How beauty science is going green (and how we can go green in our daily routine)
With calls for the beauty industry to go green, how are responsible brands introducing the science of sustainability and eco-thinking to lighten their impact on the environment?
Open a typical bathroom cabinet, and you’re likely to find a colorful collection of bottles, boxes, tubes, tubs, cartons, packets, and sachets. From a favorite bodywash to occasional luxuries, the average American woman uses 12 personal care products a day—a man as many as six. But what’s the story behind these products? A growing awareness of the pressures on our planet is driving demand for beauty products to be more sustainable. From ingredients to packaging, responsible beauty brands are lightening the environmental impact of their products―from the way they are cultivated and processed to the way they are used and disposed of, beauty is going greener.
A cornerstone of these efforts are cutting-edge sciences applied in an environmentally friendly way. The beauty industry uses this state-of-the-art knowledge to make its products not only as effective as possible, but also as sustainable as possible. This might start with cultivation, using more environmentally friendly practices to grow ingredients better, such as protecting plants with organic pesticides or precisely calculating pruning to maximize yields. Transformation can then take these raw materials (from corn to cocoa butter) and process them with greener techniques, such as biotechnology—using living organisms to change them into more efficient ingredients, just like adding yeast to flour and water to make bread. Finally, green formulation is employed to create more sustainable beauty products, including drawing on nature for alternatives to problem ingredients.
The way in which ingredients are formulated into a beauty product is important because what is safe to put on our skin may be harmful when washed down the sink—seeping into the environment and damaging ecosystems. Microbeads hit the headlines when these tiny pieces of plastic, used in some cleansing products and washed into the oceans, were found to have been eaten by fish—from where they could potentially enter the food chain and make their way into humans who eat the fish. Fortunately, responsible brands have now fully phased out microbeads, switching instead to natural, biodegradable alternatives such as apricot kernels. This is a positive shift that comes from manufacturers taking responsibility for the whole lifecycle of their products.
Just as the product needs to be safe to dispose of, so does its packaging. With over 12 million tons of plastic entering our oceans every year, using less plastic, especially less virgin plastic, is a priority for businesses and their customers alike. The beauty industry, long reliant on plastic bottles, packets, and tubes, is well placed to drive this change. Responsible brands are moving toward using only recycled and recyclable plastic and, where possible, they’re switching to sustainably sourced cardboard for packaging. Thinking outside the box, beauty is offering refillable and reusable packs, as well as larger eco-packs, all of which substantially reduce the amount of packaging―sometimes by as much as 80 percent.
Animal welfare is a core value of the green movement, too, and the beauty industry is doing more to improve its approach. Beauty products increasingly use vegan formulas, and cosmetics product safety can now be assured without animal testing―some brands are going even further to achieve cruelty-free accreditations.
This ethical responsibility also extends to the social impact of beauty products on individuals and communities—from ensuring the fair treatment of employees in fields and factories to minimizing the impact of mining and agriculture on local water supplies.
Indeed, with freshwater supply a growing green issue, this is an area in which the beauty industry can make a real difference. As much as one third of our daily water use is for washing and personal hygiene, so beauty brands are going beyond reducing their own water consumption to helping everyone use less water at home. The development of fast-rinse and even no-rinse shampoos can cut time spent in the shower and save around two gallons of water per person per day. Some solid shampoo bars use around 25 percent less water than liquid shampoos to make, use, and dispose of—that’s great green thinking at work!
Garnier is one beauty brand making positive strides in going greener. Pushing toward 100 percent sustainable sourcing for its plant-based ingredients, Garnier works with leading NGOs to ensure that the farming of its ingredients doesn’t damage biodiversity or ecosystems. For example, its avocado oil, used largely for hair care, is responsibly sourced from around 3,000 independently certified farmers, some with as few as 15 trees, but all committed to organic, irrigation-free, pesticide-free farming.
An eco-innovator, Garnier is also pioneering the use of cardboard to replace traditional plastic tubes, and has consciously designed some products to be both lighter and optimized to occupy less space to help lower CO2 emissions in transport. For more than 15 years, Garnier has evaluated the impact of its formulas on the environment, driving the development of products that are as much as 90 percent biodegradable. And packaging is also a green priority: Garnier is committed to zero virgin plastic by 2025 and has even reformulated products to avoid plastic packaging altogether. Its dry, solid shampoo bars enable the switch from plastic bottles to completely cardboard packaging for a product that many of us use every day.
In beauty, as in every area of life, going greener won’t happen overnight. But responsible brands like Garnier are making critical progress. As consumers, we can drive change in the right direction: around one in four consumers buys only eco-friendly beauty products, and as this number increases so will the industry’s commitment to green beauty. Brands like Garnier are leading the way, but consumers need to drive these efforts until the colorful collection of beauty products in our bathrooms goes entirely green.
