What Does “Clean Beauty” Mean in 2020?

To us, a clean beauty product must satisfy these two main criteria:

1. Non-toxic ingredients

At its core, clean beauty means that you can use a product without risking your own health or of your skin. The ingredients label must contain only safe, non-toxic ingredients and should be disclosed honestly.

What constitutes “safe” ingredients? We analyze each and every cosmetic ingredient and give grades from A to F based purely on safety and toxicity.

If a product gets an A, B, or C safety grade, we consider it clean beauty.

Anything lower is considered toxic and not clean.

2. Transparent labels

When a beauty brand makes an effort to list all of their ingredients and label accordingly, they’re on the right path to clean beauty. However, not all brands are transparent.

A good example of lack of transparency in the beauty industry is including fragrance in beauty products. Fragrance is not an ingredient, but since the industry is highly unregulated, companies can hide ingredients under the umbrella term “fragrance.”

Another example of non-transparent labels is misleading the consumer based on packaging. Brands can falsely label their products with buzzwords like “natural” and “eco” in order to capture the conscious consumer’s attention. This is called “greenwashing” and we’ll elaborate in a moment.

Clean beauty simple doesn’t contain mystery ingredients, and clean beauty certainly doesn’t claim to be something that it’s not.

Clean beauty isn’t about being 100% perfect. This means that yes, man-made ingredients are clean as long as they’re safe and non-toxic. This also means that clean beauty doesn’t have to be all-natural, preservative-free, etc. Clean beauty is synonymous with non-toxic beauty.

Rather than focus on buzzwords like “natural” and “organic,” switching to clean beauty products focuses on eliminating as many toxins as possible from our daily products.

Clean beauty is also about making ourselves more aware. Since the beauty industry lacks regulation, it’s up to us to become familiar with the most common toxins in our skincare, beauty, body, and hygiene products.

Unfortunately, that means the consumer (talking about you!) has a lot of responsibility to pay attention to what’s in her cosmetics.