WHAT ARE YOUR BEAUTY PRODUCTS HIDING?
WE ALL WANT TO consume more ethically, BUT IS THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY DOING ENOUGH TO HELP US?
Ethical beauty is difficult to navigate – so look out for these symbols and ingredients
AAAH. YOU SINK BACK INTO THE PILLOWS, close your eyes, and let that new face mask do what it’s supposed to: simultaneously soothe your skin and your soul. Or does it? Is your mind actually troubled by worries – about its supply chain, ingredients and sustainability? Because unless you do your homework, there’s no easy way of knowing how hard a product is working to care for those things you hold most dear, namely the planet and humankind (and, yes, your skin).
We get it: reading the small print and scouring the brand’s website before you slather on that treatment can be about as joy-killing as counting the units in a large glass of wine or the calories in that sharing bar of chocolate but, when it comes to beauty, ignorance isn’t as blissful as it’s cracked up to be. That product might not sit as prettily on your conscience as it does on your face when you start to ask questions: were any animals harmed in the making of this product? Are the ingredients ethically sourced? And what does ‘natural’ mean anyway?
So we, the beauty users, have to raise these queries. With an annual UK spend of £27.2 billion in our collective back pocket, * consumers have the economic clout to demand the one thing we really need: change. Why now? Because social
media has given us the means to communicate directly with and apply pressure to brands. Bit by bit, we’re waking up to the terrifying threat of the climate emergency and the role that overconsumption and opaque supply chains play; and, this year, the global pandemic has recalibrated our moral compasses and our idea of what it means to shop well. We have the perfect conditions for that change. The traditional offer was ‘hope in a jar’, but that doesn’t cut it anymore. Now we want facts, too.
The truth is, we have long demanded transparency from the food and fashion industries, but beauty has always been a little trickier to pin down. As with all cultures, this starts at the top of the chain: back in July, the men in suits at Westminster chortled over the delayed reopening of salons and spas – clearly superfluous and silly to their minds. The multi-billion pound beauty industry is still regarded as trivial and unserious: no wonder it’s left to its own devices to both self-serve and, frustratingly, self regulate. Deemed to be one of life’s ‘little luxuries’, beauty products just aren’t held to the same kind of standards as the food on our supermarket shelves. An ‘organic’ bag of rocket leaves is subjected to a lot of green checks and regulations. An ‘organic’ lavender bath oil? Almost none.
‘THERE IS NO TRUE REGULATION,’ says Jayn Sterland, managing director at Weleda UK, of our fragmented beauty industry standards. ‘We have “REACH”: an EU regulation that brands must comply to. It lists banned chemicals, but it can take five years of evidence for nasties to get on the list. We’re basically guinea pigs.’ And if you want to shop clean and sustainable, it’s even more complicated. ‘There’s no official definition of “natural” or “organic”,’ Sterland explains, which makes the beauty industry a hotbed of ‘greenwashing’, whereby marketers are able to label bad ingredients with good words.
Mark Smith, Director General of NaTrue (the International Natural and Organic Cosmetics Association) adds: ‘General advertising standards mean the most flagrant non-compliances may be prosecuted, but there’s a lot of grey – or, one might say, shades of green. This means that greenwashing can take many forms, from the most subtle and sophisticated to deliberately misleading. There’s a real disconnect between the demands of consumers for greater transparency and the deliverables by law for producers.’
Even if you’re not a warrior for green beauty, most of us would like to believe that brand promises aren’t empty words. But, as Anna Teal of the Walgreen Boots Alliance explains, ‘The product claims space is really complicated. There’s compliance that all brands have to go through to sell in the UK, but there’s a huge spectrum of clinical testing. Some brands only test one ingredient before staking a claim, while others will spend thousands testing the final product. That’s why finding brands that you trust and really doing your research matters in beauty.’
But beauty shopping was never meant to feel like homework, so thank goodness for the independent certification bodies doing the hard work for us and, better still, sticking labels on boxes so we can clearly navigate the aisles. Green consumers have long depended on the NaTrue and COSMOS symbol, cruelty-free shoppers on the Leaping Bunny sign, while shoppers at Cult Beauty can now take advantage of its provenance labeling, which flags 1O proof points including how organic, sustainable, vegan, coral-reef friendly and carbon neutral a product is. And there’s news that The British Beauty Council is working on a sustainability report for consumers and brands.
But until these standardised seals of approval are regulated and universally applied, we need to change our mindset from consumer to citizen, and take back a bit of the responsibility for our choices. ‘It’s difficult to be a perfect shopper, but my advice is to be clear on what you want the most, be it a green, vegan or carbon-neutral product, and look for labels that really matter to you,’ says Teal. And remember, we can use the power of our pound to drive change. As Sterland says, ‘You can vote with your money. If you stop buying a product, it will stop being made.’
From going cruelty-free to supporting brands that champion diversity, here’s how to shop like a beauty citizen of change… Look out for @ELLEUK Instagram polls this month, where we’ll be asking what you worry about when buying beauty products
”EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT A GREEN-BEAUTY WARRIOR, MOST OF US WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT BRAND PROMISES AREN’T EMPTY WORDS”