“Being eco-friendly isn’t just a buzzword,” S’Able Labs founder Sabrina Elba tells ESSENCE. With paraben-free beauty products growing 80 percent faster than the overall market and 2 in 5 consumers looking for “natural” ingredients when shopping, “clean beauty” has reached over $400 million dollars in sales every year.
Isamaya Beauty and Conserving Beauty collaborated on biodegradable cleansing cloths, hair care brand Davines turned to regenerative farming, and refills are becoming more mainstream. However, other beauty brands are facing backlash for making misleading sustainability claims. Recently, Dr. Bronners dropped their B Corp sustainability certification, claiming the standard has been compromised with rules allowing brands to “greenwash”, not even checking in on the human rights and environmental impact of their certified brand’s supply chains.
Many brands claim to be “clean”, but Elba points out products labeled as “natural” may only contain a small percentage of natural ingredients while the rest are synthetic. “If a product were truly 100% natural, it would likely need refrigeration because it wouldn’t contain preservatives,” she says. Alternatively, “over-sourcing certain ingredients can harm the environment, and in many cases, synthetic ingredients can be a more responsible choice when used properly.”
“Clean” beauty is treated as a trend while “words like ‘clean,’ ‘non-toxic,’ and ‘natural’ get thrown around without regulation or standard definitions, and unfortunately, that leaves room for greenwashing,” says Klur founder Lesley Thornton. “We’re in an era where marketing often outpaces intention.” Misleading consumers for cash, brands often use good-sounding terms to disguise dirty business practices that require an exploitation of water, humans, and other resources.
While packaging accounts for 70 percent of the beauty industry’s waste, the supply chain starts much earlier than the minimalist bottles ingredients are held in. Bloomeffects, a skincare brand known for their tulip-forward ingredients list, uses “sustainable Dutch farming practices” for their field-to-formula supply chain. It works by “upcycling imperfect tulip bulbs that are considered ‘waste’ and would have been discarded [since] only perfectly shaped bulbs are able to be sold by the farmers,” says Bloomeffects founder and CEO Kim van Haaster.
“Regenerative farming, which supports healthy soil and biodiversity, is a much better way to source ingredients sustainably, resulting in higher-quality, more effective products,” Elba adds. For S’Able Labs, building a relationship with ethical partners such as Farm Africa, an international organization working to build a resilient rural Africa where the people and environment thrive, is just as important as the product.
But, can beauty brands truly be eco-friendly? Truth is: words alone are empty. “Being eco-friendly for a beauty brand means embracing sustainability at every step of the process—from sourcing ingredients to packaging,” Elba says. “While we cannot deny that every industry, including beauty, has some level of environmental impact, the key is how committed a brand is to minimizing it.”
Most brands reduce sustainability to just a plant-forward formula, not putting in the work to ensure the soil they’re exploiting is regenerated, ingredients are ethically sourced, and humans are treated fairly. Meanwhile, influencer gifting, excessive packaging, and poor farming practices are preventing brands from truly being conscious. “We don’t need more products—we need better products,” says Thornton. “It’s not about doing everything—it’s about doing the right things consistently.”
