The internet is somewhat confounding when it comes to discovering beauty brands. Every day, you stumble upon a new beauty brand that promises transparency and uses ingredients like chlorophyll, plant-based acids, etc., that mostly go above your head. If you’re familiar with Goop, you already know all the hullabaloo that surrounds it. One of the early proponents of clean beauty, Goop, founded by the Hollywood celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow in 2008, has been mired in controversies including for the use of highly toxic ingredients in its skincare range. And yet, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the term ‘clean beauty’ has set the internet on fire; every brand wants to offer clean beauty products, and consumers, too, are becoming more conscious about clean consumption.
So, what is clean beauty — what should you look for, and what shouldn’t you ignore while perusing clean beauty aisles? Let’s dive right in!
Basics, First: What’s Clean Beauty?
Clean beauty refers to brands that use non-toxic, non-harmful, and clean ingredients to formulate their products. Anything harmful to the skin is kept out of the jar. These brands are transparent about their ingredients, mentioning them on the labels. While clean beauty is cruelty-free and BPA-free, it doesn’t necessarily translate to organic or sustainable beauty. They just don’t use parabens, sulphates, formaldehyde, polyethylene, chemical UV filters, and other harmful chemicals. But the tricky part is the definition of clean beauty keeps evolving because every brand defines clean in different ways.
Source: Stellarising
How to Identify Clean Beauty Brands?
If we pose this question to our moms or grandparents, the answer would be simple — Multani Mitti would be great to start with; dab a leftover fruit on your face or stick to aloe vera gel. But these are all-natural skincare recipes whipped up at home using fresh ingredients that must be used immediately. The mass brand beauty products that we often buy offer targeted solutions, and we lean towards them for specific issues like acne, UV protection, pigmentation, etc. Clean beauty focuses on ingredients that ensure more holistic non-toxic nutrition for a healthy skin. Clean beauty isn’t necessarily free from chemicals, but the chemicals used are safe and non-toxic.
Clean beauty focuses on ingredients that ensure more holistic non-toxic nutrition for a healthy skin.
To identify a clean beauty brand correctly, we should first cut through the jargon. So, let’s quickly go through a glossary:
Vegan beauty: Cruelty-free and no-dairy; most clean skincare brands are vegan.
Organic beauty: Organic beauty uses ingredients free from GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilisers, and additives or chemicals.
Herbal beauty: Also known as botanical brands — herbal beauty range uses botanical or herbal extracts. It may or may not be suitable for all skin types, and patch tests are advised.
Natural beauty: Made from either eco-friendly ingredients or elements that are good for skin and the earth
Ayurveda beauty: An ancient Indian science — Ayurveda beauty range is made considering the three doshas (Vata, Pitta, and Kapha).
Source: Sublime Life
A few clean beauty brands market themselves as organic, Ayurvedic, or natural. But they are clean only when they avoid parabens, sulphates, Diethanolamine (DEA), triethanolamine (TEA), oxybenzone, or artificial fragrances. If a brand has these ingredients on its labels and calls itself a clean beauty and eco-friendly or vegan — it is not clean; it’s a marketing gimmick. It’s as simple as that.
While we’re at it, let’s also address the elephant in the room: how hundreds of brands resort to greenwashing instead of being transparent. We might be surprised to discover one of our favourite brands adopting this advertising approach. Most brands realise that consumers prefer clean and cruelty-free products, so they market their products as green clean beauty, all-natural, and eco-friendly beauty, but most of these claims are misleading and uncertified. South China Morning Post reports an incident where a popular Korean brand, Innisfree, marketed its packaging as eco-friendly paper when it was using plastic. Several brands don’t think twice before promoting their products as green just to ride the wave and be relevant to informed customers. Unsuspecting consumers shop from these brands, hoping they are positively impacting the environment, when in reality — they aren’t. The only way to cut through the clutter of these claims is by reading up about the brands before investing in them. Watch out for those red flags!
Should We Care About Clean Beauty?
Would you consume a dish that’s potentially harmful to your health? If your answer is no, then it’s settled — you shouldn’t follow a harmful beauty routine too.
Source: The Urban Wellologist
Juicy Beauty reports that the USA hasn’t passed a single new law regulation on personal care products after 1938. Nevertheless, hundreds of brands have incorporated around 80,000 chemicals into their products. Unfortunately, only 10 per cent of those chemicals have been tested for human safety. Ingredients like parabens and phthalates may cause cancer, and their continued use affects us in the long run. Indeed, all of this sounds scary, and you must be wondering how to be observant while shopping. Here are some tips to follow while shopping for a clean beauty brand:
- Do basic research: Now that you know the difference between clean, organic, and vegan, go through the product labels to understand what different brands claim to offer.
- Become aware: When shopping for a new brand, go through a trusted website to understand the toxicity of certain ingredients. Sites like EWG’s Skin Deep Database offer helpful information on thousands of chemicals, and you can perform due diligence quite easily.
- Be loyal to the CodeCheck app! You can scan the barcodes on different products to know which ingredients are harmful to you and the environment.
- Read the labels: Go through your beauty closet and learn what the labels say. An initially long but straightforward way to understand which brands are clean is by going through a couple of labels.
Source: Sublime Life
While shopping, look out for Indian brands like Juicy Chemistry, Daughter Earth, and Ilana Organics. For those shopping online, Sublime Life is your red-caped hero. This online store carefully vets and curates clean beauty brands, and all the brands it houses are eco-conscious and offer plastic-free packaging.
You must wonder why shopping for clean beauty is so complex, but to be fair, it isn’t. As consumers, it’s crucial to hold brands accountable for their claims and be more thoughtful about our consumption. Switching to clean beauty is actually simple — we only have to pay attention to the fine print on the labels.