Looking good, safely
Beautycounter founder Gregg Renfrew has made it her life’s mission to help clean up the beauty industry and spread a little love in the process
Gregg Renfrew, founder of clean beauty brand Beautycounter, is standing inside her Santa Monica office dressed in what has come to be her signature no-nonsense, albeit very chic business uniform: a sharply tailored blazer, cropped jeans and statement heels (today they’re leopard print).
However, the standout piece is her T-shirt. It’s a simple white version emblazoned with the word “love.” The love theme, Renfrew says, was at the center of her speech to 4,000 of the 30,000 Beautycounter consultants at the brand’s fourth annual company summit, and is the overall guiding force behind the vast work the company is doing on its determined crusade to clean up the beauty industry.
“Everyone, at the end of the day, cares about life and those they love,” Renfrew says. “They care about love. They care about their families and their children. Everyone deserves to have safer products, and I think that helping people understand that while you may on the surface look different or seem different, that we’re all very much the same. And the essential theme of everything we do, from Day One, has been about love. It’s about protecting and being there for those you love.”
It has been five years since Renfrew launched Beautycounter, the company she created after seeing “An Inconvenient Truth.” The documentary about global warming inspired her to switch out her household cleaning products for healthier and more ecofriendly versions, but she remained shocked by the dearth of options for safe, high-performing beauty products. The business entrepreneur assembled a team of leading safety and health experts as well as a chief artistic officer, Christy Coleman, an established celebrity and editorial makeup artist who had previously transformed her makeup kit to contain only clean products.
In 2013, Beautycounter began with a set of nine products including face oil, body lotion, shampoo and conditioner, all of which lacked more than 1,500 ingredients on the company’s “Never List.” (It’s a comprehensive list of ingredients known to be harmful to human health and which the brand continues to abide by.) Since then the team has created more than 150 products, including sunscreen, makeup and a children’s line.
“Clean beauty” has become a ubiquitous term, without an official definition or guidelines, partly because the federal laws overseeing the industry have not been updated since 1938. However, with clean beauty becoming a more-saturated sector of the beauty industry, its presence cannot be ignored. (In addition to brands such as Beautycounter, there are dedicated multi-brand stores including Credo, CAP Beauty and the Detox Market carrying exclusively clean beauty products.)
“Clean beauty is really about a public pledge to forgo harmful chemicals and combine the power of natural alternatives with safe synthetics for an efficacious product,” says Larissa Jensen, beauty industry analyst at the NPD Group.
In 2017, when total prestige skin care grew 9%, clean skin-care brands saw an uptick of 34%. And this year, the clean beauty sector of the market has already seen an increase of 42% over the previous year, according to the NPD Group.
Beyond creating cleaner beauty products, Beautycounter is working to change the laws of the beauty industry. In May 2016, Beautycounter and 100 of its consultants (people in U.S. and Canada who sell the brand through a direct sales model; it’s also sold through Beautycounter’s e-commerce and retailers such as Goop and Target) descended on Washington to meet with lawmakers to voice their support for more health-protective laws governing the beauty industry.
“From the beginning, it was all about advocacy because our laws are so outdated,” says Renfrew about whether she had always planned for Beautycounter to enter the political arena. “We are woefully under-regulated in the beauty industry.”
Beautycounter was also one of the most outspoken companies advocating for the safer salon bill in California. Recently signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, the bill would for the first time require ingredients to be disclosed on professional salon products. Beautycounter also played a role in the passing of the Hawaii ban on oxybenzone and octinoxate in sunscreen.
The Counteract Coalition, an alliance rallied by Renfrew of several clean-beauty brands, including Beautycounter, Annmarie Skin Care, Biossance, Côte, Goddess Garden, Follain, OSEA, Peet Rivko, Rahua, Silk Therapeutics, SW Basics, Tenoverten, Vapour Organic Beauty and Josie Maran, formed in September 2017 to support the Personal Care Products Safety Act, a bill initially introduced in 2015 by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The legislation will be up for re-introduction in 2019, marking the first time since 1938 that imposing regulations on ingredients used in personal care products will be reviewed.
Renfrew recognizes that reforming current laws would mean a massive lunge forward for the beauty industry and public health in general but is clear to point out that the U.S. government must be stringent in its guidelines and execution. “We’re trying to help them pass a bill that is meaningful,” she says. “So it’s not just getting a bill passed, it’s actually, ‘Does it protect the American consumer? Does it give the FDA the power or the authority to recall products when harmful ingredients are there?’ ”