Cleaning Up The Beauty Industry
BEAUTY’S WAKE UP CALL
Last week Ulta Beauty, the US’s largest beauty retailer, announced the launch of “Conscious Beauty at Ulta Beauty”. An initiative that will see customers be given more transparency and better choices through the program’s five pillars - Clean Ingredients, Cruelty Free, Vegan, Sustainable Packaging and Positive Impact.
On top of this new program Ulta Beauty has pledged to ensure 50% of all packaging sold, including the Ulta Beauty Collection, will be made from recycled or bio-sourced materials, or will be recyclable or refillable by 2025.
To ensure accountability and to drive the initiative forward, Ulta Beauty established the Conscious Beauty Advisory Council - a hand selected group of experts who are already at the forefront of clean beauty and sustainability. To date, the Council includes Annie Jackson, co-founder and COO at Credo Beauty and Tom Szaky, CEO and co-founder at Loop, among others.
To continue this “clean beauty” trend, earlier this month Sephora partnered with Novi (a platform that uses AI to decipher product’s chemical information and find safer alternatives or better ingredients which meet the brands standards) to help their brand partners implement Sephora’s public chemical policy, which in turn assists this beauty giant with capturing the growing market of consumers looking for safe and sustainable products. Once products meet these strict guidelines, they then achieve the ‘Clean at Sephora’ seal.
Whilst these beauty greats have taken their time to realise the importance of clean beauty, companies like Credo Beauty have always known - which is precisely why Founder and COO, Annie Jackson, is on the Conscious Beauty Advisory Council.
Credo back themselves with the strongest “clean” standards in retail - The Credo Clean Standard. The brand has always has its “Dirty List” that contains over 2,700 specific ingredients and types of ingredients that are used in mainstream beauty products, which Credo prohibits due to safety and/or sustainability reasons. And this list is a great start, but the Clean Standard goes much further and requires brands to:
Use official ingredient terminology (called INCI) and use ingredient source codes where possible
Obtain documentation on their ingredients’ composition, purity and sourcing information
Conduct basic consumer safety (on humans…that volunteer!) and product stability testing
Back up product and ingredient claims
Be transparent about “fragrance”—at a minimum they must categorise the type of fragrance they use, and we encourage full disclosure of all fragrance ingredients.
Somehow, none of this is currently required by the US government or other retailers.
If you’re still on the fence with this “trend” (sorry guys, this one is here to stay), let this - literally- sink in…researchers have found that any ingredient (chemical) that is oil and water soluble which is found in skin care or beauty products, can indeed penetrate the skin and therefore, enter your bloodstream. These chemicals are known to mimic hormones (endocrine disruptors) and others are linked with developmental, reproductive, brain, immune and other problems. Not only that, but there is plenty of information linking nasty ingredients to cancer and increases in allergies.
So, if you don’t know what’s in the products you’re regularly applying to your skin, then in theory, you have no idea what’s currently circulating within your body.
..And we haven’t even touched on the environmental impact these chemicals are having.
So, what’s next?
We’re excited to see this shift in the beauty industry, where being transparent is the “new normal.” If beauty giants like Ulta Beauty and Sephora can get on board and make their brands responsible, then why can’t more retailers join in?
If you want to learn more about clean beauty, keep an eye out for our podcast with Annie Jackson, Co-Founder and COO at Credo Beauty, later this month. Click here to subscribe.