The Internet has proved itself to be the single most revolutionary communication and creative tool in the history of mankind, but it also allows for people to get access to products that they normally wouldn’t. Shopping on the Internet has become so commonplace that almost 50 percent of all holiday shopping now is done online.

People in small towns in the middle of nowhere are now able to buy organic skin care products that may not be for sale in a “real” store for hundreds of miles. But that doesn’t mean that every time you buy a product that calls itself organic, that you are getting what you paid for. There are plenty of snake oil salesmen online so here are a few tips you can use to help make sure that the organic skin care product you bought online lives up to its name

We talked before in the first part of this article about how important reading the labels are for products. One of the most important aspects of label reading is fining out where water ranks in the ingredient list. Since the first set of ingredients make up the overwhelming majority of the product, there is a good chance that if water falls within the first three ingredients, that your product is made up mostly of water.

Why is this important? The great water swindle is a common red herring in the organic product industry. Some venders sell their products as organic, or as 77% organic because their products are 77 percent water. They don’t even have to filter the water they use to call it organic. For many of these products, if you were to take out the water and re-measure the amount of organic ingredients, you might find yourself at zero.

You should always look to see if water is high in the ingredient list, which is commonly the case with moisturizers and cleansers, and see if that figured into the organic claim on the front of the product.

While the Internet has definitely opened up new markets to every small business owner in the United States, Canada and in Europe, the biggest benefactors of the Internet are global companies that can now cheaply and easily sell their products around the world. One of the problems that this presents to the organic product community is that one country may have a different standard of what makes a product organic than another.

You may buy a skin lotion or a bar of soap that can legally claim to be 100 percent natural, but if put to the North American or European standards, that percentage may drop significantly. As the recent product scares from products imported from China have shown, not every country enforces honest labeling and consumer safety the same. Order from abroad with your eyes wide open and check to see what you get once your order arrives.

The next tip is to not believe the hype when it comes to products you’ve never heard of. There are no magic extracts that were just discovered in the Amazon rainforest that can make your skin look healthier, younger or better. There are a large number of people who believe that organic and all natural skin care will significantly help your health, but if you stumble upon a skin care product making outrageous claims on what they can do, the best thing is to keep shopping around.

Finally, it is safe to say that we all care about our friends from nature and that many of us have pets of our own. While we strive to buy products that are kind to our bodies, we should also make an effort to avoid products tested on animals. Here, the computer is your best friend. You can Google the product name of almost any company out there and, chances are, groups like PETA will have a record on them if they test on animals. Buying organic products is important, but it is also important to keep our furry friends safe, too.