Question: See when you buy a shampoo, for example, and it has all these unknown ingriedients such as petroleum and sodium laureth sulfate, where do they get them from or what are they made up of?

Will Reynolds answered on 20 Jun 2012:

Hmm good question, I often wonder that myself. Shampoos and shower gels can contain lots and lots of different things, some clean you, some make it runny, some make it thick, some make it smell nice. Depending on which brand you buy most of the ingredients will come from oil (petroleum certainly will). In fact most of the things we use everyday are made from oil. But some of it will be from plants. The bits that clean us for example, called surfactants are usually naturally occuring and extracted from plants. there are some brands like Ecover which source all their ingredients from environmentally friendly sources that dont use oil and most others are trying to reduce the amount of oil based chemicals they use. Hope this helps!