If you’ve been sucked into BeautyTok, then you’ll know there’s a kind of sick thrill to seeing the shear quantities of products that influencers promote and, less frequently, critique.
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.
Does any 8-year-old face really need so many beauty products to merit a dedicated minifridge?!
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.
In short, the process confirmed what many already know: how little beauty brands tell us.
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?”
5 facts that surprised — and frustrated — Good On You’s Becca Willcox
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.
This ties in with reporting from journalist Sophie Benson on the Good On You journal, published alongside the scorecard in October 2024. Benson reported that ingredients can be masked or incomprehensible to most people reading the label, which, as beauty reporter Jessica DeFino tells Benson, is “an issue of not only health but autonomy and our rights as consumers.”
“It’s their right as a brand to be able to protect their trade secrets, but why is that more important than a person’s right to know exactly what’s in their body?” DeFino said.
Willcox was also quoted in that article, speaking about her work on the scorecard. Her zinger went like this: “Consumers are putting animal products on their faces, and they have no idea.” Surprised? Willcox told me she was too, as she shared these five (of many) facts about the beauty industry.
1. A lot of products are made from the same vegetable oils
When rating brands and analysing ingredient lists I have been surprised at how often the same ingredients pop up over and over again.
Look at the first few ingredients listed in any of the cosmetics products in your bathroom, if you exclude water (which is often the primary ingredient in cosmetics products), it’s very likely that the next ingredient listed will be a vegetable oil, such as palm oil derivatives, coconut oil, or soybean oil.
These commodities and the ingredients derived from them are used for their softening, smoothing, thickening, and stabilising properties in many beauty products, from skincare to haircare. Sometimes these plant-derived ingredients can make up almost half of a product.
To find them, look out for some of the most common cetearyl alcohol (palm oil), palmitic acid (palm oil), cocos nucifera oil (coconut oil), caprylic/capric triglyceride (coconut oil) or glycine soja oil (soybean oil). Depending on how they’re sourced, these commodities can be linked to the destruction of tropical forests, biodiversity loss, and human rights abuses.
But, of course, it’s not as simple as merely boycotting one problematic ingredient for another: each ingredient’s supply chain has tradeoffs, as beauty reporter Theresa Yee wrote for the Good On You journal in January in this helpful and nuanced explainer about palm oil.
2. Ingredient lists lack transparency — and can be manipulated
In most major markets (EU, US, Canada, Australia, China), ingredient lists for cosmetic products must be presented in descending order by weight, though ingredients that are less than 1% can be listed in any order.
Ingredients at low concentrations can therefore be placed strategically in this list for marketing purposes. I should note that this isn’t always misleading in terms of efficacy, as some ingredients are still very powerful at low doses.
I was surprised to discover that although beauty brands must always disclose ingredients on their outer packaging, they are not legally required to disclose their ingredients list online. Although many do regardless, due to consumer demands, transparency pushes and retailer requirements, it presented a challenge for the rating of some brands that had not chosen to do so. For a more detailed look at the issue of ingredient transparency, see this report by Sophie Benson in the Good On You journal. [Editor’s note: this is the article where Willcox reminded us we’re smearing animal products on our faces without even knowing it.]
Ingredients at low concentrations can therefore be placed strategically in this list for marketing purposes.
3. Labour risks for cosmetics are less visible than in fashion
Final stage cosmetic factories are specialised manufacturing facilities which are highly controlled to minimise contamination. This behind-the-scenes of a UK cosmetic factory from Formula Botanica shows the different stages of professional skincare manufacturing.
I’ve rated fashion brands for years with Good On You, so it’s natural for me to make comparisons between the two industries. Let me underscore how the labour risks for cosmetics production are less visible as compared to those in garment factories. That’s because manufacturing often involves complex ingredient supply chains and smaller-scale or fragmented production sites.
For cosmetics, labour exploitation is often concentrated in earlier stages of the supply chain during the production of raw materials such as palm oil, vanilla and mica.
I was surprised at the lack of transparency beyond the final production stage for cosmetic ingredients. Although most brands disclose where their final products are made, few brands are transparent about the stages further back in their supply chain, raw material production and ingredient sourcing.
4. Many so-called ‘cruelty-free’ products often contain animal-derived ingredients
To avoid animal-derived ingredients and animal testing it is important to look for both cruelty-free and vegan products.
Cruelty-free usually means that the product and its ingredients were not tested on animals; it doesn’t, however, guarantee that the product is free from animal-derived ingredients.
I was surprised by how many cosmetic products that are labelled as ‘cruelty-free’ still contain animal-derived ingredients, such as lanolin derived from sheep’s wool in lip balms, keratin derived from wool, feathers and hair.
I spoke with author and activist Emma Håkansson, the founder of Collective Fashion Justice, about this last December. As Håkansson wrote: “There’s a public perception that animal testing in the beauty industry is a thing of the past. But Good On You’s first Beauty Sustainability Scorecard revealed that’s not true.”
Consumers are putting animal products on their faces, and they have no idea.
5. Beauty’s waste extends far beyond plastic packaging
A lot of the focus by beauty brands has been on packaging and lower-impact ingredients, but overproduction and waste is often overlooked.
Waste in the beauty industry comes from various sources, including formula testing, unsold or returned products, items that expire in warehouses or on store shelves, and unused products bought by customers. Limited data on the volume of waste produced means it is challenging to determine the industry’s true waste footprint.
In Good On You’s methodology we reward brands that produce multi-use products or make their products to order or in limited production runs. Disruptor London, our top rated beauty brand, focuses on a small range of multi-functional products to empower consumers to buy less.
