FAQ

Where Are Nancy Boy Products Sold?

You can find Nancy Boy products in only three places in the world! The first, where 95% of our business is done, is this website. If you're our neighbor here in the San Francisco Bay Area or are visiting, please stop by one of our two retail stores located in San Francisco and West County, Sonoma.  

Does Nancy Boy test its products on animals?

No. Our tagline, “Tested on Boyfriends – Not Animals” is printed on our packaging.

How Long Will My Internet Order Take To Get To Me?

From the time you place it, an order generally takes one business day to process. Thereafter, Ground orders take between 2 and 5 business days to reach you, depending on where you live.  If you choose an expedited shipping method,  please note these are business days. Thus, a 2-Day order placed on Wednesday won’t be shipped until Thursday, and won’t arrive until Monday, two business days later.  Same deal with a Standard Overnight order placed on a Thursday, which will be shipped on Friday and arrive on Monday.  If you live outside the US, your order will take approximately 6 - 8 days to reach you.

Do you ship to PO Boxes

We are now happy to ship to PO Box and APO addresses, Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands at US Domestic rates using the United States Postal Service.  International orders are shipped via USPS International Priority Mail.

Do I have to wait at home for my order to be delivered?

If you feel that your order will not be safe left in your mailbox or on your doorstep, please request signature service in the Customer Notes box during checkout.

What's the difference between artificial and real fragrance? Does it matter?

Artificial fragrance is like artificial flavor - weird chemicals arranged to mimic something natural. But chemicals don't smell like real lavender, just like a cherry Life Saver doesn't taste like a cherry. Real fragrance comes from real plants, through the steam extraction of flowers, fruit rind or rare woods into their essential oils.  

And, yes, it matters. The FDA allows manufacturers to use the tame, catch-all term “Fragrance” on an ingredient listing if the product contains artificial scent, and you'd be amazed at what they throw into the vat to get the fake coconut/lime/lichee/lemongrass/ylang-ylang: ingredients including pthalates, proven toxics we don't see listed on the label because, well, the FDA says that's OK.  This toxic stew is much worse for us than any of the other so-called "bad" cosmetics ingredients because of how much "fragrance" is put in each bottle.   But we don't hear a lot about it because, um, it would put those 99.99% of brands, even the stratospherically-priced, otherwise "all-natural" ones purveyed at Sephora, Neiman-Marcus and Nordstrom, plus all the drugstore and supermarket brands, out of business. And if we've learned anything lately, it's that large corporations* are suspiciously friendly with the very government agencies (like the FDA or, um, SEC) ostensibly there to regulate them.  If the FDA can barely regulate prescription drugs like Vioxx, they've hardly got their eyes on the ball when it comes to artificial fragrance in personal care products.  And the simple reason our competitors don't use the essential oils we do, rather than cheap toxic chemicals, is cost. Depending on whether it's eucalyptus (inexpensive) or sandalwood (a fortune) essential oils cost between 50 and 500 times more than artificial scent.

*Just a few industry titans control the personal care business:

Estee Lauder owns 30 brands, including Aveda, Bumble & Bumble, Jo Malone, Origins, M-A-C, La Mer, Bobbi Brown, Prescriptives, etc.

L'Oreal owns Kiehl's, The Body Shop, Maybelline, Biotherm, Helena Rubenstein, Garnier, Lancome, etc.

Proctor & Gamble owns Olay, Max Factor, Cover Girl, Herbal Essence, Pantene, Gillette, Noxzema, etc.

Unilever owns Axe, Dove, Vaseline, Lifebuoy, Pond's, etc. 

Are Nancy Boy products "natural?" What about the preservatives you use?

None of our products contain artificial colors or fragrances. Our laundry soap, dish soap,  home-scent products and some skincare products, including salt scrubs, bath salts, body oils, pre-shave oil, cooling and replenishing after shave gels, balancing facial toner, etc. (all product ingredients are listed on this site) don't contain preservatives, or the preservatives we use, like Vitamin E or grapefruit seed extract, are generally considered "natural."

 Some contain preservatives that aren’t considered natural. If they weren’t there, the products would develop bacteria or mold, so preservatives will always be with us, like the controversy about which are “good” and which are “bad.” A class of preservatives called parabens has gotten a lot of negative press. After having conducted exhaustive research on this subject, our lead chemists, both of whom are women*, feel strongly that parabens remain the safest and most effective preservatives available. They've been used safely in products like ours since the 1920's, occur naturally in many plant sources including carrots and blueberries and the supposed dangers are the result of scare-mongering among an interesting coterie of manufacturers and well-meaning but misinformed activists.

Like any allergen, parabens are dangerous to those allergic to them (less than .1% of the population) and safe for everyone else. If you have a paraben allergy, you find out early in life; it's similar to nuts in that way. And while it's important to be sensitive to those with allergies of all kinds, it doesn't necessarily follow that a substance should be banned because a minority is allergic to it.  In fact the movement to ban parabens started not with scientists, public health advocates or citizens, but with manufacturers (who had something to gain**).  And because the public is less familiar with cosmetic ingredients than, say, peanuts, it has been quite easy to field a PR campaign based solely on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) rather than facts: there are no facts to back up the claim that parabens are hazardous. No scientific study has ever found a link between parabens and any kind of illness, cancer, danger, etc.  It is, however, fruitless  (and silly, from a business standpoint) to fight a rising tide of sentiment, so we have begun eliminating them from some of our products when doing so does not negatively affect the product's performance and/or aesthetic appeal. Alternative preservative frameworks are available, are in fact cheaper than parabens, but have been widely adopted only to be later trumpeted as impure and toxic, a la parabens, by the same big manufacturers wanting to weed out smaller competitors who could not afford to reformulate their entire line. The sands are constantly shifting and a company can go out of business simply trying to keep up in a form of "preservative correctness" gone bonkers.

Finally, we (obviously) don't take the topic of ingredients and potential toxicity lightly. We use our products everyday.  So do our brothers, sisters, moms, dads, aunts, uncles, friends, nephews and nieces, some of whom are babies.  We've done some bad things before, including stealing candy from the dime store (repeatedly) for which we will certainly pay a karmic price, but knowingly putting harmful ingredients in our products isn't one of them.

*The reason we noted our chemists' gender is that the study most manufacturers and activists point to when raising concerns about parabens is one in which women with breast cancer were found to have parabens in their breast tissue.  Whether the paraben levels were higher than in women without breast cancer was not addressed, nor were the tissues tested for carcinogenic substances, nor was it any physician's opinion that the presence of parabens had been a precipitating factor in any of the subject's cancer. Nonetheless, manufacturers capitalized on the study to introduce "paraben-free" products and galvanized opposition among frightened activist-consumers. And in the 7 years since this discredited study was fielded, not one piece of data has emerged linking parabens with any type of illness or ill effect. Nothing.

**What they have to gain, in an incredibly cluttered, competive personal care/cosmetics category, is market share. It's easy and profitable to fool people into buying products based solely on what's not in the jar rather than what is, just by scaring them.  Evidently, no proof is necessary.  And the, um, interesting thing is that proven toxic substances like pthalates are present in artificial fragrances, are never listed on the label, and 99% of ALL brands use artificial fragrances rather than essential oils to scent their products yet jeepers what a coincidence pthalates have gotten a bare whisper in comparison to parabens, hmmm.

Are Nancy Boy products for men?

Our products work well for anyone with hair or skin! We know this to be true, because women account for over 50% of our sales. (We know this is counterintuitive but if you think about it, women buy lots more of this kind of stuff than guys. Always have, always will.)  Again, to sell more products, the beauty biz marketing folks keep trying to convince men and women they need different stuff. However, traditional men's products are simply repackaged forms of big-volume women's products, differentiated with extra-manly I'm-definitely-heterosexual artificial fragrances. Except for some reason they all smell really fruity.

It is true that some of our products do better with men and some with women. Biggest sellers among guys include everything in the shaving line, bar soap, active and tea tree deodorants,  invigorating body wash, body moisturizer, shampoo, conditioner, styling cream, mild facial cleanser and replenishing facial moisturizer. Biggest sellers among women include the ultramarine night cream, bath salts, salt scrub, shampoo, conditioner, mild facial cleanser, laundry soap, replenishing facial moisturizer and all face masks.