million in revenue in 2014. This year, industry watchers estimate that figure will soar past $250 million and the company is reportedly considering an IPO. The company’s latest funding round of $100 million in August put Honest Company’s valuation at $1.7 billion, according to the Journal.

The company seems to have no plans of slowing down its torrential pace of releasing new products, which are sold through its website and at more than 4,000 stores, including Target. The brand launched with 17 items, including nontoxic diapers and cleaning products, but now sells everything from toilet paper and infant formula to cribs and a line of make-up.

In April on stage at Inc.’s GrowCo conference, I asked Alba and CEO Brian Lee if they worried about Honest’s fast pace of growth and how they would know if the company started to grow too fast.

“The way that you know if you’re growing too fast is really about the customer and the community,” Lee told me. “They’ll let you know. Cracks start forming and leaks get bigger. The first thing you see is a decrease in customer satisfaction.