Clean Beauty is Muddy, But There’s Hope For Us Yet

Clean beauty is… complicated. The concept of wholesome, toxin-free products that are better for us and the planet is certainly appealing. But in practice, it’s not so simple. In order to get what we’re seeking from clean beauty, we first have to take a big ol’ step back and ask: what is clean beauty?

Therein lies the issue, because clean beauty has no real definition. Some brands have put a stake in the ground and created specific parameters for themselves, and we’ll go into that later. But without a generally agreed-upon definition, and nothing to enforce it, the category has become a free-for-all. 

And where there’s a free-for-all, there’s a long list of brands just waiting for the easiest way to sling their products. A term as buzzy, sought-after, and nebulous as ‘clean beauty’ is a prime target for brands looking to exploit consumer interest. And this is why we can’t have nice things.

Well, we can, we just have to work a little harder for them.

An honest look at clean beauty

At every turn as I researched this topic I encountered new complications. Not only is ‘clean beauty’ subjective, but when you sprinkle in misinformation and so many strong and differing opinions, it can start to feel like a lost cause.

I sighed, I groaned. I touched the back of my hand to my forehead and said feebly, “why must everything be so hard?” I had flashes of clarity. And now I’m here to offer you the spoils of this chaotic experience. I’ll make it as fair and level-headed as I can, so you can embark with joy and confidence on your own clean beauty #journey. 

A summary if you’re short on time

This article is long. If you’d like the elevator pitch instead of spending ~10 precious minutes of your day reading the full version, here ‘tis:

1) Since clean beauty doesn’t actually mean anything, we can’t take the term at face value when we encounter it. We have to dig a little deeper to see if and how it’s substantiated.

2) There are some big issues with clean beauty. Lab Muffin Beauty Science, among others, debunks all sorts of myths that clean beauty has perpetuated – listed in #3 below. I have a couple qualms with those debunking sources (detailed later in this post), but they do reveal ways in which clean beauty has misled us.

I encourage you, as I repeatedly encouraged myself, to approach the topic of clean beauty with an open mind. Confirmation bias is real, and it takes intention to consider a topic without jumping to unfair conclusions.

3) Here’s a quick summary of some things that clean beauty (as it’s often presented) gets wrong, according to science: natural does not necessarily mean better/safer/healthier than synthetic. Parabens are actually quite safe (!). And the phthalates that are of any real concern to our health are not those that would ever really be used in cosmetics anyway. All of this is discussed in more depth and linked with sources later in the post.

4) Despite undeniable issues with clean beauty (lack of clarity, gobs of misinformation), I, for one, am not ready to give up on what the concept fundamentally promises: healthier and more sustainable products. So where does that leave us?

5) Here’s where I’ve landed: clean beauty doesn’t mean much out in the world, so we each have to give it our own meaning and shop accordingly. Kind of a soggy conclusion, I know. But the best of bad options. There are many things that clean beauty can mean to any given person – vegan, organic, fair trade, free of xyz, made with simple ingredients, etc. Science may tell us that natural isn’t necessarily better, but maybe your intuition tells you otherwise. Choose what feels good and right for you and your bod and your worldview. So… what’s most important to you?

This approach of course requires research to find products that fit your criteria. I hope that Florah can take some of the heavy lifting off your plate, and to that end I’ll outline how I approach research for all brands and products featured on the site at the end of this post.

6) In order to make clean beauty personal to you, I recommend the following when you’re out and about in the world:

• Leverage relevant certifications and databases to find products that suit you. Those resources aren’t perfect, but they’re a good start.
• Browse stores devoted to ‘clean’ beauty. This will start your search from a baseline of higher-than-average standards. Some of these include Petit Vour, Credo Beauty, and the Detox Market.
• Err on the side of caution. Because… why not? If you feel good about an ingredient/product, have at it. If you feel unsure or nervous, just opt for something else. There are lots of great options out there.
• Seek out transparent brands. Be biased towards brands that give you lots and lots of solid information about their values, ingredients, sources, etc. It’s a good sign.

Now let’s get into the nitty gritty. Fair warning that this is going to get more complicated and convoluted before it gets any clearer. But we will emerge!

What is clean beauty?

Try typing “clean beauty” into Merriam Webster or Encyclopedia Britannica. Ain’t gon’ work. There’s also no real certification or stamp for clean beauty (though there are some related certifications – more on that later). 

Still, we can use brands’ definitions as a starting point. Goop defines clean beauty products as: “those made without ingredients shown or suspected to harm human health.”

Credo Beauty says, “We believe everyone deserves safer, better products. The Dirty List™ is the foundation of the Credo Clean Standard and contains over 2700 chemicals that we prohibit or restrict, usually due to safety and/or sustainability concerns. Credo brand partners are committed to not using our restricted ingredients in their products.”

The Detox Market maintains a list of banned ingredients and participates in various eco-initiatives. 

But, as you can see with those three examples, it’s rather hard to tell what any of them really mean. Credo Beauty’s list prohibits or restricts 2,700 ingredients – “restricts” to what degree? What are the thresholds, and who’s dictating them?

The Detox Market’s banned list is only 23 items long (granted, some items contain multiple sub-items). Does that mean they’re way more lenient in their standards than Credo Beauty? Or does Credo Beauty also ban only that many, and just restricts the other ~2,650? 

I’ll leave that tiresome line of questioning be, but the point is: without some central definition of clean beauty from the non-existent highest order, it becomes hard to know what means anything. At least if you’re a regular person and not a scientist. Which leads us to…

The issues with clean beauty

Without a core definition, ‘clean beauty’ can be thrown around however brands see fit. Discerning people may know when a brand is really misusing the term, but I think on the whole we tend to believe that brands mean what they say.

Case in point: I almost distractedly bought exfoliating shower gloves with overt ‘sustainable’ claims from the grocery store yesterday. Turns out that all ‘sustainable’ meant was that the teensy piece of cardboard encasing them was FSC certified, while the gloves themselves were made of virgin polyester and nylon. Like, what!!!

So although one might reasonably assume that beauty products marketed as clean are a) safer b) healthier c) free from gross ingredients and/or d) more sustainable, they may or may not be any of those things. Anybody can slap “clean” on their website and go on their merry way.

So that’s issue #1. Another issue is the mismatch between people’s expectations of products marketed as clean and what ends up being the reality. You don’t have to look hard to find people who are frustrated by what they feel was a false promise: products purported to be clean that end up being more expensive, quicker to expire, and not necessarily more effective than (or even as effective as) their “non-clean” counterparts.

And then there’s a third issue, which is so big that it gets its own section: what science says.

Where clean beauty and science diverge

One common clean beauty theme is a celebration of natural ingredients and a suspicion of synthetic ones. I’ll be the first to admit that I went into this research feeling FIRM in my belief that natural = better.

But apparently that is what science nerds (😉) refer to as the “appeal to nature fallacy,” which is essentially arguing for or against something on the premise that it’s good by virtue of being natural, or bad by virtue of being unnatural. Something natural may very well be ‘better,’ but it’s just not solid reasoning to assume that it’s necessarily so. 

And indeed, science tells us that synthetic ingredients are not necessarily better than natural ones. Sometimes synthetic versions of ingredients are safer (purer and less prone to contamination, and also more rigorously screened and tested), and sometimes they’re more sustainable (you don’t have to harvest over-harvested resources if you’re making them in a lab). 

Another related clean beauty theme is the idea that we should be opting for “chemical-free” products. That may sound reasonable at face value, but then you realize: quite literally everything other than energy, light, heat, sound, thoughts, dreams, gravity, and magnetism is made up of chemicals. (Thank you, ThoughtCo.) 

To illustrate that point, here’s an image of a strawberry and its chemical makeup. It is WILD. So chemicals ≠ bad. Thanks, science!

It’s easy, I think, to be susceptible to scary-sounding things like ‘synthetic’ and ‘chemicals,’ but it’s so important to understand them if we hope to gain clarity on the clean beauty front and separate fact from fiction.

Here are two more specific examples of clean beauty vs. science that may surprise you and that were REAL tough to swallow, for me at least: parabens aren’t necessarily bad for us, and the phthalates that are of real concern to our health are not really used in cosmetics and beauty products anyway. I know, I know. I dismissed those findings as propaganda when I first read/heard them. But I did my best to keep an open mind and trudged on.

And in doing so, I got into some interesting resources:

Sources advocating against clean beauty

In the spirit of well-roundedness I tried to incorporate a range of perspectives in this post, including those of doctors and scientists who are advocating against clean beauty and associated misinformation. If you’d like to check them out yourself, the ones I focused on are Eco Well [Website, IG] and Lab Muffin Beauty Science [Website, IG, Youtube].

Lab Muffin has an article and video titled, “Clean Beauty is a Scam and Won’t Give Us Safer Products.” That’s actually the single sentence I would use to sum up both of these sources’ views on the topic if I had to, ya know, oversimplify them.

My experience with this new content was mixed. On the positive side, it helped open my eyes to how susceptible I am to marketing. I do highly recommend reading or watching some of their content, if only to get a taste of all the misinformation out there.

On the negative side, the deeper I got into their content the more hopeless I started to feel about clean beauty. I started to wonder whether it is just a sham. If so many of these clean beauty tenets, like parabens being evil, aren’t even founded… do we just throw our hands up and forget this whole stupid mess? 

But then came another loop in the rollercoaster that has been this research. Namely, although I think those sources make some mind-blowing points, I struggle to find the solution in what they’re advocating.

They debunk various myths that clean beauty has perpetuated, but… then what? As far as I’ve been able to tell, they don’t offer much in the way of a solution. They don’t have their own database of brands and products they deem healthy, effective, ethical, etc. I guess we could watch video after video to see what products they recommend in any given category, but that seems impractical.

Lab Muffin also promotes various brands that are not cruelty-free, which leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, personally. If you’re going to slam clean beauty and then recommend non-cruelty-free products from mega brands…. you’ve kind of lost me.

Eco Well will sometimes argue against clean beauty misinformation by saying, effectively, “do you really think brands are out there trying to sell us unsafe things?” And I’m kinda like… um, yes? High fructose corn syrup and red 40? (Those are food examples, but the point stands.) I just don’t have that level of faith that big brands care what they do to us in the long run, and I think they choose profits over people ALL the time.

And you know that something must be amiss in conventional beauty products when only 11 cosmetic ingredients are banned in the US, but 1,300+ are banned in Europe. Now, do I think that things are totally unregulated in the US, the way that stat makes it sound? Certainly not. Do I think it’s still cause for pause? Sure do.

I commend these sources for their noble efforts to correct misinformation. They’re a good reality check, and a strong reminder not to believe everything we’re told. In the same breath, I don’t think that big brands have our best interests in mind, and I think we can still find much better-than-average products from better-than-average brands.

How, pray tell? Read on.

Side note: what about fragrance?

Fragrance has been a big topic in the clean beauty world. Largely because when you see fragrance or perfume or parfum on a label, that single item may actually be composed of many many ingredients. The FDA explicitly says so:

“If a cosmetic is marketed on a retail basis to consumers, such as in stores, on the Internet, or person-to-person, it must have a list of ingredients. In most cases, each ingredient must be listed individually. But under U.S. regulations, fragrance and flavor ingredients can be listed simply as “Fragrance” or “Flavor.””

And you have celebs making wild claims and perpetuating half-truths on the matter. In that same linked video, Eco Well makes the case that the reason for fragrance being a catchall term is really for the practical reason of label real estate, and that concerns around fragrance have more to do with irritation than toxicity. 

Indeed, the general consensus among dermatologists seems to be that fragrance, if anything, is irritating rather than toxic, and should mainly be avoided by those with sensitive skin (and/or eczema, rosacea, migraines, etc.). 

How to partake in clean beauty

And now from the rubble we must rise. Because despite the issues surrounding clean beauty, you, like I, probably still want all the things that made you seek it out in the first place. Namely health, safety, sustainability, and wholesomeness from the things you put on your skin. 

So if we can’t take brands at their marketing word, and we can’t take clean beauty at face value, then what can we do? I think the not-super-satisfying answer is this: we have to treat clean beauty as something personal. It needs to be defined by what we as individuals care most about. Maybe that’s organic or vegan or fair trade ingredients. Maybe it’s natural ingredients!

Or incredible sustainability initiatives from a brand. Or all of the above, and then some.

This unfortunately means more leg work for all of us, but I think it’s doable. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Leverage the relevant certifications and databases we have at our disposal. You’ll find these in the next section of this post.
   
2. Use marketplaces that are offering better products. This will enable you to sort by what you care most about, and generally to know that you’re browsing through a collection of products that have been thoughtfully pre-screened. Imperfect, but it adds a layer of higher-than-average standards to the shopping process. These are Petit Vour (all vegan!), Credo Beauty, and the Detox Market.
   
3. Follow the precautionary principle. Meaning, in the absence of sufficient scientific evidence for or against something, just err on the side of caution. This feels intuitive to me, and helps me wrap my mind around something like the EU vs. USA banned ingredient lists. The EU is being hyper-cautious, and I like it. We keep finding out new things that turn out to be harmful to us, so… why not just be cautious from the get-go?
   
4. Seek out transparency from the brands you support. You know when you visit a brand’s site and there’s just an abundance of thoughtful and informative content? It feels like they’re looking for every opportunity to tell you about their clean ingredient sources and eco-efforts and philanthropic triumphs. If any brands are clean, it’s these ones.

There’s still hope for the promised land of clean beauty. It may not be cut and dried, but at the very least we can go forth as informed consumers and buy things that align with our own definitions of ‘clean.’

How to find good, ‘clean’ products

As noted above, I’m of the mind that clean beauty must be personal. And it’s nice to have some resources at our disposal as we suss out which ones live up to our particular standards.

This article from The Conscious Insider does a great job breaking down various relevant certifications, including those related to origin of ingredients, chemical safety, animal welfare, ethical practices, and environmentally friendly practices. I love this breakdown because it illustrates the point that ‘clean’ has different facets and some may take priority over others for you.

EWG’s Skin Deep Database gives you ratings on beauty products based on a weighted score, which considers both the hazard level of each ingredient and the data availability on that ingredient. It’s an incredible resource in theory, though in practice it does seem to have some shortcomings that should be acknowledged.

This article from Eco Well points out some issues with EWG – like that they’re biased towards natural products and overstate the risks of certain ingredients, like parabens, when many studies show their safety. I don’t know… to me it seems to come back to the precautionary principle, so I’m less bothered.

But I DO agree with Eco Well that it’s icky that EWG provides affiliate links even for products that they say are the worst for us. Meaning they make a profit from leading us to bad products just as much as they do leading us to good ones. So that’s a li’l yikes-y. Head to the comment section of that Eco Well article for a taste of the heated discourse on the whole topic. 

So we’ll take EWG with a grain of salt, but I’d argue that it’s still a great and useful starting point in a sea of misinformation. You can look up each product and see what ingredients they deem problematic, and then decide for yourself if you’re comfortable with them.

How I vet products that are featured on Florah

This isn’t a perfect science. (Because I’m not a scientist and even scientists don’t have a perfect answer.) But here is my formula, so you know what you’re getting when you’re here:

1. Conduct in-depth research on each brand to understand who they are. This includes a deep dive into their:

Ingredients: If a brand is touting “clean ingredients” but has nothing to substantiate that beyond “free from parabens and phthalates,” that gets a “no” for me, dawg. If they discuss their ingredient philosophy at length (why it matters to them, how they think about it, what all they avoid and why, etc.) that sounds more like a “yes.” Again, not perfect, but I do think that the brands that are really worth our while are transparent.

Sustainability: If you think ‘clean beauty’ is a foggy term, try ‘sustainability’ on for size. Greenwashing is real, and even when it’s not at play, there are still a thousand and one choices that a company can make that are good or bad for the earth. For this criteria I try to confirm that a brand is doing real, meaningful things to benefit the earth. So they’re not only using glass bottles, but they’re also using zero-plastic packaging and shipping materials, and are Carbon Neutral Certified (just as an example).

Philanthropy: This arguably has nothing to do with whether a beauty brand is clean in the traditional sense, but I’ll frame it as providing evidence of their clean conscience. I consider a brand’s philanthropic efforts to be a nice-to-have rather than a must-have, but when I see a beauty brand that’s transparent about its ingredients and sustainability efforts and donates to charity, it gives me an added boost of confidence that they’re worthwhile and mean what they say.

2. Look up products on key third party sites to understand ingredient quality. Cross reference with other sites to parse out the quality of ingredients, like EWG’s Skin Deep Database, Petit Vour, Credo Beauty, and the Detox Market. This at least adds a layer of clarity.

3. Look at reviews on third party sites to gauge actual quality: Cross reference with several reputable sites to get real consumer reviews. It’s unfortunately really hard to take reviews on brands’ own sites at face value. So finding reviews on reputable sites – not just Amazon! – is key. Because a product could be the epitome of ‘clean beauty’ and have the loveliest, simplest label you’ve ever seen, but if it doesn’t work then it’s not worth anything.

What does clean beauty mean to you?

Please share your thoughts in the comments! I remain open-minded about this whole topic, and I think it’s so important to keep a conversation going and share perspectives. I plan to continue learning as much about this as I can, and I’m so interested to hear what your take is.

What does clean beauty mean to you? What are your top priorities, your lingering questions?