It’s Only Skin Deep

A quick PSA from your favorite bath salt CEO while everyone’s panicking about the next big thing

Changing the dyes in our foods is only half of the issue.

Everyone’s currently losing their minds about MAHA pulling FD&C dyes out of the food supply including; Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, the whole petroleum-derived rainbow, by the end of 2027. Red 3 is already gone. Nestlé says it’ll be done by mid-2026. Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Tyson, Hershey’s - all reformulating. It’s a real story and it matters. I’m genuinely glad it’s happening.

But.

While we’re collectively gasping about food dyes, can we have a quiet adult conversation about the fact that those same FD&C dyes, and a whole arsenal of much scarier stuff, have been sitting in your bath products this entire time? Your soap. Your bubble bath. Your “lavender vanilla relaxation soak” from the bath aisle that turns the water a color not found in nature?

Whole Foods, to their enormous credit, has never allowed FD&C colorants in the bath and body products on their shelves. That’s been their standard for as long as I’ve been in this business. But everywhere else? Game on.

And here’s the kicker:

Your skin is your largest organ. It’s about 22 square feet of you. And unlike food, which has to run a metabolic gauntlet through your liver before anything reaches your bloodstream, what you sit in for 20 minutes in a hot bath goes more or less directly in. Hair follicles. Pores. Warm water dilating everything. That’s not a “wellness influencer” claim, that’s why nicotine patches and hormone patches work. It’s literally how transdermal pharmacology is designed.

So while everyone’s hunting the next villain in the cereal aisle, I want to point at something almost nobody’s looking at:

It’s not the salt. It’s the fragrance.The expensive part of a “clean” bath product isn’t the magnesium sulfate. Epsom salt is one of the cheapest minerals on earth. The expensive part is not using cheap synthetic fragrance.

The word “fragrance” or “parfum” on an ingredient list is one of the most legally protected loopholes in American consumer goods. Under U.S. law, “fragrance” is considered a trade secret, which means a single word on the back of your bottle can hide hundreds of individual chemicals; including phthalates like DEP (diethyl phthalate), which are used as fixatives to make scent linger and which a growing pile of peer-reviewed research connects to endocrine disruption, reproductive harm, and developmental issues. The EU has banned several of these. The U.S. has not.

That is the actual story. The dye is the canary. The fragrance is the mine.

When I tell people my products cost me more to make than my competitors’ with the same retail price on the shelf, same category, same form factor; and they ask how that’s possible, the answer is the boring one: I’m not spending the money on cheap synthetic scent and I’m not spending the money on a marketing department and a CEO yacht. The covenant in our corporate charter sends 100% of residual profit to mothers in crisis through MomBomb.org.

That structural choice is what gives me the room to put real essential oils and pharmaceutical-grade magnesium sulfate into a product that competes on price with bath bombs made of FD&C Blue 1 and diethyl phthalate.

Most people think mission-driven brands cost more. We cost the same. We just spend the money differently.

The reminder

Most Americans don’t get enough magnesium. Depending on which survey you read, somewhere between half and two-thirds of U.S. adults consume less than the recommended daily amount, and the number climbs higher among older adults, women over 50, and anyone eating a standard processed-food American diet. Magnesium is involved in something like 300+ enzymatic reactions in your body. It’s connected to sleep, muscle function, blood pressure regulation, mood, insulin sensitivity, migraines, the works.

Now, am I going to sit here and tell you that one Epsom salt bath will reverse a magnesium deficiency? No. The research on how much magnesium actually crosses the skin barrier during a soak is genuinely mixed, and I’m not interested in overselling. Some small studies (most famously a University of Birmingham pilot) show measurable serum magnesium increases after a week of daily baths. Other dermatologists are skeptical. I’m not here to argue that point.

Here’s what I am here to argue:A 20-minute soak in warm water with real magnesium sulfate and zero endocrine disruptors is one of the cheapest, most pleasant, lowest-risk acts of self-care available to a human being. Worst case, you’re warm and quiet for 20 minutes and your nervous system gets a break from the world. Best case, you’re warm and quiet for 20 minutes, your nervous system gets a break, your muscles unclench, your skin doesn’t absorb anything that mimics estrogen, and you sleep better.

The downside is approximately zero. The upside is everything from “I feel a little better” to “I feel a lot better.”

What might happen when you sit in a clean Epsom salt bath:

Your shoulders drop about two inches from where they’ve been living

Your muscles, especially after a workout or a long day on your feet, actually let go

Your skin feels softer because warm water plus magnesium sulfate is a mild exfoliant and humectant

You sleep better that night, partly from the temperature drop after you get out (which mimics the body’s natural pre-sleep thermoregulation), partly from the parasympathetic activation

You stop being on your phone for 20 minutes, which is its own intervention

You aren’t dermally absorbing a cocktail of phthalates, parabens, FD&C colorants, and undisclosed “fragrance” compounds — which, even if you can’t feel the difference in a single bath, is the kind of cumulative exposure decision your endocrine system will thank you for over a decade

That’s it. That’s the whole pitch.

The bigger thought

We are in a strange cultural moment where everyone’s hunting for the next bogeyman ingredient. Seed oils. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Forever chemicals. Some of it is real, some of it is moral panic, some of it is the wellness-industrial complex selling you a new $80 supplement to fix it.

I am a CPG founder who is genuinely glad MAHA is pulling petroleum dyes out of food. But I also want to point out, gently, that the simpler story — the one that’s been true the whole time — is just:

Read the label. Buy fewer, better things. Sit in a bath. Be a person for 20 minutes.It’s only skin deep.