5 beauty industry facts sure to cause wrinkles (from frowning!)

Does any 8-year-old face really need so many beauty products to merit a dedicated minifridge, especially since dermatologists describe children using so many skincare products as “dangerous”? Does any adult even want another lookalike celebrity lipgloss? And why do brands force us all to buy such a wastefully big plastic bottle of shampoo when it’s almost entirely filled with water?! 

You don’t need detailed data about the beauty industry’s sustainability performance gap to guess the answers to those questions. The rush toward so-called “fast beauty”—TikTok-accelerated, trend-led overproduction — and the overwhelming amount of packaging waste sent to landfills are only a couple of the blemishes that no serum will solve.

Simply put, beauty is big business. As with our disposable consumer culture broadly speaking, beauty’s business model is premised on selling you more products than dermatologists would characterise as a necessity. Social platforms play a role in this. In 2024, Pew Researchers found that the majority of U.S. adults use TikTok for product recommendations. And beauty influencers love posting their hauls — the towers of PR gifts, the tens of thousands of dollars they spent on makeup. 

Certainly, there’s science to skincare just as there’s art to cosmetics, stretching back thousands of years; in ancient Egypt, for instance, bright eye makeups were all the rage. But today’s beauty industry promotes an overconsumption of products that’s an anomaly in the course of human history. It’s similar, therefore, to the difference between style and fast fashion: you can love the ancient craft, the skills, the rituals, without tolerating the current state of the industry around it. Yes, we can gag at our local drag queens’ make up skills, indulge in a little femme glam if we want to and yet, still hold the industry to account. And beauty has a lot to account for. 

Indeed, beauty’s sustainability track record is remarkably poor. With its lack of transparency, determining just how bad the industry performs on key environmental, labour and animal justice issues has been a challenge for activists. 

As a journalist, I wanted to see if data could identify where some of the biggest transparency gaps were. Last year, in my role as editor-at-large at Good On You, I worked closely with brand rating experts Kristian Hardiman and Becca Willcox, who were tasked with developing a methodology to assess beauty brands on publicly available information related to their entire value chain, not only a few greenwashed initiatives. In short, the process confirmed what many already know: how little beauty brands tell us. 

Good On You’s team of analysts rated hundreds of brands to see where they stood. And with Willcox and Luis Rodriguez de Cespedes’ data analysis on 239 brand ratings, including most major beauty brands and a sampling of smaller “sustainable” brands, I wrote the Beauty Sustainability Scorecard — this first deep-dive survey into the beauty industry’s sustainability made headlines from the Financial Times to Vogue.

The scorecard examined more than a dozen issues including ingredient transparency (72% of brands don’t disclose their fragrance ingredients), living wages (84% of beauty brands don’t disclose any action at all on living wages), and climate reporting (80% of large brands don’t disclose any progress against emissions reduction targets). It also revealed the brands at the top and bottom of the ranking (including top-rated small brand Disruptor London, which anxiety.eco’s Amy Miles spoke to this week about shampoo bars — the only product they sell).

The findings in the scorecard were overwhelming. So, just over a year after we hit publish, anxiety.eco chatted with Willcox — whose expertise was central to our reporting — to ask her: what facts about the beauty industry had you saying, “girl, what?”

One of the key issues that Willcox, Good On You’s beauty sustainability manager, found when rating hundreds of brands? The rules around ingredient transparency and disclosure are generally failing shoppers, she tells anxiety.eco.