Clean Beauty - Who to Blame & What to Do

A slightly provocative post - hoping to spark a discussion among the  #scicommunity  and especially the folks working on the industry side

“Clean beauty” is a nonsense trend based on fear-mongering marketing techniques that doesn’t benefit consumers and can even potentially limit innovation in skincare

How did it come to be? A lot of industry insiders seem to blame challenger brands that started to use “free-from” claims and “black lists of ingredients” for marketing purposes, as well as NGOs like EWG who earned fame and big budgets by claiming that many cosmetic ingredients  were “cancerogenic”, while ignoring actual toxicologists attesting to the contrary. And the snow-ball fear started rolling…

But how about the responsibility of the established players in the beauty industry? Established beauty brands for decades have been feeding consumers with unrealistic product claims, using different misleading advertising techniques to lead consumers to big money for pretty basic products, all while nurturing and exploiting people’s insecurities about their skin’s appearance and even it’s ability to function well without the help of “holy grail” beauty items. The beauty industry has been lacking transparency for decades: it hasn’t been clear to the consumers what they are paying for (many consumers are shocked that the biggest cost of skincare products is packaging & advertising), what they can expect from the products to accomplish for their skin in reality, and what the skincare products are actually made from. 

With the Internet, consumers got used to operating with more information about what they buy. They demand transparency across industries. What if the established beauty industry was too complacent to recognize the change and too unwilling to change its ways to give consumers the transparency they were seeking? Could it be that the “clean beauty” and other harmful trends emerged as a misguided reaction to the lack of transparency in the traditional beauty space? How can the industry players become more transparent for consumers given the limitations of trade secrets and the need for good marketing stories to get their products noticed?