Smarter Shopping, Part Deux

A lot of you like yesterday's Smarter Shopping about the new Think Dirty mobile app, so I was a little stressed about getting today's post about another product ratings app buttoned up. Here's what I got.

GoodGuide is brought to us from the folks at United Laboratories (UL), which acquired the company in 2012. Founded in 2006 by UC Berkeley professor and academic expert on global supply chains Dara O'Rourke, GoodGuide takes a holistic but scientific approach to rating products and the companies that make them.

According to GoodGuide, it's not enough to know if a product is good or bad for your body. Rather, they rank products based on a number of criteria in the categories of Environment, Health and Society. How easily is that shampoo bottle recycled? What does that nail polish do to the water supply? How do Nike's practices impact its factory workers? So on and so forth.

It's a pretty interesting concept. It makes sense because no one thing or one person exists in a vacuum, so every product we buy and use has a real impact on not just us and our lives, but on the environment and even the people who helped manufacture it.

Ok, so let's see what this baby can do. Like its counterparts at Think Dirty and EWG, GoodGuide uses a 0-10 scale, but it has reversed the ratings. The higher the number, the better a product or company has scored in its rankings. That will take some getting used to for you Skin Deep fans, but a familiar red-yellow-green color coding helps.

So I'm typing in the Jason Natural Tea Tree Normalizing Shampoo again, for a comparison to the rankings for the same product from Think Dirty and EWG. The result? Another not-so-good score for the product, here a 4.2, but again for different reasons. Let's see why.

EWG nailed the product for containing vitamin A, and Think Dirty did the same for containing dimethicone. GoodGuide doesn't seem to bother with any of that, but points to data adequacy and ingredient disclosure as reasons for the crummy score. Here's what they say:

"GoodGuide caps a product's score if it lacks complete ingredient data or lists generic names that do not support chemical-specific evaluations."

Huh. Doesn't sound so good, does it?

This is what I like about GoodGuide. They don't take the information at face value, because they know companies withhold product data. Nobody gets a freebie here. Every point in a score needs to earned.

GoodGuide has some handy features similar to Think Dirty, listing cleaner alternatives to a 'dirty' product and saved lists of favorite products. There are also links to buying a product online, which is a nice way to locate a hard-to-find product (though how GoodGuide decides which retailers get referred, I don't know).

All in all, it's a neat ratings system that deserves a good look. Check it out, and I guarantee you'll learn something about nearly every product and company you search.

-- Jazzy