There’s an informal logical fallacy called the “appeal to nature.”

Wikipedia summarizes it like this: “an appeal to nature is a rhetorical technique for presenting and proposing the argument that “a thing is good because it is ‘natural’, or bad because it is ‘unnatural’.”

It’s a slippery slope to fall into, because if you think about it for even a minute, it’s obviously not always true.

Cyanide is naturally occurring and a tiny pinch of that stuff will kill you. Modern penicillin is synthetic and purified and saves a BUNCH of lives.

It’s totally understandable to be careful about throwing consumer goods into your body willy-nilly, but it can taken to some weird places, like in this story.

Check it out.

AITA for not buying personal care products for my stepsister?

My stepmother is super into all natural things. So she uses only all natural things.

I don’t even mean products that are labeled at the store as all natural I mean she will actually make her own deodorant from natural things.

She also only use natural remedies for things unless absolutely necessary and she’s anti shaving because our bodies are supposed to like hair.

All of that sounds fine (with the worrying caveat that real medicine works better than not medicine), so long as it’s just HER personal choice.

Thankfully she doesn’t force this stuff on my brother (m18) and I (f 16) and we can use our own toiletries.

This is because my dad and her have an agreement to not interfere with each others kids.

The only thing we kind of have to have is the vegan all natural foods only.

Which aren’t actually that bad.

Most of the time I don’t eat breakfast anyway and my brother and I will sometimes go out for lunch and during the school year we also buy lunch and sometimes sneak in snacks.

So it’s really only dinner, which isn’t that bad.

But then we get to the unfortunate sibling.

It’s different for our stepsister (f13).

She is absolutely not allowed to use any chemicals at all.

Let’s pause to reflect on the fact that this is literally impossible.

Everything around you is made up of chemicals, and that was true before humans even existed.

Dihydrogen monoxide is a chemical compound we commonly call “water.”

Living free of chemicals is a nonsensical non-starter.

That wasn’t too much of a problem before or at least I didn’t know if she complained about it.

Now she’s started getting acne and she hates it.

Her mom keeps trying only natural remedies that don’t work and thinks chemical will just do more harm than good since its not that bad.

Poor kid.

Also there’s other things my stepsister hates like having to use natural deodorant and she wants to use tampons instead because she hates feeling wet when she has her period.

Her hair is also not really good and feels crispy even if she uses oil on it.

She also wants to shave because she gets made fun of for having hairy legs.

So it’s NOT her choice.

Because of the situation with our stepmother our dad sends me and my brother money to our accounts for things like toiletries.

He also gives us an allowance.

My stepsister doesn’t get an allowance, but she knows about the money we get and asked me if I can buy her some acne stuff, some hair stuff, razors, and tampons.

That stuff all adds up though and I don’t want to spend so much of my money on it because then I won’t have as much for stuff I want.

I already use up all my toiletry money every month on stuff I need, so it would have to come out of my allowance and would probably use it all up.

Let’s see what the comments say:

There were honestly a lot of helpful suggestions:

But this is probably reaching levels of neglect in the eyes of the law.

Help her out how you can.

At a certain point, you’re just forcing your kids to live in another century while everyone around them gets the comforts and safety of modernity.

And that sucks.

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.