What does certified mean?

Ensures an ingredient or product possesses particular, stringent qualifications and meets defined requirements and standards. Thus an entire product can be "certified organic" if all criteria is met and/or an individual raw material can be "certified organic."
"Certified" matters because of the lack of transparency in the personal care industry. With certification, you can read the qualifications the company's products must meet to obtain that standard. You can also find out who verified that the standard was followed, thereby achieving complete transparency about the ingredient(s).