Oscar Wilde wrote a book about a man who never aged. Up in the attic hung a portrait. It showed everything the face didn’t… every compromise, every time he looked away. The point isn’t that Dorian hid the portrait. The point is that he knew it was hanging there… and kept locking the door.
I had a conversation recently. Over Messenger, across a couple of weeks. With a person who believes he’s a conscious consumer. He isn’t stupid. He doesn’t not care. He’s actually curious… in his own way. He asks questions. He sends links. He’s happy to talk about products and ingredients. He just doesn’t read the answers. This is his portrait. Or maybe mine. Or maybe yours. We’ll see.
The conversation starts with something practical. We hadn’t been in touch for a long time, but we’ve known each other for many years. He asks how things are going. I tell him about my studies and the business. His reply is that he already uses something similar… in sheet form, though. He mentions a competing product before I’ve even introduced mine. Not to compare. Not to ask what the difference is. But to tell me he’s already solved it. And that’s fine.
I tell him about the blog. Suggest he take a look. His answer is direct and honest: he hasn’t read the blog. It’s not meant unkindly. It’s just exactly what four out of ten Danes do, according to Gjensidige and YouGov… they never check the ingredient list. Not because they don’t care. They just don’t have the time. Or the energy. Or… and this is the uncomfortable part… they don’t want to ruin the feeling that they’ve already chosen right.
A few days later he finds the blog. And the first thing he does is ask whether I know Fussy. Then Mothers Earth. Then Novus laundry sheets. He sends links and screenshots and ingredient lists… for other people’s products. He even sends the ingredient list for his laundry sheets. Eleven ingredients. The very first is Sodium Dodecyl Sulphate. That’s SLS… just under its chemical name. One of the harshest surfactants there is in consumer products. He doesn’t know that. Because he’s read the front, not the back.
The next ingredient is plastic… Polyvinyl Alcohol, which his product claims in its advertising not to release. The sheets look like paper… they aren’t. He wants my assessment. Of their products. Apparently I’m expert enough in his eyes to assess others, but not enough to make very comparable alternatives. He gets the answers.
The INCI, by the way, sat at the very bottom of the page, after thirty seconds of scrolling. The fact that the INCI is placed far down isn’t a red flag in itself… every page has a hierarchy, and the INCI is rarely the selling element. But this isn’t one red flag. It’s a configuration: strong buzzwords on the front like “eco-friendly,” “organic,” and “no chemicals,” colorful packaging, images with big promises, and an INCI list that contradicts every single claim, hidden at the bottom of the page. Each individual component can be explained. It’s the stack that tells the story.
It’s not an answer to what I wrote. It’s an answer around what I wrote. He isn’t shocked that SLS is first on the list. He doesn’t respond with genuine wonder. He says it “takes time to find your way”… as if the problem were the journey, not the ingredient. He wasn’t looking for truth. He was looking for a green flag from me.
The front of the product had promised a load of buzzwords. The INCI rejected them all. When the verdict comes back negative, he doesn’t look for what the verdict means. He looks for the next person who can invalidate it. And his criticism of the laundry sheets? Not the eleven ingredients. Not SDS as the first ingredient. His problem is that they’re not “antibacterial.”
I asked him which bacteria he’s looking for. Never got an answer. Few people refer to everyday dirt as bacteria. Soap doesn’t kill bacteria. It never has. Soap removes them… it breaks down their fat membrane and rinses them away with water. It’s done that for four thousand years. That’s the whole point. And that point is in the blog I wrote, largely inspired by his questions. With sources and everything.
Then he reads the blog about soaps from Temu. The best-selling ones… over seventeen thousand units… were the ones with the longest ingredient lists. Niacinamide, collagen, silk, activated charcoal, goat milk, kojic acid, turmeric, sulfur. All of it in one bar for twenty kroner.
My point was the number. Not the individual ingredients. Nowhere do I call collagen or activated charcoal bad things. I can tell you more if you read it. He concluded it anyway.
Ingredients didn’t matter to me in that blog. It didn’t matter whether there was collagen, activated charcoal, or gold dust from Tinker Bell’s wings. My point was never what was in the soap. My point was how many things were in it. But he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. He zoomed in on the one ingredient he recognized… and used it to defend the twenty-six others he didn’t know.
When I asked where exactly in the blog I write that, out came my quote from the blog. There’s nothing wrong with the quote. Context is what’s wrong. I asked again. He answered with his own logic: Soap is either good or bad? Twenty-seven ingredients are fine because some good ones are included?
That’s his logic. An ingredient list of twenty-seven things is a bad thing. Regardless of the ingredients. A bit like a dish. Onion is good. Cheese is good. Chocolate is good. Sea salt is good. Some dishes benefit from a splash of red wine. That doesn’t mean you should put them all in the same pot.
He hadn’t had time to read up on activated charcoal… he only knew it in solid form. Or collagen, which he thought was only something you ate. But he had time to argue against what he hadn’t read. That’s the core of the whole conversation. He’d rather discuss things he didn’t know than spend five minutes studying them. Arguing feels active. Studying feels passive. But it’s the opposite. The one produces opinions without basis. The other produces basis.
And when I explained it, he replied that I should just believe it. That doesn’t make it any more true. But it shows precisely that I don’t read or understand what he writes. He misunderstood. And turned his misreading into my miscommunication.
He says he’s wrong. He’s not “one of those” who loves lots of ingredients. He says so. Several times. In the same conversation where he defends a Temu soap with twenty-seven ingredients because it contains charcoal. He hasn’t noticed the contradiction. And that’s the point.
Charcoal is a fantastic ingredient… in the right amount, in the right product, without twenty-six other things beside it. But that conversation requires being able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. That something can be good in isolation and problematic in context. He can’t. And he’s not alone in that.
Binary thinking is the industry’s best friend. Good or bad. Natural or chemical. With or without. It’s easier to sell a “yes or no” than an “it depends.” The latter has too many variables… too complicated.
When the conversation reaches an uncomfortable place, he rewrites the story. He says he started with just a question about my blog. But it mustn’t happen again. It wasn’t one question. It was a whole week. Questions about Fussy. About Mothers Earth. About laundry sheets. About ingredients. About bacteria. Links he wanted assessed. Products he wanted analyzed. And when the answers didn’t confirm his choices, it became “splitting hairs.”
He came for a creative conversation. Got just an argument about splitting hairs. A creative conversation requires two parties who contribute. He brought other people’s products. I brought knowledge. He wanted confirmation. I gave him facts. Don’t shoot the messenger.
It’s the most recognizable consumer pattern there is. Not the mistake itself… but the rewriting of it. We don’t buy bad products. We just didn’t have time to research. We don’t ignore the ingredient list. We trust the brand. We don’t misunderstand. The other person just communicates badly. The consumer is never the villain in their own story. The portrait hangs in the attic.
He’s done this before. With food. When I changed my diet, his reaction was: crazy and dangerous. Then he asked how long I’d be on it. Then he was impressed by the results. Then he argued that you have to live and enjoy life. And now he eats that way himself… and has found “inner peace” with it.
The pattern runs: Phase one is rejection. Phase two is curiosity. Phase three is impressed. Phase four is resistance. Phase five is adoption. With conscious consumption he’s somewhere between phase two and three. Curious enough to ask. Not curious enough to read. Most of us are there.
And the pattern predicts the rest. Within six months he’s probably using a soap with five ingredients. Within a year he’s telling others about it. And he doesn’t remember that he once called it “splitting hairs.”
When the conversation got uncomfortable… when I refused to confirm his compromise approach and refused to act as his personal encyclopedia going forward… he turned on disappearing messages. Twenty-four hours, then it’s all gone. You don’t have to stand by what you say if it disappears on its own. It’s the digital version of Dorian Gray’s portrait. Tuck it away. Let the face stay untouched. And pretend the conversation never happened.
Disappearing messages don’t delete what’s already been written. They delete what comes after. I didn’t even know the feature existed on Messenger. He could write next week: “Hey, have you seen the new soap from X?” I could reply. And the next day it would all be gone. I could never point back. He didn’t want out of the conversation. Nor out of the relationship. He just wanted a relationship without memory. A mirror that resets itself every twenty-four hours. A face that never ages, because “yesterday” never happened. And he genuinely thought I’d accept a relationship like that.
But in my world, if “yesterday” never happened, then “tomorrow” isn’t needed either. I split ingredient lists as a hobby. I take claims apart for fun. “Splitting hairs” is precisely what I do. And it’s precisely what he came for. To me. All on his own. He just didn’t like the answers. He used the right word. He just meant it as an insult.
His action also reveals something else. That feature isn’t something you turn on if you think you’re right. If he stood by his arguments, there’d be no reason to delete them. He knows it. He knows it doesn’t hold up. He’s not an unconscious consumer. He’s a conscious consumer who chooses to close his eyes anyway. And that’s Dorian Gray. The portrait doesn’t hang in the attic because he doesn’t know it’s there. It hangs there because he knows… and locks the door.
My own market research showed it: Forty percent say ingredients are the most important thing when choosing care products. More important than price. More important than brand. But only eighteen percent actually know what’s in the products they use. Seventy-five percent can’t name a single Danish brand that makes handmade soap. Not one.
Mine was a small survey. But the Nordic Swan Ecolabel confirmed the picture with one thousand and ten Danes in January 2026: eight out of ten find it hard to tell whether their products contain harmful chemicals. And every fourth person doesn’t even trust that the authorities have banned the dangerous ones.
Researchers call it the “intention-action gap”… the gap between what you say you want and what you actually do. It’s one of the most documented phenomena in consumer research. A review in the Journal of Business Ethics showed that even consumers with strong ethical views consistently act against them when it costs just a little extra… in time, in money, or in cognitive effort. He’s not an exception. He’s the average.
He can’t be recognized by others reading this. But he’ll recognize himself. And maybe you will too. Because we all have a portrait in the attic. We all have a product in the bathroom we’ve never turned over. We’ve all defended a choice we never examined. I have mine too. Mine isn’t about INCI lists… I know where they are. Mine is about something else entirely. The difference isn’t that I don’t have a portrait. I do. The point is that I’m more aware of it… and more willing to look.
The point isn’t whether you have a portrait. You do. The point is whether you dare to look at it. Turn the bottle over.
Sources
- Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- Gjensidige/YouGov: “4 ud af 10 danskere tjekker ikke ingredienslisten” (via.ritzau.dk)
- Carrington, M.J., Neville, B.A., & Whitwell, G.J. (2010): “Why Ethical Consumers Don’t Walk Their Talk.” Journal of Business Ethics, 97(1), 139–158 (springer.com)
- Svanemærket/Opinion, januar 2026, 1.010 respondenter: “8 ud af 10 danskere har svært ved at gennemskue skadelig kemi i produkter” (via.ritzau.dk)
- Forbrugerrådet Tænk: “Bagsiden først”-kampagnen (taenk.dk)
- Rolsky, C. & Kelkar, V. (2021): “Degradation of Polyvinyl Alcohol in US Wastewater Treatment Plants and Subsequent Nationwide Emission Estimate.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(11), 6027 (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)