The Brands You Trusted Got Bought. Here's What Changed.
Six well-known "natural" and "non-toxic" brands, six paper trails. What happens to ingredient integrity after a founder sells — and how to spot it on the label.
There's a version of this story you already know, even if you've never traced it. A brand starts small. A founder gets specific about what s/he won't put in a bottle. Customers notice, and they stay loyal for years, sometimes decades, because the label means something. Then the brand gets big enough that someone larger buys it — and the label stays exactly the same while what's inside it quietly doesn't.
This isn't a conspiracy. It's a business model. And it's checkable, which is more than you can say for most ingredient panics. Who owns a company is a matter of public record. What that ownership changed is, in several of these cases, a matter of federal litigation.
Here are six brands worth knowing the ownership history of before your next drugstore run.
Tom's of Maine — owned by Colgate-Palmolive since 2006
Tom's built its identity on "natural" before that word meant much of anything, legally. Colgate-Palmolive bought the brand in 2006 and kept the packaging, the Maine branding, the whole folk-market aesthetic.
What followed was two rounds of class-action litigation over the word "natural" itself. Plaintiffs argued that toothpaste and deodorant labeled natural actually contained glycerin, propylene glycol, sodium lauryl sulfate, aluminum chlorohydrate, xanthan gum, sorbitol, ascorbic acid, and xylitol — across roughly 17 deodorants and 34 toothpaste flavors. Colgate ultimately won the second suit; a federal judge ruled the plaintiffs hadn't proven that a reasonable consumer understands "natural" to mean free of synthetic or processed ingredients. Worth sitting with — the court didn't say the ingredients weren't synthetic. It said the word doesn't legally promise otherwise.
More recently, the allegations moved past semantics. A 2026 settlement paid out $2.9 million after an FDA inspection found Tom's of Maine had failed to meet Current Good Manufacturing Practice standards, while Colgate continued marketing the toothpaste as naturally sourced. Separate suits followed FDA findings of bacteria and mold-like substances in Tom's facilities, and allegations that a children's fluoride-free toothpaste was contaminated with lead and arsenic.
That's a manufacturing problem hiding behind a wholesome label.
Honest Company — the most sued brand on this list
Jessica Alba's Honest Company built its entire premise on "non-toxic" as a promise, not a marketing flourish. More than a dozen lawsuits since 2015 have argued the company didn't keep it — spanning sunscreen, diapers, cleaning products, and personal care, with claims that "all natural" and "plant-based" labels sat on products containing synthetic actives and chemicals flagged in hazard databases.
The sunscreen suit is the one worth knowing. Honest reformulated its sunscreen in 2015, cutting non-nano zinc oxide from 20% of the formula down to 9.3% — right around the time customers began posting sunburn photos. A separate suit named phenoxyethanol and methylisothiazolinone specifically as the ingredients customers said contradicted the "non-toxic" promise on the Conditioning Detangler and Shampoo & Body Wash.
Honest never sold to a conglomerate — this one's a caution about founder-brand marketing outpacing founder-brand formulation, not an acquisition story. But it belongs on this list because it's the clearest example of what happens when "non-toxic" gets treated as a vibe instead of a spec.
Seventh Generation — owned by Unilever since 2016
Seventh Generation spent nearly three decades building trust around the idea of consequences seven generations out. Unilever bought it in 2016 for roughly $700 million.
A class action the same year resulted in a $4.5 million settlement over "natural," "non-toxic," and "hypoallergenic" claims on products the suit alleged contained methylisothiazolinone and benzisothiazolinone (MI/BI) — preservatives the plaintiffs argued are known skin irritants and allergens — along with laureth-6, sodium lauryl sulfate, and several other synthetic ingredients.
A second, separate 2021 class action alleged independent lab testing had detected PFAS — the "forever chemicals" that don't break down in the body or the environment — in Seventh Generation dish soap, despite marketing that promised freedom from harmful chemicals. PFAS allegations are a different category of concern than a fragrance blend; they're not about undisclosed synthetics so much as persistent ones.
Mrs. Meyer's — owned by S.C. Johnson
Mrs. Meyer's sells an Iowa farmhouse feeling — herb-garden scents, a friendly matriarch on the label. The plant-derived surfactant base is real. But nearly every scented product in the line also carries MI and BI as preservatives, the same combination at the center of the Seventh Generation settlement, alongside fragrance and PEG-5 cocoate.
No major lawsuit has been filed against Mrs. Meyer's specifically. This one's a quieter case — not fraud, just the gap between a farmhouse aesthetic and an ingredient panel that reads like most other mass-market cleaners once you get past the herb names.
Native — owned by Procter & Gamble since 2017
Native built a name on what it left out: no aluminum, no phthalates. P&G — the company behind Old Spice and Secret, both of which do contain aluminum — acquired Native for $100 million in 2017.
There's no lawsuit here, but there's a paper trail of a different kind. Amazon reviews from 2018 and 2019 describe the formula as greasier and different than before. A recurring thread across Reddit's natural-beauty communities shows longtime users who'd recommended Native for years abruptly stopping after noticing the change. Native's response attributed it to manufacturing improvements rather than acquisition-related reformulation — and never published a timeline mapping when anything actually changed. The shift is real. The cause is deliberately unclear.
What hasn't changed: every scented Native product still discloses "fragrance" as a single line item, which means the brand's aluminum-free, phthalate-free claims are true and also incomplete. Only the unscented and Lavender & Rose versions disclose the full ingredient list.
Dr. Squatch — still independent
Dr. Squatch is the one brand on this list that hasn't sold. It's also, by most measures, the most transparent — no SLS, no parabens, no PEGs, built from real saponified oils, and the brand's own blog warns customers away from sulfates.
The gap is the same one that shows up everywhere else: fragrance. An independent ingredient-safety review declined to fully recommend the line because of it, and noted the shampoo compounds the issue by adding sodium benzoate on top. Dr. Squatch markets itself as roughly 98% natural — an honest number, and also an admission that the other 2% is doing some unexplained work.
The pattern, if you're keeping score
Every brand on this list avoided the ingredients customers have been trained to fear — sulfates, parabens, phthalates, aluminum. Every single one of them still had something to hide, whether that was an undisclosed fragrance blend, a preservative combination linked to skin reactions, or in two cases, outright litigation over what "natural" is legally allowed to mean.
"Non-toxic" isn't a regulated term in the United States. There's no government standard a product has to meet to use it, which means the word on the label tells you what a company wants you to believe, not what's inside the bottle. The only way around that is the ingredient list itself — which is the whole reason we read them out loud around here.
DISCLAIMER: This post is for informational purposes and reflects independent research and publicly available litigation records as of 2026. It is not medical advice, and none of the brands mentioned were contacted for comment. Luna Lou products are formulated with full ingredient disclosure, including fragrance — see our Fat Stick Heavy Balm for an example of a label that says what it means.
